Messages

76

General Discussion / Re: Sayonara..

« on: 2006-05-10 17:27:15 »

For one, since this was posted just before the forums even went down, I'd say it's not because of that. Unfortunately that also meant the post instantly fell into obscurity, since no one could even see it for the better part of a week. Bad timing.

77

General Discussion / Re: FFXIII screens

« on: 2006-05-10 17:25:17 »

...after IX?

78

General Discussion / Re: (Death To) Inactive Member's

« on: 2006-05-10 17:24:25 »

On a similar note, we should burn all copies of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, because God knows he's not around to contribute anymore.

79

Troubleshooting / Re: TTG

« on: 2006-05-10 10:47:50 »

Oooh, well apart from that being quite an old quote, I can assure you I'm so much more motivated to work on TTG now that I'm being called a liar. I hear the planned next release was just indefinitely postponed.

Was that your point with this topic?

80

General Discussion / Re: (Death To) Inactive Member's

« on: 2006-05-10 08:48:46 »

There's no point in deleting accounts which has posts, since those posts will then become either authorless, or tied to a disabled user. The first case screws up the topic pages, the second provides no benefit since the user is still there in the database.

81

Announcements and site development / Re: Temporary forums

« on: 2006-05-09 13:48:00 »

why not rename the patch on your server, then set up a redirect to a porn site or similar on the old name? 

82

Announcements and site development / Re: Temporary forums

« on: 2006-05-09 08:47:37 »

Speaking of which, a bird whispered in my ear the other day that Eidos is no longer direct-linking to the chocobo patch hosted here. Quite polite, since they never asked for permission before either distributing the patch (bit of a moot point perhaps, as some recent laws makes it border-line illegal o_O) or more importantly eating up my site bandwidth with hundreds of people downloading directly from me (without ever realizing the "qhimm.com" in the URL contained anything more than file storage, for example, oh, the people who made the patch?).

But I digress. The same bird also claimed that the reason they're no longer linking to the chocobo patch is because they're now linking to AnimeVamp's patch instead. So much for politeness. If this is true, I don't know whether to laugh or to cry. Or are they (AnimeVamp) actually crediting anyone these days? Yes I'm lazy since I don't google for it myself, it's just that I'd feel so dirty afterwards...

83

Announcements and site development / Re: Temporary forums

« on: 2006-05-08 16:24:22 »

Does SMF use similar index (I suppose it does...)?

I'm not sure actually, I think it doesn't. Partly because it has a more feature-rich search than phpBB, and mostly because I can't find a cached search table. It's quite fast though, uses relatively few queries, but I suspect those queries are immensely heavy. Then again, I'm not sure whether it was the intensity of the MySQL queries that forced the shutdown of the site, or merely the sheer number of them (possibly caused by search engines and/or faulty phpBB code). For now I'm assuming search = heavy.

Could the updates be cached and and the index itself modified only once per day, for example? If search is the only thing dependent on it, I don't see a huge problems if it's lagging little bit behind.

Quite possibly, though if SMF doesn't use an index at all, there's going to be some work involved. It might be easier to actually try to structure the forums themselves to make it easier to find things, e.g. a proper FAQ and a real, dedicated, post archive (with proper, indexed search).

War rocket Ajax, Flash Gordon.

*adds to list*


And yes, the smilies are ugly. Dunno what's best though, import the phpBB ones or look for good ones. Perhaps a contest? Suggest the new smiley theme/set, win a ...coconut!

84

Announcements and site development / Re: Temporary forums

« on: 2006-05-08 15:10:28 »

Can SMF cache static pages?

I'm going to assume that the account has way more space than you know what to do with, and there seems to be about 10 thread views for one reply, on average. So, I suppose that if the forum cached the static page created during the first view and then displayed it, that should cut down the SQL-activity quite a bit.

Wordpress certainly benefits from creating static pages and caching them, but it is a blog.

I'm going to have to look into that. As feature-packed as SMF is, it should, otherwise there should be a mod for it somewhere. And yes, I have way much more space than I have MySQL server resources.

Limit searching for members only?

It's very annoying, and guaranteed to generate dead accounts, but it should decrease the server load. I assume that searching is the activity that creates the most load?

And/or limit searches to x times in 10 minutes, for example.

I'd like to avoid blocking guest searching unless really necessary... ironically on phpbb the critical issue was not the searching itself (that is just a quick lookup into a search word index, 1-2 queries), but rather the maintenance of said index, which had to be updated whenever some post content changed. Not horribly performance-intensive (just space-consuming), but it did add 1-2 queries to whatever action you ever took which modified the content.

Oh, and I also expect the blockage of search bots will bring the SQL traffic down by 50% or so. It'll mean less people will find their way here, but hey, at least there'll be a "here" to speak of.

Have you shopped around? There might be cheaper alternatives.

...and your salary is at least 3-4 times greater than it was during the old forums, is it not?

