Cygon’s Blog

This weekend, on a LAN party, I had the chance to play Sacred 2 on a friend’s PC. I already liked Sacred 1, especially because of the detailed and beautiful dragons, but had already put Sacred 2 on my “don’t buy” list because of it’s online activation requirement.

When I played Sacred 2, I came across a guy with really good face textures that looked familiar somehow. Clicking on him, he revealed himself as Hansi from Blind Guardian! After doing some quests in which undead metal fans had stolen the band’s instruments, I was given a performance from the whole band in sunwind. Pretty cool!

The last time I’ve seen a real band appear in a game was Gothic 1, where one night, In Extremo played in the old castle. Now I’m torn between buying the game to support this fantastic idea (and the band, of course) and boycotting it to protest against the silly copy protection.

After thinking long and hard, my final decision was to buy the Collector’s Edition and post in the game’s forums, explaining just like I did here, that the only thing that made be rethink my decision to boycott the game was the performance by Blind Guardian.

Turns out Ascaron, the game’s developers, stand firmly behind this copy protection. Just so much as mentioning DRM in your post will get it deleted instantly, referring me to a forum with one (!) thread where everyone that wants to talk about DRM should post. So much for my attempt at providing friendly feedback to the developers. Apparently this is how it works these days:

a) Make random assumptions about how some crazed copy protection scheme is going to save the day

b) Dump your game out into the world

and c) if one of your customers comes along to give you some friendly, non-demanding feedback, plug your fingers into your ears and shout “lalalalala”

Or, if you prefer an analogy, assume your government would not allow people to voice their opinion except for in a small, dark room where hundreds of people complain to each other without the public being “influenced” by those naysayers. That would be a very ethical use of the government’s power, wouldn’t it?

So, to say it a little bit less friendly this time: Ascaron - you guys suck!

I’ll try to cancel my order on amazon and buy some Blind Guardian merchandise instead. Thanks for nothing.

Once more, I’m just a slight bit annoyed at the level of incompetence the pile of crap I’m sitting in front of has been engineered. Not that I’m buying cheap hardware — I’ve learned that lesson long ago — it’s just that even the best, to put it simply, is just mediocre most of the time.

Whenever I boot my top-of-the-range Asus motherboard, I’m greeted by a colorful picture intended to hide the actual boot messages, lest they scare the user. On this screen is written “Performance, Stability, Reliabilty“. Yes, that immediately convinces me that this message reflects the actual work that went into these things.

When I turn off my PC at the boot screen, it will warn me that the previous boot failed and asks me whether I want to continue or enter the BIOS setup. If I select continue, this message will come up again at the next boot, and the next, and the next. But if I turn off my PC at the boot screen again, the message disappears. Yes - if the user says it’s alright, keep nagging him. But if the same error occurs again, then it’s probably alright.

Recently, my brand new Western Digital 1 TB HDD (Raid Edition 2) developed bad sectors. 1365 of them, even though it was never moved an inch.

To locate and mark all current defects on the drive, each sector needs to be written to. Windows Vista’s checkdisk of course restarts at sector 0 each time it is run. It takes more than 6 hours to reach sector 100 (!), making it… mildly… inpracticable to scan the entire disk in one session. So checkdisk is out of the equation.

Trying to force the HDD’s controller to mark the bad sectors by formatting the entire drive has the same issue. Windows Vista’s partition manager doesn’t resume formatting after a reboot. The partition will just be marked as successfully formatted when you reboot during formatting.

If you try to cancel the formatting process, nothing happens. Even Minutes later, there’s no reaction from Vista. So that tells me the reboot is probably not even waiting for the partition manager to finish, leaving the partition in who knows what state.

While I’m formatting, whenever the drive encounters a bad sector, Windows Vista will deep-freeze for a fraction of a second. So it becomes quite hard to click on anything with the mouse and preventing you from working or playing on the machine while the drive is being formatted. Of course, audio playback stops too, so should you decide to watch a movie instead, that experience is utterly destroyed as well.

