05.10.07
Posted in Game design at 16:14
Okay, this is… a little geeky, but bear with me.
You know how the H&K Gewehr G36 supports five different trigger groups? Well if you don’t, wiki it 
. In STALKER, the G36 comes with the most boring trigger group possible: It can be set either to single-shot or continuous shot, which according to Wikipedia is the standard for the German military. Personally, however, I rather like two-shot bursts. You can change a lot of things about your weapon in STALKER, but you can’t change its trigger group.
Well, unless you edit its data file! So, having already downloaded and installed Kyodan’s awesome Real Gun Names Mod, it was a piece of cake to find the ltx file for the G36 and change the fire_modes property from “1, -1; 1, -1″ to “1, 2, -1″, which adds a two-shot burst. I originally set it to “1, 2, 3, -1″, which was copied from the MP5, but Wikipedia says no such fire group exists for the real G36 rifle, and STALKER is a game that takes that sort of stuff seriously, so I removed the 3-shot burst again. If you’re interested, here’s the file for download. It’s pretty tiny:
Alternate G36 Trigger Group mod 
Just extract that into your STALKER directory. The rar comes with the necessary file structure already, but if you prefer to place it manually, it goes in gamedata\config\weapons. Note that this was modified from the Real Weapon Names mod, so I’m pretty sure you’re going to fuck up its name and description if you don’t install that first. You can find it here:
Kyodan’s Real Gun Names Mod (English 0.3)
Just overwrite his G36 file with mine to get the new trigger group.
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05.06.07
Posted in Games at 14:41
I’ve been playing a lot of Puzzle Quest on my DS these past few days. The game is basically an attempt to merge casual and hard core games, replacing all combat and various other activities in an old-fashioned top-down Heroes of Might and Magic-style adventure RPG with… Bejewelled. It works a lot better than you’d think. There is a story in there, but a game can hardly get any more gamey.
Then last night, Ruben linked to Photopia. Interactive fiction is not something I’ve been paying a lot of attention to, my first attempts at text adventure ended in great frustration, staring angrily at the text prompt, trying not to lose my temper and break my keyboard. Photopia isn’t a text adventure though, it’s a short story with a text prompt. In the beginning, it was both frustrating and confusing. Frustrating because I didn’t know which commands to put in, confusing because the story makes no sense at first.
But then I got into it. And it got into me. And I can’t get it out of my head. I played it last night, when I was tired and most susceptible to emotional input; took about an hour to complete. I’ve been thinking about it all day. It didn’t make an impression because it was interactive though, it made an impression because it was a fantastically powerful story. So now I’ll put a link to it here, and even if you’ve never played an interactive fiction before, I encourage you to try it out and stick to it. It’s not long, but it lasts.
Photopia
http://adamcadre.ac/if.html
Scroll down.
Enjoy.
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05.01.07
Posted in Personal, Photos at 20:05
I have cats. This should be no surprise. But now, as opposed to a week ago, I have 3. In preparation for the event, I bought a new digital camera. My previous one, a Nikon Coolpix, was not producing images of sufficient quality. Indeed, due to its internal objective, it distorts the photos slightly, and its tiny lense is far from light sensitive enough to take pictures in the sort of conditions I need it to. It’s a good tourist camera, but I needed something more fancy. More arty. More hard core. So I broke the piggy bank and bought a Nikon D50. Here’s what this baby can do:
Read the rest of this entry »
- Mood: Cuteness overwhelming
- Music: Feeder - Piece by Piece
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