Okami Review (Wii Version)

Just a few days ago I finished my way through Okami (Wii version) and it was one of the most excellent games I have played in a long time. Okami is primarily an Action/Adventure game with a bit of Platforming sprinkled about. The reason that Okami stands apart from games of the day is that it feels fresh. These days, after many years of gaming, I can play a game and be completely turned off to it if it is a clone of some other game I’ve already played. Once I get that “been there done that” feeling any game, no matter how execellent otherwise, becomes worthless to me.

Plot (No Spoilers): In the game Okami you play as the sun goddess, Amaterasu, as you try an restore a land filled with evil. When you first start you have just been resurrected… so to speak and your powers are quite weak. From that point on you spend the game fighting back Orochi (and other evils) as well as gathering “praise” from villagers, plant life, and animals. Throughout the game you are seeking out the ancient “brush techniques” which allow Amaterasu many different super natural powers.

Music: The music in Okami is quite good and does not seem to get terribly repetative as some game music tends to do. Most of the music is that kind of music that is normally aossicated with old or ancient Japan, which is fitting since the game takes place there. I suppose if you aren’t a real fan of that kind of music then it would drive you nuts, but the music has a relaxing feel to it and blends nicely into the background.

Brush Techniques: This is what really makes Okami stand out from other games in the genre. As you work your way through the game Amaterasu learns 13 “Celestrial Brush Techniques”, which are performed by drawing various patterns on the screen with the Wii mote.  Each technique uses a certain amount of “ink” which you have a set reverse of. Ink levels recover slowly so you can’t use the techniques wastefully. I have heard that the controls for the brush techniques have been given mixed reviews. I had some trouble with the controls in the beginning, but after an hour or so I really enjoyed them and I think it is a very natural fit for the Wiimote. Again, for me, this was the major selling point of the game.

Controls: The controls for Okami felt pretty solid, but there  were a few occasions where they were a little clunky and just got me downright annoyed. Overall I wouldn’t say they detract from the game, but the one or two times you run into trouble is quite irritating.

Praise: In Okami “praise” is how you are able to get more powerful over time. As you travel around the various lands helping villagers and restoring nature that has been corrupted you acumulate praise. This praise can be spent on upgrades to increase the amount of ink you carry (needed for brush techniques), to get more health, and for various other upgrades. Praise is fairly easy to come by and as long as you are paying attention you should aquire it naturally as you play the game. I never found myself in a situation where I had to grind for several hours just to be strong enough to continue.

Battles: Battles in Okami are faught when you approach floating scrolls of paper that look possessed (yup… best way I could describe it). When you get close enough a restrictive barrior is placed around the immediate area of the map and the enemies appear. At the beginning of the game you are given a simple weapon that looks like a shield and as you move through the game you get various new weapons for your arrsenal. There are 15 weapons total and you are allowed to have one main weapon and one sub weapon equipped. Each enemy in the battle has a certain amount of health that you can view via a health bar that is displayed. It is in your interest to finish each battle as fast as possible, and take as little damage as possible. This is because at the end you see a summary of how well you did, and get rewarded with extra money for being faster/taking less damage. The battle system helps keep them from feeling too stale and gives you a reason to improve your skills over time and learn the best way to defeat each enemey.

Overall: Okami is a great game with a very interesting and engaging story line that keeps you guessing as to what is going to happen next. The controls take some getting used to, but Okami is one of the few games that didn’t just add Wiimote features for the heck of it. Its fresh take on the Action/Adventure genre is refreshing especially given all the clones of this genre.  I would recommend this game to anyone who likes the Legend of Zelda series, or anyone who enjoys  Action/Adventure games.

Happy gaming !

My Impressions of KDE 4.2

I have actually been meaning to write this post for a while now, but as usual school takes away most of my ambition to do things such as write to this blog or write fun code.

I have been using KDE 4.2 on both my Gentoo systems (laptop and desktop) since about a week after it was released. I still run it now and plan on running it until the next big release of KDE.

KDE 4.2 really took my breath away on many fronts. First of all the Phonon sound system works properly. This also means that I can use Amarok 2.0 which is a HUGE plus for me. In 4.1 I had all sorts of annoying problems getting Phonon to even play sound, and when it did it would block any other applications from using the sound card. Not so any more!

