Cygon’s Blog

This game sounded promising. Granted, it was a console port, but so was Final Fantasy VII and that has made it into my eternal hall of fame. FF7 had two key setups, one inside the game and one as an external windows application, the movies had been scaled up using point filtering and many more things, but the game was still playable and fun.

Now here comes Devil May Cry 3. The first bad sign is the setup assistant. It is launched whenever you put the DVD in your drive. Even if the game is installed already. Can live with that, no problem.

When you start the game, the first thing that greets you is a low resolution, flickering Eidos logo with a jaggy mouse cursor on it. Then, having arrived at the game’s main menu, you’re on your own. The mouse cursor is just there, it doesn’t do anything (besides being in the way). Pressing keys is of no use — until you find out that the zero key on the numpad is the start button. And 8, 4, 5, 6 represent the cursor keys.

Of course you want to change that. So welcome to the key configuration screen. You’ll notice the key bindings have been spread out over the whole keyboard allowing you to continue your game of find-the-key inmidst of the action when you’re playing. Having put all the keys in places you think you might just remember them, pressing the ‘exit’ button yields a message you that you cannot leave the key configuration because there are unassigned keys.

Well, the keys are all configured and everything’s alright. Through trial and error you notice that there are some “trap keys”. That is, once you change them, you can forget about your new key configuration, the game will keep telling you that there are unassigned keys until you choose ‘defaults’, resetting all your key bindings. So forget about keyboard control.

Thank goodness I’ve got my gamepad. There is a seperate joystick configuration page. Buttons can be reassigned here without the stupid message, however, there’s another trap. One of your gamepad’s buttons will spontaneously reset all keys to their defaults. Try to find out which one!

All that could be accepted because you do it once and never touch it again. Well, did you notice that you couldn’t reassign your directions? You’re asking why you should want to do that? Simple. Because the default controls are like this: left: move down, up: move right, right: move up, down: move left. So no matter how you hold your gamepad, one axis will always be inverted. Unless your are so clever to hold the stick away from you.

What in all world has ported this game?

When you google for content management systems, the most famous choices commonly seem to be XooPS, Joomla and Drupal. I have yet to find the object-orientedness in XooPS and I keep hearing that Joomla is hard to customize (and I’m sure I’ll deviate from what the Joomla developers think about how things should be at some point).

So, Drupal was my next candidate for a closer look. On first sight, it is rather simplistic in its approach. But as long as the right choices have been made by the developers, that can be a good thing.

The categorization module (called “taxonomy” in drupal) is slightly more powerful than Xaraya’s. You can create multiple dictionaries and organize the terms therein as a list, a tree or even as a net. The “article” module does a good job visualizing this organization to the visitor of the site as you can see below.

While is serves its purpose, the drupal default theme is blue/black on grey/white without any eye candy. The fonts are readable and chosen well, but this alone probably won’t do to make visitors feel “at home” and motivate them to choose your site over others. Drupal theme development is a bit too minimalistic, the default theme consists of nothing but a handful of html files. At least you should have no problems customizing these.

Another unique feature of Drupal are multiple input formats. This means that, for example, your site visitors could be allowed to only use plain text or basic html tags in their forum posts or comments while you or other users you trust can have the ability to publish articles using the full html vocabulary and even PHP code.

The role based rights management in drupal is, well, just as everything else, simple. You can grant permissions to roles and then assign these roles to users. As an example, you could create a role “shopkeeper” which allows all users that play this role to administrate your online shop. Limited but concise (and sufficient for my purposes).

Just like all the other CMS, Drupal also provides its own forum module. If your aim is to gather a community, a good forum is probably the single most important feature your site needs. Drupal’s forum doesn’t look as spectacular as vBulletin or phpBB2 but with a better theme, it seems usable at least. Maybe it’s even up-to-par with PunBB?

The minimalistic approach becomes even more visible if you try to build a web links directory for your users into your drupal site. There is no predefined link type yet, so you can’t really do this without installing one of drupal’s link modules - which either aren’t connected to the taxonomy and article tree at all or integrate tightly into the article tree with the side effect that the article overview now lists links as if they were articles. Right, the article module does not differentiate between the content types of the articles.
Regarding e-commerce, Drupal provides a solid e-commerce module with support for a whole bunch of payment processing services with several predefined product types (the most interesting ones being parcel, service, donation, download). Once installed, you can begin filling your online shop right away.

If you’ve got big plans (not in community size, but in site functionality) you are likely to hit the wall with Drupal rather soon, but if you can live with what Drupal provides you, the system is a real breeze.

For quite some time now, I’ve been trying to create a new web site on which I could publish articles and code snippets, organize good links and ultimate sell my future games on. Back in 2002, after checking out various content management systems (including PostNuke, XooPS and Joomla), I decided for Xaraya.

Now it’s 2006 and I have put a decent amount of content into my Xaraya site, even got listed in the open directory project. However, I never came around to customize its look and feel because it seemed to complicated. Somehow I simply cannot get myself to like web development. I want an almost complete system that looks good, is intuitive and fun to use. Reason enough to reevaluate the status of CMS systems out there.