I’d like to close with a list of the files I found in my Mercenaries 2 folder:

d3dx9d_27.dll
d3dx9d_32.dll
d3dx9d_34.dll
D3DX9d_36.dll
d3dx9_32.dll
d3dx9_34.dll
d3dx9_35.dll
d3dx9_36.dll
dbghelp.dll
msvcp71.dll
msvcp71d.dll
msvcr71.dll
msvcr71d.dll
msvcr80.dll
msvcr80d.dll
xinput1_3.dll

For the non-programmers reading this, that’s the Visual C++ 2003 Runtime for C and for C++, the Visual C++ 2003 Debug Runtime for C and for C++, the Visual C++ 2005 Runtime for C, the Visual C++ 2005 Debug Runtime for C, D3DX from DirectX 9.0c December 2006, D3DX from DirectX 9.0c June 2007, D3DX from DirectX 9.0c August 2007 and D3DX from DirectX 9.0c November 2007.

Wow, just wow. Did anyone even have the slightest idea what they were doing? You’re not allowed to distribute even half of those DLLs in that form as per Microsoft’s license. I hope someone (hopefully a junior programmer or worse) just panicked and put everything he could think of in there to make it run because… the other possibility… scares me.

Last week, I bought GT Legends, a racing simulation, from amazon.de. I really enjoy racing games and, while I do like arcade racers very much, I also play simulations. So for €9.95, what could I possibly do wrong?

Lots.

Installing the game killed my system. Obviously, the game employs the heinous StarForce copy protection system and the StarForce driver on the game DVD is incompatible with Windows Vista x64.

Luckily, I’m already prepared for these almost regular incidents and within 20 minutes, my drive image was restored. After some googling, I discovered a StarForce update that you can install after the game (but before rebooting) to get it working.

Next, I tried to register for an online account. The game simply displays the message “Registration Failed: Invalid CD-Key”. How great.

Being at least able to play offline, I tried to create an image of the game’s DVD in order to play with the image mounted in Daemon Tools (Advanced Pro’s IDE drive). Guess what? StarForce just hangs until I unmount the DVD, at which point it crashes.

Fantastic. So for buying the game, I can not play online and have to play disc jockey, fetching the CD each time I want to go for a drive.

Had I just downloaded a pirated version, I wouldn’t have been able to play online, too, just like it is now. But I wouldn’t have to keep the CD in my drive, my Vista x64 wouldn’t have been screwed up and I would not have the revolting StarForce drivers on my system.

What exactly was the point of all this key code and DVD verification stuff?

Maybe game producers could just stop pressing DVDs altogether and upload their game, cracked, to a warez site. Honest people then just transfer the money to their bank account and can play like everyone else - without fucking up their systems, trying to decipher badly printed CD keys and waiting for shipping.

I’ve got a Thrustmaster Dual Analog 3, that’s a plain and simple USB gamepad without any fancy vibration, orientation sensor or anything. I’m mainly using it to control my WinAmp when I’m listening to music.

Whenever I start an Unreal Engine 3 game, for example Gears of War, Blacksite: Area 51, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty or, just right now, Turok, I can enjoy the intro, and, as soon as the action starts, my character is spinning to the left. Permanently.

This goes on until I disconnect my gamepad, which is quite inconvenient since I have it attached to the back of my PC so that the cable is long enough to use it when listening to music while lying on my bed.

So, as always, I have to end the game, download the latest Thrustmaster driver, fiddle with the settings, start the game again, watch the introduction a second time, and am still spinning to the left.

I fiddle some more with the settings, restart the game yet again, watch the introduction sequence yet another time and finally, I can play.

This sure is an evil gamepad I have.

This weekend, I started playing Assassin’s Creed. It’s really a fantastic game and you can see all the experience from the Prince of Persia titles. For example, whilst running, you just have to control your character’s direction. He’ll intelligently navigate the environment like a free-runner, jump over obstacles, launch himself off of obstacles or jump from beam to beam.