Also, the Plasma widgets are running much cleaner and faster. In KDE 4.1 they seemed to resize slowly and imprecisely. Now, not only do they resize correctly, but if you stick them off the screen in a strange way or place them in some funny manner they try to arrange themselves in a neat fashion. For someone as OCD as myself this feature is wonderful!

The fact that you can now use a Desktop View widget as a desktop is probably good news for some because it means easier access to icons. Personally, I don’t really care about that because I hate desktop icons to begin with. I launch all of my programs through the Run Command interface anyway.

I started using Kopete recently as well, and that has seen huge improvements since the last time I used it. I’m not sure when they changed the interface around and added all the animations, but Kopete has now replaced Pidgin as my default messaging client.

In terms of looks… well KDE 4.2 looks very much like KDE 4.1 or even 4.0. They updated the default theme a little bit, but it is still the same fundamental idea. This is fine with me. I love the new Oxygen theme and it gives a fresh look to my desktop.

As far as running KDE on my laptop is concerned I like 4.2 much better for basically one reason alone… The battery meter widget shows the time remaining now and is also aware of different processor throttling states. This is a great improvement over what I experienced in 4.1 and it makes KDE completely useable on my laptop. Also, since KDE is now more aware of dual screens and screen settings it made it nice to use while I was giving presentations with Okular (the new KDE pdf viewer) on my laptop. I’ve yet to play around with the GUI for changing the display settings (I use xrandr from the terminal) , but I hope to give that a try some time in the near future.

Dual screen support in terms of my desktop setup seems to be about the same as it had been, but I think that is because I am using the proprietary ATI driver and not the open source one. It works well enough that I don’t have any issues. I really like the feature where if you have a maximized window on one screen you can just drag it over the other screen and it stays maximized. Maybe other versions of KDE had this… but either way it is real handy.

I can hardly say enough good things about KDE 4.2 and I am really looking forward to the 4.3 release and some additional bug fixes.

Now that I have gone on and on about the positives I will list a few bugs and whatnot that I have found, but am confident they will be fixed in later releases. The first is that the “Run Command” feature seems to crash if I have KDE running for too long. I typically leave my system running for days at a time so I don’t like it when stuff like that breaks. Also, when I first installed KDE 4.2 I had to clear out all my KDE 4.1 settings before it would run correctly. This is only a minor annoyance, but if you have a bunch of settings that took forever to set up it would be a bit of a bummer to reload them all.

Overall I am extremely happy with KDE 4.2 and would reccomend it to those who have been holding off on account of stability issues. I use it everyday for doing school work and I have not run in to any problems that have caused me to need to downgrade to 4.1 or to switch away from it entirely. Great work KDE team!

Just Begin Curious? Or a Skeptic?

Well, it is no secret, especially to those who know me, that I often like to inquire as to why people think in certain ways. At times this results in further discussion or debate, and at times I simply find their response interesting and that is the end of it.

As it turns out not everyone finds this to be one of my more charming attributes. I can’t really say why I am always interested to engage in deeper conversation about a particular topic with people. In fact it seems that it only gets me in trouble with some people. I find myself wondering if I should maybe abandon hope of attaining a reasonable explanation out of people for how they view the world. Today one of my friends responded with “Fine Tim, dissect my statement, I’m just full of crap” after I asked him to explain why he thought the tootsie roll ad campaign was one of the most successful in history. I don’t know… but I was genuinely curious as to the grounds by which he was basing that statement. It seems that many people would have me just take that sort of statement for granted and immediately say something like “Yeah, you’re right” and indeed, if I did think that I would have gladly responded with something to that effect.

I am wondering if people think I am constantly looking for a way to debate with them, which would cause  defensive statements such as the one mentioned above to come out instead of what I was actually looking for. I don’t try to be argumentative with people, but I can’t deny that a lot of my friends think I come across that way. I have tried in the past to “stop arguing”, but I always find that even things I consider light discussion turn out to be debate for some people.

Even after all this consideration I am left wondering what the best course of action is. Do I try my best to change and not attempt to ask people to explain the reason they feel certain ways, or do I pass it off as being an issue that only certain people have, and just avoid getting in to debate with them? After all I have met people more than willing to have a good debate with me about things. When is there good enough reason to debate with people and when should one let things drop? This is where I have trouble drawing the line. To me, sometimes a question I find to be very innocent is taken to mean that I am looking to start a lengthy discussion about some “trivial matter”.