Xaraya is still one of my top candidates because it’s probably the most powerful & flexible system.

On the other side, what I don’t like about xaraya is the seemingly unneeded complexity stuffed into some things that could have been made simpler. I see the same happen at my workplace (I’m a software developer) every day: Instead of making good compromises in order to be able to create an intuitive, well-understood system, where we can say “you can do this but not that”, we throw in just about everything the customer might require. Then we end up with something nobody fully understands and which cannot even be cleanly expressed in a GUI.

Xaraya presents even the web site visitor with a myriad of choices. Of course you can hide all that away by customizing a theme, but that means I’m forced to take over the work of maintaining the theme I’m modifying. There should be away to configure what functionality gets exposed to the user. If I want to attract visitors, my site needs to look clean and professional. The visitor should never feel overwhelmed by the amount of choice. In short, the power of xaraya needs to be better hidden.

The categories system in xaraya is great, thought its default category tree is plainly confusing. The document types (”publication types” in xaraya) have been recreated as example categories. So instead of listing your documents by topic, you will be listing your documents by document. Or categorize your web links by web link. Nonsense. I erased the default tree and created my own one.

The article management in Xaraya works really well. You define so-called “publication types” which define the kinds of articles you can create. For example, web links, forum posts, product descriptions and screenshots. Each publication type has a number of fixed fields you can freely configure to contain URLs, links to uploaded files, text, dates and more. Even more flexibility can be added with dynamic data, a powerful feature of xaraya that I have yet to research.

Browsing articles in the default theme again isn’t very intuitive. Imagine you’ve got a category “Math” with two sub-categories “Statics” and “Dynamics” containing some articles. When the visitor browses the “Math” category, no articles will be shown. There’s a tiny textual link saying “include children” that will do what you’re used from other CMS. I have tried modifying this overview a bit for my links section, but haven’t managed to reverse this behavior so the tiny link says “exclude children”…

I think the font for the article display in Xaraya’s default theme is not well chosen and by far too small. I have overriden the default template, removing the ugly box around the article, throught I have yet to do something about the fonts.

E-Commerce in Xaraya is still in its beginning stages. There is no unified product management module yet. Luckily, because I only want to sell downloadable software, I don’t need fully integrated shopping carts, shipping address-to-user profile association, warehouse management or anything like that.

When I started my install of Microsoft’s Visual C# 2005 Express Edition today, an insignificand paragraph on the start page captured my attention: Microsoft’s registration benefits program. Register your copy of Visual C# and you’ll get 250 icons for free.

Alright, I’m just in the process of reworking my website and had already searched for some good icons that I could afford. So why not check this out?

I had already registered Visual C# in Microsoft Connect or Microsoft Live or MSN or Microsoft Passport or whatever it’s called today when it first came out, so I just logged in a began searching for the “registration benefits” page. Nothing there…

My registration email was still an older address that I’m trying to get rid of, so I decided to update my email address, hoping to end up in my user profile with a nice list of those registration benefits offers laid out before me. That seemed like a good idea, less so when 10 minutes later I was still searching for a way to change my email address…

Fine, maybe only new subscribers get the registration benefits and I want to use my new email anyway. Why not just re-register and create a new Microsoft Passport-Connect-Live-Whatever account, then reap those registration benefits?

Said and done, after registering I had to validate my email, enter my details and then validate my email… wait a second, didn’t we just do that the moment before? Fine, after the second validation I finally received the welcome email with the link to the registration benefits page.

Wow, that was really worth my 20 minutes. A big fancy “Page not found”. I’m still thinking of ways I can use those cool words on my website.

Update: Out of the blue, it finally worked and I got to the desired page.

If you haven’t realized yet, Microsoft has published free, trimmed-down versions of the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. These versions are tightly bound to one language, currently available are Visual C# Express, Visual C++ Express and (damn!) Visual Basic Express. As much as I would want to recommend SharpDevelop at the moment the Visual Studio IDE is just far more productive.

So what means trimmed down? Is it cripple-ware? Not at all! I have worked with the full Visual Studio 2005 and most of the time, I don’t even notice the difference. Some advanced enterprise tools are gone, but if you need those, you also have the money to buy the Professional Edition.

Also gone is the UML class designer. This is a bit sad, but there are free tools you can use as a replacement. Check out UML Sculptor which is really great for quick drafts.

What annoyed me a bit, thought, was that the default setup doesn’t let you switch between ‘Debug’ and ‘Release’ mode (debug mode creates unoptimized binaries suitable for debugging and release mode creates lean, fast binaries suitable for distribution to the end-user). The Express Editions do it like this: A release build is done when you press Ctrl+F5 (run without debugging) and a debug build is done when you press F5 (run in debugger).

You can, however, make the Express Editions behave like the big Visual Studio by opening the ‘Extras’ menu, choosing ‘Options’, then navigating to ‘Projects and Solutions’ where you enable ‘Show advanced build configurations’ (make sure ’show all settings’ is selected):

This also allows you to set the working directory to use when the program is launched without debugging (Ctrl+F5).