The fighting system is also great. No as dedicated as that in Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but you won’t get very far with button mashing. For example, you can deal light strokes and hard strokes with your blade, the hard strokes of course take longer to execute. You can break a move at any time and block, if you’re quick enough you can pull a last-second defense if your enemy tried to strike you while you tried to gain momentum.

Now once you’re used to this, you can learn new tricks. For example, when an enemy raises his sword to attack, you can press the left and right mouse buttons (in the default controls) to intercept his move and execute a counter-attack. Or when you see that the enemy is about to parry your own attack, you can left-click again to punch or kick the enemy. And if that worked, if you click again, you can deal a fatal blow.

It’s a really well done progressive system where you learn better and better tricks, one step at a time!

Frying?

Now what about the post title? Well, I’m playing this on an Asus GeForce 8800 GTS 512 TOP, a factory-overclocked card. So far, it has worked great in numerous games. Assassin’s Creed, however, manages to overheat the card rather quickly.

I had to crashes yesterday, once with strange blocky artifacts on the screen (a telltale sign that your graphics card is either overclocked too hard or overheating) and once the system just froze. Looks like the default fan control settings aren’t adequate. The card idles at 70° C (158° F) and there was only a slight increase in fan noise at the time of the crashes (I don’t know which temperature it was at since I didn’t monitor it at this time).

Using NVidia’s nTune utility, I set the fan speed to 60% (that’s about the point from where onwards the fan’s noise level starts to exponentially increase), which kept the temperature at 60° C (140° F) during the game. No crashes anymore.

I just bought myself the Logitech G9 Laser Gaming Mouse:

This mouse has all the features I could ever wish for:

• 3200 DPI (For gaming, I usually turn the DPI setting all the way up and reduce the mouse sensitivity in the game itself. This results in superior aiming because even the tiniest movements don’t get filtered out by the mouse but reach the game and are just scaled down.)
• Adjustable Weights
• Tiltable scroll wheel for horizontal scrolling
• Big teflon feet that cover the whole width of the mouse (my MX-518 has already lost 3 of its 5 tiny teflon cushions)
• Scroll wheel can be toggled between smooth or stepped scrolling

All in all, this mouse unites everything I ever wanted from a mouse.

But it utterly fails in the ergonomics department:

• The cord is rough and feels like it is made out of nylon. I don’t like it one bit. This gives me a really ugly feeling, especially when the cord runs over the edge of my table.
• The thumb pit is too small for my thumb
  • I can’t easily reposition the mouse because I don’t get a good grip on it.
  • My thumb is permanently pressed against the edges of the forward/backward buttons, up to the point that it hurts.
  • The alternate cover allows me to grip the mouse, but it’s rough and its thumb pit has the same problem.

This could truly have been the holy grail of mice. Everything about the functionality of the G9 is totally over the top. And that just makes it all the more painful to admit that its ergonomics utterly destroy the G9.

I’ve tried several mice over the last two years, but each time, I quickly returned to my good old Logitech MX-518. Among the candidates were a Razer Diamondback and the Microsoft Habu. Now the Logitech G9 has to line up in this list of expensive mistakes. *sob*

Last weekend, it was finally time for an upgrade to my 1 1/2 years old gaming rig. Amongst other things, I switched from an Asus A8N-E (NForce 4 Ultra) board to an Asus Crosshair (NForce 590 SLI).

This alone solved a lot of issues I was having with my PC. It appears that the NForce 4 chipset has serious problems with heavy bus traffic. If, for example, you’re copying a large file, NForce 4 may fail to deliver the next chunk of audio data to your sound card in time and you’ll hear skips or ugly scratches whilst listening to music.

You can find several references to this bus priorization issue of you google for NForce 4 bus issues. For example:

NForce4 on Wikipedia
Issues With nForce4 Mobo and X-FI Cards
X-FI + Nforce4 = Pops/Hicks/Hisses

The important parts:

We have observed through direct observation of the PCI bus on the nVidia nForce 4 motherboards that when the crackle symptoms are occuring, the Soundblaster X-Fi card PCI bus master memory requests for audio data are being held off (not serviced) for very long intervals.

