Kartones Blog

If you've played Resident Evil 4, you'll probably have some fun with this "live merchant" :D

Few weeks ago, Miguel and I were preparing to kick some ass at Gears of War together, when we discovered we couldn't chat or play along... Something was clearly wrong. I've played through XBox Live but sometimes I couldn't connect or was thrown off by the host  without reason.

I tried the console's network test and found I was having "strict NAT" (and Miguel had "moderate NAT"), not "open NAT". After looking in internet, Migs found this KB about port settings and XBox Live.

Basically, you have to open this  ports:

• UDP 88
• UDP 3074
• TCP 3074

After doing it, we played without any problem. And now probably we'll connect to any game session without problems.

For those having problems with XBox360 and Windows Media Center, there are some ports that need to be open too in your firewall (whenever its Microsoft's or a third party one):

• UDP 1900 (Svchost.exe, outgoing)
• TCP 3390 (Svchost.exe, outgoing)
• TCP 3932 (Mcrmgr.exe, outgoing)
• TCP 5555 (Ehshell.exe, outgoing)
• UDP 3776 (Mcrdsvc.exe, outgoing)
• UDP 7777 (Ehshell.exe, outgoing)
• Mcxnettw.exe outgoing (random port)
• Ehexthost.exe outgoing (random port)

Source: KB911728 & KB896036

I've uploaded to the Downloads section all the speeches I've given about Managed DirectX and XNA. I hope to increase the number soon ;)

Lucasfilm seems to have some monetary problems (either that or they want to "steal reputation"), because the've sued Digg.com because of the similar name of their (12 year old) game The Dig. It's a trademark dispute, but searching in Google "Digg" gives 198,000,000 results, vs. 76,700,000 of "The Dig".

Some people are talking why then they dont sue Disney for their Pirates of the Caribbean movies then... because they're a copy of their Monkey Island game series...

Well, the answer is quite easy: Because the series creator, Ron Gilbert, said in the past that he took inspiration from a Disneyland ride called... Pirates of the Caribbean (built in 1967 :)

They themselves say that "the name is confusingly similar" (not equal). Why, if one is a videogame and the other a  web about bookmarks and news?

Funny, uh? Maybe they should try to make good quality games like in the old times and stop trying those legal tricks...

For a few days, I'm doing some QA and testing at work of a web application that some of my companions have been developing.

The application has typical technologies (SQL Server 2005, ASP.NET 2.0, a bit of Active Directory, master pages, ...) and it also uses ASP.NET AJAX. The entire website was built with the early versions, porting  to beta and now running with the 1.0 RTM.

 All was going well until the RTM upgrade (made few weeks ago). The app. started to  throw some exceptions from time to time, but they thought it was because of the development server (an old laptop which stores a Virtual Machine with the "real" DB and web server).  When I joined to do the QA and testing, I started to get the errors almost every few minutes, making the application crash frecuently.

The exception we got was this:

Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException: An unknown error occurred while processing the request on the server.
The status code returned from the server was: 12029 

 As the official documentation for the error is crappy, we searched and searched until we found the solution.

Seems that there's a bug in the RTM version of ASP.NET AJAX (not present in earlier versions) with the RoleManagerModule when it adds its cookie to Response's cookies.

There are 3 ways to evade the bug. None is perfect but the first one worked well for us and required no code rewriting:

1. Disable caching of cookies in the RoleManager.
   <roleManager enabled="true" cacheRolesInCookie="false">
   
2. Handle the Application's Error event to clear the error from the Context selectively.
   void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e) 
   {
     //There should be some checking done so that not all the errors 
     //are cleared
     Context.ClearError();
   }
   
3. Disable EventValidation in the web form.
   <%@ Page Language="C#" EnableEventValidation="false" %>

Hope helps someone else if they have the same problem

Benjamin Nitschke has posted a fantastic XNA tutorial about skeletal bone animation and skinning using Collada models, which allow  for complex animations exported as XML that DirectX .X files can't handle.

As I haven't read all yet (it's quite large :), I'll leave you with the video showcasing what the demo does:

BTW, Jad Engine 1.1 (which is going to be released in few days) it's going to not only support Collada files, but use them as primary models. Here you can see other new features it has.

While searching if there was a new version of Terragen, a 3D landscaping tool I used in the past and wanted to re-install, I've found 3D Terrain Generator. It is a small tool that improves Terragen's idea of creating in a simple way a terrain map (from a bmp for heights and textures for terrain types) by letting you control every polygon and thus allowing to modify every bit of the generated map.

And it's made with .NET :)

Here are a few screenshots of the tool:

Damm, I need free time to try all these things!

I don't use umbrellas, but this ones are quite funny. Too bad that fighting with them would be clumbersome ;)

Source: Microsiervos

After a few weeks of discussion with my pals at our office (and via email) about if Windows Vista was bad, Linux was bad (the typical Windows vs Linux topics), I've decided to install the Ubuntu distro under VMWare Server (which is free and, unlike Virtual PC 2007 does not have any problem installing any Linux), in order to learn how to use it (for some security & forensics distros I've got) and to see if, as our company's "Java side" says is as user-friendly as Windows.

A few notes before telling my first impressions:

• I know a bit about Linux from the university, but haven't touched any Linux since 4-5 years.
• I'm going to be as objective as I can, but comparisons are inevitable and there will be comments about what does have Windows (either Vista or other Windows) and Linux doesn't have and viceversa. Also, I have WinXP SP2 instead of Vista on my machine (but I've had it for one month, and I have a virtual machine with Vista Ultimate).
• My comments will be more related to usability, ease of use, problems I've found and things like that.
• I'm not going to use it on a daily basis, so this will not be the perfect test. Also, I'm running it on a VM without sound and using NAT networking.