On a more humorous note it is tough for me to have a discussion with people about my argumentative nature because as soon as I ask for more details about what they are saying I receive the response similar to “There you go again, this is exactly the problem”. Basically, if I try to defend myself that turns into the other person’s main argument against me.

Still, after this level of introspection I am left in a state of confusion about what the best course of action is to take. Certainly, I don’t want to be irritating my friends all the time. If that were the case I could hardly consider myself a good friend by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, what do I do if they have led themselves down a path of thinking which is just flat out illogical or otherwise incorrect? Do I let them continue living with that issue, or do I try and let them know that I think there is a problem?

Well, I still don’t have the full solution to my troubles, but it is nice to sit down and lay out my dilemas.

My Experiences with Mozilla Prism

I have been quite busy lately trying to keep up with my school work, but I decided that I had time for a quick post to the blog.

Recently I have been playing around with the Mozilla Labs project known as Prism.

Prism allows one to easily turn any website into what appears to be a standalone application. The advantage of which is that you can ditch things such as the menu bar and forward and back buttons which typically take up an unnecessary amount of screen space just so you can do something like… edit your WordPress blog.

So far I have only used this for WordPress and for access to my GMail account. It is nice to be able to just click on an icon and load up either WordPress or GMail in a nice and contained format. This is especially nice for GMail since I almost always have that open in a Firefox tab and now I don’t require all of Firefox just to check mail.

For now I had to install it by downloading the tar.bz file and just unpacking it. You don’t need to do any special installing because it can simply run  as a normal user. For ease of use I just put the files in a .prism directory under my home directory and sys linked that to a directory which is include in my PATH variable.

Presently when you run prism you just enter the website and prism turns it into an easy to run desktop icon and then from that point on you use the icon.

Use This To Create a "New App"

After doing this one gets a nice desktop icon:

GMail Icon

Once you click on the icon the application is run:

Notice the lack of navigation or address bar

It should also be noted that there is a Firefox extension to do this same thing, but I couldn’t get that to work even after playing with it for a good deal of time.

If you would like to download and play with Prism for yourself you can check it out here: http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/prism/ . I should also mention that Prism is still in the testing phases so it might not be too surprising if there were some bugs.

I have many more things I’d like the write about especially my awesome experiences for KDE 4.2, but those will have to wait until my motivation and free time have increased .

Java Scanner class and Standard In Troubles

I ran into a bit of trouble today with the Java Scanner class that I thought was worth mentioning. Personally I really like the Java Scanner class because it is a great way to easily read from standard input (stdin). In specific the issue I had was that I noticed the Scanner class allows you to close stdin. This is the part I found problematic. Consider the following code from Test.java:

import java.util.Scanner;
public class Test
{
    public static void main(String args[])
    {
     Scanner scanner = new Scanner(System.in);

     System.out.print("Enter a number: ");
     System.out.println("Your number was: " + scanner.nextInt());

     scanner.close();

     scanner = new Scanner(System.in);

     if(!scanner.hasNext())
     {
         System.out.println("Whoops! nothing to read!");
         System.exit(1);
     }

     System.out.println("Things seemed to  have worked correctly.");
    }
}

When you run this code what you will notice is that after you enter the first number the program goes straight into that if statement. This is not what we might expect however because the has<something> functions are supposed to hang until something is typed.

The reason for this is the call to scanner.close() which ends up closing standard in. To be honest I’m not sure how this would work on a Windows system, but I know it was a bit of a problem for me on my Linux box. The simple fix is to just not call .close() , but since it is normally good practice to close things you opened I didn’t think much of it when I first wrote the code. I guess we didn’t technically open stdin, so perhaps that is the correct way to look at it .

At any rate I wouldn’t call this a bug of Scanner, but simply something to look out for when using the Scanner class.

Happy coding !

Spheriosity Alpha 3 Released!