We have observed peak holdoffs of up to 2 milliseconds in some cases. This is unusual chipset behavior that is beyond the ability of a hardware audio accelerator to compensate for in its internal buffering. The SoundBlaster X-Fi tolerance for these PCI holdoffs is approximately 120 microseconds peak holdoff, with a 1 microsecond average holdoff.

and

Further to the reported cases of crackling issues reported by owners of Sound Blaster X-Fi cards, we have extensively tested both Creative and non-Creative audio cards on motherboards where the issues were reported in an effort to isolate the root cause.

The findings indicate that circumstances causing these audio glitches only arise on Nvidias nForce 4 range of motherboards, with the exception of the newest n590 board which does not exhibit this issue.

The Sound Blaster X-Fi card was designed to meet PCI bus standards and tolerances and this is the only range of motherboards that operate in this manner.

Here’s a list of issues I attribute to the NForce 4 chipset:

• Games that load data in the background momentarily skip a frame or two. As an up to date example, NForce 4 owners playing Need for Speed: Pro Street will experience the game making tiny little pauses while they drive around the track. Enough to completely destroy every sense of speed and to skip past the exact moment you need to turn into a bend.

• You can either watch a movie or defragment your hard drive, but not both. If you try to listen to music or watch a movie during hard drive defragmentation, the sound will hang, skip or scratch every few seconds.

• Your mouse cursor becomes jumpy or temporarily unmovable when you copy large files. As in all the other points, whenever heavy disk activity hogs the system bus, something goes wrong. In this case, the USB devices seem to not be polled in a timely manner anymore.

• Cutscenes played by games while at the same time loading data will hang, jump and have sound distortions. NForce 4 owners playing Call of Duty 4, for example, will have serious trouble understanding the mission briefings played while a level loads. Slower drives might merely destroy the game’s atmosphere.

Now I’ve got the NForce 590 SLI chipset. All of my issues went away with the upgrade:

• The loading screen in Supreme Commander rotates slick and fluid.
• The cutscenes in Call of Duty 4 are intelligible.
• Need for Speed: Pro Street gives me a sense of speed.
• I can watch a movie when I defragment my drive.
• I can use my mouse while I copy large files.

I’ve never been so happy about an upgrade. All of the little issues I was having — gone in an instant.

There are users reporting the issue with the NForce 590 SLI, but all of them have two graphics cards installed and are only experiencing this during heavy usage (eg. 3DMark). I don’t plan on using SLI anyway (I just wanted to get the Asus “Crosshair” :p), so even if the issue is only gone because bus throughput has been dramatically increased, I’m happy

Quality doesn’t seem to be what quality once was…

Installed the game, launched it and did the obligatory video settings adjustment. When I jumped from page to page, one part of my settings was kept, the other discarded. At least until I found the little ‘apply’ button in the lower right, which was only there on some pages, but not all.

I launched the campaign, was about to finish the training course when the game crashed back to the desktop. Wow…

Installing the latest ATI drivers seemed to help, at least I now was able to finish the training course.

This training course needs to be done as quickly as possible and starts with you having to climb down a rope. Wanting to improve on my time, I did the clever thing: I jumped, not climbed down the rope. But someone yelled “you missed the rope!” and the screen faded out. Interestingly, the game had autosaved just then. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in…

Starting the campaign all over once more, I did the training course in about 20 seconds which seemed to please the instructor, so I continued without repeating the darn thing. Next, I’m greeted by a BSOD showing ATI-something.dll as the source. Great, reboot, launch game again, Campaign, Resume, play on.

Went through the ship mission, lots of scripted action, feels even more like a movie than Call of Duty 2, but the gameplay looks rather poor. Finished the mission, jumped into the helicopter, BSOD, reboot.

Watched in 1st person as the president of some small country being driven through a town by terrorists, lots of unarmed people being shot on the way through, then I’m shot in the face, BSOD, reboot.

Second mission, helped some rebels, stormed a town, rescued some informant, BSOD, reboot.

