Category: Games


Why Fable 3′s 360 bugs piss me off but New Vegas’s PC ones didn’t.

Filed Under: Games by Diziet — Leave a comment
15/11/2010 16:19

A lot of it, possibly, can be attributed to the platform. On the PC I could, as far as possible, do things about the problems that vexed me. Although I never had a problem with slow down I did install a custom d3d dll which doubled my frame rate and got rid of most of the lag when going into VATS. I also installed a mod allowing ovens to be used to cook food, whether or not they worked was based on Luck. You could repair them with flamer fuel and a pilot light. I also only encountered 2 mission based bugs, both of which had work arounds on wikia.com.

In fable 3 though there is one bug and one feature which are greatly annoying and I am powerless to do anything about them.

- The frame rate is completely unpredictable with slow down at random times none of which seem to be related to the amount going on graphically. It drops to less than 10fps easily. It’s not a deal breaker as it doesn’t happen in combat but it’s incredibly irritating.
- More irritating than that is Jasper, it’s not his or John Cleese’s fault who is excellent. It’s rather the constant exhortation that there is something new in the sanctuary shop should I want to take a look. Every time I visit the sanctuary, which I need to do to change spells/weapons/clothes which is quite often. Shut UP! Stop telling me to buy the fucking DLC. I don’t want black dye! Lionhead, what the hell were you thinking? If people want the content, they will buy it. You have no need to ram it down our throats.

I’m also undecided on the quality of individual script dialogue. A lot of it this time seems to be self consciously poking fun at the nature of the game and games of it’s ilk in general. In the case of one quest with 3 wizards and rescuing a princess it’s obviously parody and very much part of the quest in that you are partaking in a table top rpg session. There it works well. In a quest I’ve just done involving Reaver it’s out of context, breaks immersion and smacks of laziness. I hope there is more of it but used well like the former example and not like the latter.

In more positive news, the game is excellent and a clear improvement on Fable 2. The combat is streamlined, I like the way the weapons change. In pretty much every key area that I’ve discovered so far the game is improved. I can’t comment on plot as I have not yet completed the game and it would be unfair to do so until I have.

So please Lionhead, sort out the frame rate and tone down the number of times Jasper tries to persuade me to visit the sanctuary shop. I’m not buying the DLC, in part because I already have most of it from codes provided with the pre-order (yet the game does not recognise this and would quite happily let me purchase them, which is appalling behaviour by MS Live/Lionhead whomever is responsible) and secondly I don’t accept that a few dyes are worth any MS Points at all.

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Progress doesn’t always feel like progress.

Filed Under: Cooking, Games, Programming by Diziet — Leave a comment
04/11/2010 20:02

So many changes have been made, which doesn’t always feel like you’re getting anywhere. I’ve made it so that Recipes sent in any form are transmitted as JPEG’s at 50% quality, it seems you can set the quality level of JPEG but not PNG. This should help mitigate the possibility of a recipe being 20-30MB of data if somebody decides to create one for a cooking lesson. E.g. lots of small steps, each one illustrated.
The iPhone application has been changed into a tabbar/navbar app allowing for a permanent and separate recipe view. This meant that a lot of iPad specific code was no longer specific and could be moved to the shared classes. It also acted as an impetus to solve some of the pettier iPad specific bugs relating to that view. I also decided to adopt the iPad unified view rather than the iPhone versions recipe summary/ingredient and method split.
Many things to fix still such as image zoom, pdf generation, preview images in emailed content, ingredient/step management, category combining, whole category emailing? etc.
It also heralded the first time I’ve used the app start to finish to write in a recipe then add photographs to the steps later on. It worked fine. I also used it to record recipes from Fallout New Vegas so I could scavenge the right stuff for them in my wasteland wanderings.
A surfeit of Pumkin/Apple provided by my sister and the garden trees respectively prompted a baking of Pumpkin Pie, Apple Pie and Blackberry and Apple Pie. Lamb and Pumpkin Tagine was also cooked. Sadly time got the better of me and a lot of the pumpkin has since decided that it’s cellulose based cell walls are not, anymore. Shame, I was hoping to make a pumpkin chutney.

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Well these are novel reasons for offering a patch.

Filed Under: Games by Diziet — 1 Comment
18/08/2010 21:11

I guess there must be a fuckton of starcraft players out there with macs. Hopefully not the same specs or macs though.

Interestingly I have experienced both of the issues this apparently fixes.

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A summary of the day.

Filed Under: Games, Programming by Diziet — Leave a comment
12/08/2010 18:38

Good day.  Silly exc_bad_access bug resolved.  A macro in gdb to print the retainCount (mentioned in a previously posted link) is indeed very handy.  Spamming this through the code was also useful:

NSLog(@"%@ <nameoffunction>",self);   <--- (or with another %@ and adding parameters)

where nameoffunction and the code itself was in things like dealloc, viewWillAppear, viewDidLoad etc.  Thus when it crashed and I could see the memory address as it would be somewhere in the debug console, this along with breakpoints at the aforementioned retainCount macro (or just typing print (int)[object retainCount] ) helped greatly.

Also interesting how sometimes the retain count is not what I thought it should be.  For example a custom table cell is deallocated.  This table cell was created the normal way with dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier and then had a property set to an object.  So something like:

CustomTableCell *cell = [self.tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:@"CustomTableCell"];
cell.anObject = (AnObject *)newObject;

Where newObject was obtained from Core Data with the fetchedResultsController returning a MSManagedObject. In this case you just cast it to the type of object you want, as above. You see I would have thought that my newObject/anObject had a retainCount of 2 so when it’s deallocating the custom cell having deallocated the tableView it was in I should do this:

-(void)dealloc {
  [anObject release];
  [super release];
}

however checking the retain count for the object showed it to already be 0 at that point. The retain count never went above 1, e.g. the initial creation of it inside the table view. Once the superfluous release was commented out the problem went away and there are still no memory links, so it’s definitely not a case of fixing a problem by creating another.

On the opposite side of the coin if I create a view it’s retain count is 1. If I assign that view to a view controller I would expect it to be 2. Commonly once it’s assigned you can release it to return the retainCount to 1. However it isn’t the case. When the object is pushed to a controller the retain count went up to 5 and then dropped to 4 when release later on. Something like (pseudo code ish as I’m sans mac right now):

NewViewController *newView = [[NewViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"NewView"];
newView.anObject = (AnObject *)newObject;
[self.navigationController pushNewViewController:newView animated:YES];

I assume the retain count for the view increases as things are assigned to it’s member properties.

Anyway the app at this stage is now, to the best of my knowledge, bug free. That leaves me open to implement the final view needed; and also the most bitchy complicated dynamic one.

On another note I’m a complete Dragon Age whore. I am intrigued by the warning on the just released golem DLC which essentially says “This is fucking hard”. I hope so as the rest of it, although fun, has been piss easy.

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