Today I finally managed to release the next instalment of Spheriosity. For those who don’t know Spheriosity is the Java program I wrote to be an emulation of spherical geometry and it is geared toward students in higher geometry classes or anyone interested in learning about spherical geometry. The latest release has many new features. Here are a few of them:

• Midpoint plotting
• Ability to draw spherical circles
• Improved line length measurement tools
• Ability to rename points

To give it a try head on over to our SourceForge page and download away. Spheriosity requires Java3D >= 1.4 and Java >= 1.5 . For those interested in hearing more about the latest release then keep reading.

The reason that I decided to release it as alpha is because I think there are still too many features I would like to add to the next version. Also, I have been reading about XML lately and think I might change the file format over to use an XML based one for saving spheres. Changing to XML will probably not be terribly difficult, but it does involve my needing to actually do it and then write some acompanying tests. More importantly it will, yet again, break backwards compatibility with file reading.

Hopefully, the next version I release can be beta quality. Also, I am still looking for people who would be interested in helping with development. It would be great to have other people to bounce ideas off of and check the code out to make sure there are as few errors as possible. Additionally, I don’t always have time to work on the project and getting a few more people would help it have some more consistent development.

At any rate I hope everyone enjoys the latest release and if you have any feedback please let me know either via this blog or the Spheriosity SourceForge page. Thanks!

fglrx Drivers — Getting TV Out to Work

About six months ago my friend sent me a link to Hulu.com and one day I simply stumbled across the service Joost.com. Since then I have been hooked on internet television. I rarely use the normal form of watching TV, and why should I? I can watch the shows I want to watch WHEN I want to watch them. Additionally, both Joost and Hulu offer subtitled and dubbed anime, which is far more than I can get on TV. Anyway, that’s not the point of my post, but rather the reason I became interested in getting the TV Out on my ATI Radeon 9800Pro to work. As a final note I am using the ati-drivers (fglrx) version 8.561 . For you Gentoo users it is currently masked in portage so you are going to want to add “=x11-drivers/ati-drivers-8.561” to your /etc/portage/package.keywords if you plan to use them. I don’t know what version they started supporting the features I am talking about so it might work with your current setup just fine.

Sadly I must use the closed source driver, for now anyway, because Spheriosity will not run properly for me on the open source driver. I used to switch between the two drivers, but that became terribly inconvenient because I needed to maintain two Xorg.conf files since each driver has its own little nuisances. I kept reading that the closed source driver (fglrx) supported TV-Out, but I was failing to setup the Xorg.conf file correctly and I noticed that xrandr didn’t seem to work. Eventually I noticed here (scroll down a bit) that fglrx does not support the randr extension. At that point I was ready to give up, but I noticed the aticonfig tool. This has a few options that can be changed on the fly, which is exactly what I wanted. Normally I run a dual monitor configuration with big desktop and only on occasion do I want TV output. With the aticonfig tool it was quite simple:

aticonfig --query-monitor

This shows what monitors are seen by the drivers. Here is what mine looks like:

jinto@lightflame ~ $ aticonfig --query-monitor
  Connected monitors: crt1, tv, crt2
  Enabled monitors: crt1, crt2

To enable the TV you simple issue the following command:

aticonfig --enable-monitor=tv
             OR
aticonfig --enable-monitor=tv,crt1 (if you want tv and a monitor)

You may have to replace crt1 with whatever output you get from --query-monitor, but hopefully you get the idea. KDE 4.1 did seem to have some minor annoyances while switching between configurations so when I watch TV I simply use a failsafe login to avoid my plasmids from getting all messed up. Also, there are ways to adjust the size of the image being output to the TV using the --tv-geometry flag. aticonfig will complain about not being able to edit the xorg.conf file, but it seemed to change it for me on the fly so I’m not sure what the story is behind that. If you want to understand how to use --tv-geometry just issue aticonfig --help | less and it is near the top. If you are interested the tv geometry I use it is:

aticonfig --tv-geometry=43x55-1+1

What you need to use probably varies from TV to TV so unless you have a 27″ Sony Trinitron you will probably have to tweak that command .

Oh yeah… and if you want to go back to your original configuration just issue:

aticonfig --enable-monitor=crt1,crt2

Or whatever monitors you wish to active. If you only have a single monitor then all you need to do is issue the previous command without the “,crt2″ part . Good luck!