Third mission, stormed another town in search for terrorist leader who was broadcasting propaganda speeches, stormed his building, he wasn’t there, stormed some more town, some TV station, turns out the speech was recorded, mission end, BSOD, reboot.

Launched COD4, Campaign, Resume… wait, where’s the Resume button? Uh-oh. My savegame was gone with the last BSOD. So now I can enjoy starting right at the *beep* training course again.

Oh, well, come to think about it, that Timeshift icon on my desktop suddenly looks so much more appealing. Maybe I’ll play it through once more instead… and if I wanted to, I could play it from the beginning to the end in one big session without any hangs, crashes-to-desktops or BSODs

I’ve got a pretty elaborate scheme for keeping my PC clean: I’ve got a disk image of my C: partition with a clean Windows XP install including recent drivers, firefox, winamp, VLC and so on. Whenever I’ve got the feeling that my PC is clogged up (usually right after taking part in a LAN party), I just restore my disk image (a work of 5 minutes) and everything is fine again.

This week, I almost went and logged into my old Steam account again to order BioShock. Luckily, while looking for reviews, I stumbled upon some fine lads reporting about the copy protection system in BioShock.

Apparently, when you install the game, it phones home (to SecuROM). Somewhere on the SecuROM servers, a counter is incremented. This counter is used to restrict you to only install the game 2 (in words: two) times. Then it’s game over and you can buy another copy of the game.

Other sources suggest that if you uninstall the game, that counter will be decremented again (so upon uninstalling the game, it will phone home as well). Also word is out that this counter has been extended to allow for 5 installs.

Bugger. I was really waiting to play this game, but with that, I’ll just leave it be.

For some time in the past, SecuROM was the sane alternative to StarForce. But apparently, that wasn’t because they were less crazed out than the StarForce maniacs, but because they just weren’t technically capable of what StarForce did. Now the beast shows its ugly face.

I’ve always been a fan of the “buy it and its your’s” mindset. When I paid for the game, I should be allowed to do whatever I please with it. Just attempting to run it in a Linux/WINE environment would be futile because of the copy protection. Forgetting to uninstall the game before I restore my disk image means one install is gone - forever. If I wanted to install the game on both my Vista and my XP partition, I’m already nigh on using up my allowed install count.

Being a software developer myself, I tried not to use illegally copied software. But at this rate, I’m actively considering to look for a pirated version just for the sake of it. You can almost feel the mistrust in the air. Think of entering a store and immediately, two guys with “Security - Anti-Theft Department” on their shirts start walking behind you until you exit the store again. SecuROM my ass, you’re soo close to making me become a software pirate on purpose.

I finished!!

What? Test Drive: Unlimited, of course. “The Millionaire’s Challenge” is a 60 minute time trial with about 200 km to cover in heavy traffic. You’ve got to speed like a maniac and keep your concentration for the whole 58 minutes. For the last 3 evenings, I tried to beat this mad race. Just did it in 58 minutes and with barely 2 minutes to spare in a Koenigsegg CC8S.

I made it to about checkpoint 12 (ca. 15-20 mins into the game) several times, but repeatedly hit two other cars in succession (triggers the police) or scored a direct collision with a police car. If the police car that eventually appears in front of you manages to clip your line, you’re promoted to a two-star-criminal and unlike Need for Speed, you’re basically wasted at that point.

When I reached the 16th checkpoint of 32 (half the race), I was ecstatic. At 24 checkpoints I had the urge to hum a victory hymn. Just then, the course lead through a dense city on a 2 laned one-way street — in the wrong direction. Of course I rammed right into a police car and while silently trying to sped away on the side of the road, another police vehicle watched as I ran over a sign, which I thought was harmless but nevertheless raised the criminal level to two stars. With the onslaught of police vehicles trying to run into me, commited my third offense by letting myself be rammed and had a full three-stars chase going.

That’s real pressure. You’ve invested 45 minutes of your precious evening into this stupid race and now you’re that with 99% probability, you can start right over again. With some crazy luck and insane driving I managed to get away until the chase was given up. And finished the race.

What a miserable way to spend an entire evening. Yet so satisfying…