Messages

46

VGMaps Social Board / Re: Cloudflare for vgmaps?

« on: June 20, 2012, 10:53:17 pm »

Output from Live HTTP headers:

https://www.vgmaps.com/System/Headers/NES.gif

GET /System/Headers/NES.gif HTTP/1.1
Host: vgmaps.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0.1
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: removed
If-Modified-Since: Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:22:39 GMT
If-None-Match: "27ea6e6-5b-45ea6be72f565"
Cache-Control: max-age=0

HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 04:41:52 GMT
Server: Apache
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Etag: "27ea6e6-5b-45ea6be72f565"
----------------------------------------------------------

Yes, an HTTP request is still sent to the server, but only an HTTP header is sent in response, not the whole gif image.  You can use other cache directives to tell a browser to hold onto a file for a period of time and not even bother checking to see if the file changes, but then if the file does change, the user won't see the new one until the cached file expires on his/her client.  Which may or may not be desirable depending on the content.  HTTP GET requests and 304 responses hardly take up any bandwidth.  Yes, it is another connection that has to be opened, but with modern internet speeds and modern multi-core servers, it's a small overhead.

For the maps and title images, it probably wouldn't matter if they had an expiration of several hours, or even a day or two.  But the HTML pages probably shouldn't carry an expiration.

47

VGMaps Social Board / Re: Cloudflare for vgmaps?

« on: June 20, 2012, 03:23:01 pm »

The server is already set to use traditional browser/proxy caching using HTTP cache directives and the 304 response code for static files.  HTTP compression would help, sure, and if GoDaddy allows Jon to configure that, he should do it for HTML, CSS and Javascript mime types.

I just don't think the load times are enough of an issue that Jon needs to go and change his name servers.  That's no small thing.  He'd be giving DNS control over to Cloudflare's machines.  He would need to make sure he trusts Cloudflare enough to do that.

I'm still of the opinion that a site redesign would do more good than trying to do these optimizations.  As I see it, the search engine crawling and navigation of the site are bigger obstacles than the loading time of the maps.

48

VGMaps Social Board / Re: Cloudflare for vgmaps?

« on: June 19, 2012, 12:13:08 pm »

A site redesign would probably increase speed (as well as usability) more than cloud sourcing the images.  Right now you have to download large HTML pages just to get to a single game in the popular systems.  Woe to those who need a game in the last part of the alphabet in the NES page.  Cloudflare wouldn't help with that bottleneck as they don't cache text/html content types.

49

Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Advice / help wanted for mapping 3D DOS game with vector graphics

« on: June 15, 2012, 09:28:17 am »

The game engine might not be designed to display an angle of 90 degrees.  Early 3d games use custom software rendering, and the developer might have only made sure the engine worked for the camera angles it was designed for.  It looks like some of the decorations are sprites instead of models, so those will either disappear at a 90 degree angle or could be displayed improperly if the developers never intended for the camera to be at that angle.  It doesn't hurt to try thought, just know you might not get a usable result.

Extracting the 3d data from a game that old might be difficult.  Even if it's stored in a format that's easy to reverse engineer, you'll still have to know how to use that information to recreate a 3d scene.  I tried working with some Quake map files once (un-compiled, not BSP) and they stored brushes as 3d vectors, but who knows what format this game uses.

50

VGMaps Social Board / Re: GMaps for Game Maps (Beta)

« on: June 07, 2012, 08:26:24 am »

Finally, although these are only Zelda maps, the system is open enough to allow any other map! I intend to make this system available to every mapper, I'm not sure yet how (allow non-zelda maps on my site? create a new site? give the source code and let the community do what they want).

Once you've made it available for us to make our own stuff, we can probably give you better feedback.  Hopefully you'll release it so we can use it on our own sites.  If you're going to keep it on your site, I myself, would probably not be interested.

We've talked about this kind of system here before at VGMaps.  It would certainly be useful for games with large maps.  IMO, it's a bit over-kill for games with smaller areas.  For example, I'm not sure I like the way you did Hyrule castle.  The floors are logically separated into different "maps", but that actually makes it difficult to follow them if you're trying to use this thing while you play the game.  You have to click to go to a different floor, and then you can't see where you just were.  Certainly, if every floor is lumped together in one image, it's a bit harder to read, but I would only need to touch my mouse if the whole map didn't fit on the screen.  And I get a better picture of where I came from, and where I'm going.

It's also kind of silly to load all the Javascript, marker images, etc, when a floor is small enough to fit on the screen.

Maybe the solution is to use a hybrid of what we do, and what you're doing.  Put all the dungeon floors in one big map, but still have your clickable markers to allow the user to the destination of a portal/door.

For larger maps I see a lot of potential.  If you ever make this available to us, I would be interested in porting the Wolfenstein 3D maps, the Faery Tale Adventure over-world, and maybe some Phantasy Star II, into this.

51

Maps In Progress / Re: Position hacking script for Sonic 1, 2, 3 & Knuckles

« on: May 17, 2012, 09:58:10 am »

I don't mean toggling layers, I mean like reading a tile map or the sprite table then assembling an image or data structure based on that.  Lua supports disk i/o, so you could theoretically dump lots of useful information.

Do you know if there is any more detailed documentation?  Your script uses what appears to be a global table called vdp, but it isn't listed in the lua doc that comes with the emulator.