Video Game Music

It’s no secret, at least to those who know me personally, that I love listening to the music from video games. Now, I have my limits. If the game has terrible music then I simply don’t care to listen at all. Recently there has been some stunning work on video game sound tracks. The sound track to Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Brothers Brawl were absolutely breathtaking. The industry has come a long way in terms of audio. I still have a soft spot in my heart for those classic NES tunes, but I sure do like the way things have been improving.

There are even some games for the SNES that had rather amazing sound tracks. The obvious games there are Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III (Well VI actually, but released as III in America), and Secret of Mana. That is not to say there weren’t other SNES games with good sound tracks. In fact, there is an entire community of people who take video game tunes and remix them. The big place for that happens to be OCRemix.org and I have spent hours upon hours on that site. They truely have some talented remixers there. Here are a few good mixes, but certainly there are hundreds more that are quite amazing:

• Dragon Song by Harmony
• Into the Thicket by Darkesword
• Wicked Six by Sixto Sounds
• El Lagarto by Evil Horde
• Super Mario’s Sleigh Ride by The OneUps

Beyond the realm of OCRemix we have video game cover bands (as if things couldn’t get any better) ! Some of these include: The Megas, Armcannon, The OneUps, Powerglove, and The Black Mages. All of the bands mentioned even have CDs you can purchase, or most of them have options where you can download the music (for a small price). For those of us that love the video game tunes it is truely a great time. Back when I was much younger there were none of these things and the closest thing I had to listening to video game music (other than playing the games) was a Mario Kart 64 Soundtrack that I found somewhere.

Whether it’s an OCRemix or a video game cover band these guys are taking the old 8-bit tunes and turning them into musical glory. This gamer in particular finds himself frequently amazed at what they can do.

In the future I plan to blog a little more about video game music as its one of my interests. I just haven’t had the time lately .

Replacing Power Supply Fans

For some time now whenever I would turn on my computer the fans would make that classic “I’m going to die soon” sound which is never a good thing. I didn’t really want to throw down the money to replace an otherwise working power supply so I decided that I would simply replace the fans. This was a fairly simple project, but not worth breaking your warranty over. The power supply I was working on was a 5 year old Antec 480Watt power supply, nothing special. The basic tools you would need for this project are:

• 2 Philips head screw drivers a smallish one and a mediumish one
• Basic soldering skills
• Soldering supplies (solder gun, solder, flux… etc)
• Wire Cutters
• Wire Stripers
• New case fans that are the same size as the ones already installed
• Heat shrink or some electrical tape

Before I continue on I want to issue this general disclaimer: Working with electricity or devices that use electricity can be dangerous. By following any of the instructions in the rest of this post you acknowledge that you will not hold wordpress.com, this blog, or writer of this blog responsible for anything that happens as a result of what you read/did as a result of reading this article.

Honestly I didn’t want to have to place such a disclaimer on my blog, but I feel it is necessary. This job is simple and can be safe as long as you are careful! It’s not my fault if you start poking your screw driver around and get zapped!

One last thing before I get started. That is a note on fan selection. I had to take mine apart once to figure out what size fans I needed. In my case I had two fans: an 80mm and 92mm fan. I ordered two of these: http://www.xoxide.com/80vanstealfa.html (not two of those exact ones, but two Ventec Stealth Fans). You can order any old 12 volt case fan as long as you think it will move enough air to cool your power supply. If you are concerned that your power supply uses some fancy non-standard fan then just follow the guide up until the part where you have to cut the fan wires and you can see for yourself. Anyway, I choose these fans because they were supposed to be quiet (around 20dB). Apparently they also move enough air, or I wouldn’t be writing this post right now ^_^;

The first step in all of this is to remove the power supply from your computer. You should unplug the power supply before you start removing it. The actual removal differs from computer to computer and if you are concerned you won’t remember where everything plugs back in then take a picture or take some time to label things.Typically the power supply is screwed in to the back of the case with 4 screws. It’s easy to locate because it’s where you plug in that monster power cable that your computer needs to operate.

Once you have safely removed the power supply from the computer set it down on a flat surface and pull out your smallish screwdriver. Most power supplies I have taken apart (about 6 or 7) have four tiny screws on the top. I circled two of them in the picture below.

Power supply case screws highlighted

The other two screws are simply on the other side. Also, notice that the screw on the right was originally covered with a sticker.