So, here we go!

Why Ubuntu? Well, my friends told me it's a very good distribution with lots of features. Also, I tried earlier a Debian mini-network installation CD, and after hours of downloading packages and installing it, the x-windows system did not install correctly so I deleted the VM and started again with something I knew it would work with graphical user interface from the beggining.

I launched the latest Ubuntu 6.10 ISO file, and chose to install it. It asked me the typical things: Time zone, keyboard layout, root password, a user account & password, partitions... I liked the fact that the keyboard layout selection window had a textbox to try it, so if you mess and chose an incorrect one, you can see if your special characters appear or not (I installed the OS in english, but spanish layout to have our additional special characters).

 After the install, a restart. Everything went fine and quite fast (I was running a mounted ISO from the HDD).

 First step after the reboot, using the "Linux Update" :P 133 packages to update. 215 MB, as you can see in the screenshot. It updates everything, from the OS basic packages to applications. Took a bit to download and a bit longer to update. I needed to reboot (much like Windows).

 After rebooting again, I launched Firefox (2.0) and tried surfing to this portal. All renders and works fine, except the font, which Firefox rendered different. I downloaded and installed Opera and it showed 100% accurate everything (including the fonts).

I then opened the Package Manager, and installed some stuff, including Microsoft Core Fonts (or something like that). I removed some useless stuff (games and things like that) and added other ones, like AbiWord, a PDF viewer, and all Mono packages I found. After installing all, the upper system bar hang-up and, as it had the shutdown options, I had to reset manually the virtual machine, then everything worked fine and finally this portal rendered 100% same with Firefox as under Windows (I assume Opera translates some font names to Linux equal ones).

One annoying thing is that the package manager didn't installed MonoDevelop, so I've got all Mono files and libraries, but not the IDE. Tomorrow I'll download and install it manually.

Oh, the VMWare Tools installed correctly, but one thing I don't like is that the install "executable" (a perl script file) needed root privileges, but as I tried installing it from Gnome and not from a Terminal, when I double-clicked on it, it did nothing. From a Terminal tells you that you need root privs. and with the sudo command all went right. But -1 point to usability. Windows Vista handles all privilege requests with a dialog box, Linux doesn't even keeps the Terminal window with the error description. For a dummy user that could represent a "it doesn't works!" thought.

In general, it's user-friendly, it has good tools and works fine. I don't like still needing to rely on the Terminal window to see error messages, but I already knew I would need to do some things "old style".

Soon more experiences with the OS.

First conclusion: Not for my mother (for who "internet" means "Google and Yahoo mail" and sticks only to the desktop for "storing files and documents"), fine for me.

NVidia has just released CUDA, a new special compiler that has C extensions to program the GPU. This allows a high-level direct programming of the GPU, using it almost as a coprocessor. The approach is different from ATI's CTM (which provides a low-level assembly API and leaves to the developers the development of the libraries).

They have also updated their OpenGL extension specifications to support DirectX 10 capabilities, such as the geometry shaders.

You can read more info about CUDA and CTM at ars technica and at NVidia.

Orisinal is a website with lots of small flash games. The distinctive point comes from the graphics, sound and design of the games... All quite pretty and "soft".

Because not everything in life is killing foes ;)

Geeky!!! :D

Source: xkcd

Lately, with the public launch of Windows Vista, there are some bluffs about the new operating system. I'm going to focus on one: The "Vista is quite bad for gaming", aka "NVidia on Vista sucks".

Benchmarks are benchmarks, so it's true that Vista runs slower than XP with all games. But why is that?

First of all, there are no DirectX10 games on the market (a bunch in development, but none finished yet), so all benchmarks are made with DirectX9 games. That is an important point, because, as Vista has changed the internal structure of the drivers (with part of them now being run at kernel-mode), it's obvious that Vista's DX9 is not the same as "normal" DX9. The following diagram shows the new API structure:

The Windows Vista Graphics API structure

Because of backwards compatibility, the entire Direct3D 9 API is present, with some parts of it being emulated (resource creation & management and error handling) while using the new Vista's driver model. This means that performance will actually degrade, but it shouldn't be too much.

But in order to achieve best-performance with DX9 and take advantage of the changes, Direct3D 9 Ex API has been created, bringing new features to take actual advantage of Vista. This extensions use the WDDM drivers (required for Vista), so are just for that OS.

What all this means is that yes, Vista for current games is not as fast as XP, but way too slow to 20% less? I don't think so. NVidia's drivers are in beta stage, not even supporting fully DirectX10. Probably, when they release a "final" version of their drivers, things will go way faster. I've got an ATI 3D card and they release new drivers once a month more or less. I've had glitches and problems with games (like Far Cry, Kotor II,...) until they released a new version fixing that. I've had noticeable performance improvements sometimes after updating to latest drivers.

Also, it's clear that game companies should make patches for their games, creating new routines that call DirectX9 Ex instead of DirectX9 if the game is running under Vista. That would surely increase the FPS noticeably.

 So, this is IMO the list of "problems":

• Games need patches. Some to run/not crash, some to get around DX9 emulation.
• Drivers need to get stable. A beta driver is beta. NVidia has to hurry.
• DX9 without DX9 Ex runs a bit slower. And won't be the same without the extensions, except if graphics drivers can somehow call the DX9 Extensions (I don't know if this is even possible).

Here and there you've got detailed explanations of DirectX 9 Ex and DirectX 10, if you want to read more about it.