52

Maps In Progress / Re: Position hacking script for Sonic 1, 2, 3 & Knuckles

« on: May 17, 2012, 08:05:41 am »

If you have access to enough of the Genesis' components via the lua interface, you might be able to dump layers or sprites via scripting instead.  Hell if it's robust enough you might even have lua do stitching for you...

53

Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Texture Skewing Tool

« on: May 15, 2012, 12:13:51 pm »

I submitted a re-evaluation request to Symantec, just waiting on that.  It's really annoying.  I resolved the issue with Google so browsers like Fire Fox and Chrome wouldn't show the warning, but I didn't realize Symantec had their own blacklist until now.

You should be able to ignore the warning Symantec is giving.  Like I said the warning comes from an issue that happened years ago when a PHP script appeared that was doing some bad things.  It was deleted and resolved a long time ago.

*EDIT*

All fixed: http://safeweb.norton.com/report/show?url=garoux.net

54

Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Texture Skewing Tool

« on: May 15, 2012, 07:31:53 am »

I had an issue years ago where some malicious code got onto the server.  I removed the script fairly quickly, but it looks like Symantec doesn't bother to re-check sites that have been black-listed.  Great, makes me wonder what other security tools have done this...

55

Mapping Tips/Guides / Texture Skewing Tool

« on: May 10, 2012, 12:58:38 pm »

I know a few people were interested in the skewed textures from the Wolfenstein (and friends) maps I did.  I wanted to play around with SharpDevelop, so I wrote a small C# program that can generate textures similar to the ones I used for those maps.  Yes, floor textures are still a bit distorted, but everything fits together pixel perfect (which was more important to me).  You'll need .NET 3 to run this.

Program
Example Scene

56

Gaming / Re: Sent in my 3DS to Nintendo for repairs...

« on: April 14, 2012, 10:56:13 am »

There are still cases where things are repaired.  A few weeks before I moved cross-country I discovered there was a class action suit against Samsung about some faulty components in some of their TV models.  The TV I was going to give to my parents was one of those models (I didn't want to box and ship two TVs).  Since Samsung settled the suit, I was eligible to have a tech come out and replace the capacitors at no charge to me.  The guy came to my house with a soldering iron and the replacement parts, took apart the TV in the room it was in, popped out the bad parts, and replaced them in about 15 min.  The TV worked like the day I bought it.

57

Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Degree of transparency.

« on: March 02, 2012, 02:25:39 pm »

To convert 5-bit-per-channel colour to 8-bit-per-channel colour (aka true colour) you should not multiply by 8, as that makes pure white a bit grey. You should use bit operations to repeat the value until it fills 8 bits:

Code: [Select]

r = (r5 << 3) | (r5 >> 2)
and repeat for g, b and a. But a lot of emulators do this wrong.

Not sure what you mean here. As far as I know, the GBA doesn't have a pure white color, as it can only get up to {248,248,248}.

Generally speaking when talking about video hardware the largest value per color channel should represent the most intense value.  So when you translate that over from 5-bit to 8-bit, 31 should translate into 255.  Like Maxim said, the emulator itself probably does the color conversion wrong.

58

Mapping Tips/Guides / Re: Degree of transparency.

« on: March 02, 2012, 08:13:57 am »

If you do decide to attempt this, I recommend working with BMP format, so you don't have to bother with compression.

Just FYI, dealing with PNG in any higher-level language/environment like Java or .NET is pretty easy.  You don't have to write any decompression code yourself to read the files.  Even with lower-level languages like C there are libraries already written.  Several years back I still used BMP because I used MS Paint for a lot of things, but these days there really isn't much reason to use BMP unless you're dealing with some sort of legacy software or system.

59

VGMaps Social Board / Re: Anyone know where I can find a clean version of Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up"?

« on: February 29, 2012, 06:08:56 am »

There are methods to remove the human voice from a piece of audio, but your success rate is going to depend on how the song was mixed, and whether or not the voice sample has gone through any kind of filtering itself (probably has for this song).  You may also lose non-vocal audio, which could ruin the music.  There's also the possibility of looping a section of the song that doesn't have the voice sample.  Prodigy pieces are usually pretty simple looped patterns, and with a little bit of effort you could probably do it with Audacity.

Of course, I don't really agree with editing a song because you found one part of it offensive.  Find another song.  It's not like there aren't millions out there.  I know when I hear a censored version of a song and I'm familiar with the original, it feels weird, fake.  But that's just my opinion.

60

VGMaps Social Board / Re: Did Flip Industries Really Create "Super Kid Icarus"?

« on: January 20, 2012, 07:18:21 am »

Just to clarify I wasn't saying that Flip should in no way credit you, and that you didn't deserve some mention, but you can't really expect it with this type of thing.  It's like sprite sheet.  People rip sprites from commercial games and put a "please give credit to xzy" text on their sheet.  It's nice if you make a Flash game (or something else) with that sheet and credit the person who ripped them, but you can't really expect or demand it.  It's copyrighted material that you don't own.  Call me cynical, but I have just come to expect that this sort of thing happens on the internet.

I'm glad you got that e-mail. I should have probably made my argument more along those lines. 

As far as getting VGMaps' name out there, you really need to work on your SEO (search engine optimization).