Warranty Sticker

That sticker says something about violating the warranty and I imagine that by defacing it I voided my warranty (which had long expired). If you care about your warranty stop now and put down the screw driver. If not continue on by taking the top part of the case off. I had to be careful when taking mine off because, if you didn’t notice, there is a fan attached to the top of mine. That fan has two wires that run down to the main board and there’s slack in them, but I could easily seen them being yanked out by an overzealous tug. Here is when you can figure out what size fans you want to order. Simply measure any given side of the fan (it’s a square… all sides have the same length) in millimetres and this will tell you what size it is. I had an 80mm and 92mm fan in mine. They come in standard sizes (yes… 92mm is a standard size for some reason) so they won’t be hard to find.

Here is the inside of the power supply case

Notice that, as promised, I have two fans I need to replace. Only one of them was making funny noises, but I figured if I was going to open everything up I may as well replace both of them.

Quick Note: If you look at the picture just below I have circled the main reason playing with your power supply does include risk of electricity.

Don't let these guys zap ya!

Those bad boys are 200 volt capacitors. If you didn’t already know a capacitor is a magic device that can store electricity. It’s doubtful that a fully charged 200 volt capacitor would kill you, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend testing that theory out. Just don’t touch it, either with a screw driver, or with your body and there is nothing to worry about .

The next step is to detach both of the fans from the power supply case. These are standard case fans and detach with four screws each. They should be on the outside of the case as shown in the picture below.

Just to give you an idea of what to look for

Yes, this picture was taken with the case still screwed together, but that is because I forgot to take it with the case apart . In any case hopefully you get the idea… you have to unscrew all the fans to remove them.

Here is a fan unscrewed from the case

Now we are tasked with detaching the fan from the main board. On my power supply they are plugged in with tiny plastic plugs as you can (sort of) see in the picture below.

Remove this if you feel up for a fight...

I didn’t feel like fussing with the connector to try and remove it so I just cut the wires. At the end of the day you are going to have to solder anyway . I decided where to cut based on the next step which talks about cutting the wires on the fan. I tried to keep the final wire length the same as what it was originally, but to make soldering easier you want to have enough slack on each wire that they will cooperate nicely with you. Below is a picture of the cut wires. At the end of the day you just need to use your judgement. Remember: measure twice, cut once!

Here is a picture of the wires I cut

There are a few things you need to know about modern case fans. Any case fan I could find typically came with a 3 pin connector (for a motherboard) and an adapter to so you could hook it right in to your power supply. My power supply fans only used the red and black wires which are for power and ground respectively. The extra wire, usually colored yellow, is so the motherboard knows what speed the fans are spinning at. If your power supply happens to support that then solder that sucker in. Mine does not so I just cut the wire really short and figured nothing else would touch it.

Now that everything is ready, solder it all up. I am assuming you know how to solder and chances are you solder better than me. Once you have soldered you will end up with something that looks at least as good as this:

The fans all soldered in to place

I would have used heat shrink, but I didn’t have any and really needed my computer to be running again. Before you reassemble everything I would suggest that you hook up your power supply just enough to get the fans spinning. This means you’ll want to hook up main board power, hard drive power, and video card (if needed). Press the power button, see if they spin, and they pull the plug so you don’t overheat anything. You want to make sure the fans will spin before you put it all back together. The last thing you want is for it to overheat without you knowing!

After you test and they work… you are done! Enjoy your new fans .

Spheriosity Work Continues

This is just a quick update about my recent work on Spheriosity. I had promised myself that I would release a version over my winter break from college. Today I finally had time to sit down with the code and start working through a few bugs. I fixed most of the bugs that I know about, and now I have moved on into commenting and writing unit tests.

It was a bit of a struggle to motivate myself to write the current group of units tests, which is probably why they aren’t already written. I will write them though, and it will help keep Spheriosity more stable in the long run so it’s a worthwhile goal.

After the unit tests are done I plan to add one last feature which will handle midpoints of lines. This should be a snap to implement and it has been on my list for a while.

Finally, I will do a major update to the user documentation which will include a proof reading .

After all that I will release the new version. I’m not sure whether I consider this alpha or beta. I’m going to have to give it some more consideration. It looks pretty likely that I will finish this all within the next two weeks so hopefully all goes according to plan .