Hush! It's actually about 2.5 times greater, then again my fixed expenses are also 2-3 times greater. And I'd much prefer not having to spend what little remains on additional web hosting just so I can have even more unused space and traffic allowance. Unless more people donate...? (nudge nudge say no more)

Jokes aside, I have not looked around at other hosts yet, mainly because allowed MySQL server load is not really something they state on their pages, and moving just to find out that you'll get shut down again is a bummer. And semi-/dedicated hosting is going to get expensive no matter where you look, and very definitely overkill just to power a medium-sized forum (hey, I guess we're not "small" anymore! yay! and d'oh!).

I also quite like the overall "feature set per dollar" of my current host. That, and I have pre-paid current hosting for about $100 worth.

Awww, spellcheck doesn't work.

Aww, I hadn't checked but I had a feeling it wouldn't... the necessary programs are installed, but possibly they're not setup correctly. I'm going to have to check if I have access

EDIT:
I also hear talk of using AJAX techniques in the newest SMF, to further reduce server load. For those of you who think soccer or cleaning when you hear "AJAX", in this context it refers to page scripts communicating with servers directly and exchanging data without reloading the entire page. For example, one could imagine editing your post (in a popup window, or inline in the topic) and when you're done only your post is reloaded (the rest of the page stays the same). Plenty of browsers support techniques like this, it's helpful to reduce server load, and when you get down to the details it's quite cool to work with as well.

85

Announcements and site development / Temporary forums

« on: 2006-05-08 09:09:06 »

I've switched forum software to SMF, currently running a default install. This will mean there are a whole bunch of new features you can use, but which I strongly recommend against using (moderators can step in if you do). The point here is to try to minimize server stress, because quite frankly it looks like we've gotten a bit too big for my hosting account to handle (MySQL-wise).

Currently all accounts and posts are intact, but I will sometime soon take steps to move older topics to some archive of sorts, again to minimize server stress. Memberlists will also be culled, search bots will be blocked, etc. etc. Also the forums themselves will be customized whenever I have time, to reintroduce things like warnings, etc. Note that all old warnings are still intact, so you have not gotten a clean slate because of the switch.

Also the subject requires some further explanation. These forums are temporary, and if it turns out the server is getting overloaded (again), they can be disabled without warning. Good luck to us all, because the next level of hosting is 3-4 times more expensive than my current hosting plan.

86

Completely Unrelated / Small C++ Test.

« on: 2006-05-01 14:08:09 »

Wah, I got here late. Let me just try the questions without reading the thread first (sorry if this looks terribly stupid if you discussed it to death already).

1. J is undefined, dependant on the compiler implementation. The standard does not specify exactly when the post-increment is performed during the expression evaluation; it may be done immediately after the retrieval of the value, or some time later up until the expression is "finished" (IIRC compilers are allowed to delay it all the way up to the ';', the end of the statement). Therefore, J can be either 60 or 61, depending on when the post-increment is applied.

2. I is 1. Had I initially been set to 1 instead of 0, there would be ambiguity for the same reason as above, though compiler writers would be likely to implement the compiler to apply the post-increment within the numerical expression evaluation, before moving on to the next part of the boolean expression. Why is this significant? I don't know, it's just ugly because of the high risk of ambiguity.

3. J is probably 2, but I think the standard doesn't guarantee that (since again it uses a variable which is also post-incremented within the same expression, and the order of events is not clearly defined). It is likely to work though, due to how boolean expressions are typically handled by compilers.

4. I'd say that the result is 1, for the same reason that (((int *)2) + 1) equals (int *)6. When offsetting pointers with integers, the integers are scaled by the pointer type size; in this case, an int, by 4 (bytes). I haven't tested it on actual compilers, but I imagine the same mechanics apply when subtracting two pointers. One significance of this kind of pointer arithmetic is that array indexing and pointer math becomes one and the same, e.g. array[5] = *(array + 5).

5. Ooh, nice. I'd have to say this is undefined as well. The post-increment can be applied within the right-hand side expression (resulting in I = 2), or it can be applied after the entire assignment expression as a whole has been evaluated (resulting in I = 3).

6. Undefined. Again, the order of evaluation/application is not specified, and additionally I haven't seen any specification of which side of comparison operators are evaluated first. If we make the assumption that the right-hand side is evaluated first, then J is 1. If the left-hand side is evaluated first, J is 0. I don't think the standard dictates either way.

7. Specify according to what? As I said I don't think the standard specifies the order and timing of post-increments, or even the order of evaluation of this kind of expression. Those indexings just become a (I++)*sizeof(structitem) + (++I)*sizeof(anotherstructitem) + offsetof(iInt), and added to the address of g_mMyStructArray, which again there's no specific order of evaluation defined. But fine, here's a best-effort attempt to guess how a current compiler would do it, if it followed the "increment as soon as possible" approach. (I++ == 0) evaluates to true, and I is incremented (1), then I's value (1) is taken, after which it is incremented again (2). g_mMyStructArray is indexed (2), I is incremented (3), I is incremented again (4) and used to index sAnotherStruct. So [2][4] = 1. Note again, however, that the compiler is well within its rights to optimize code by moving around a) where post-increments are applied, and b) the order of evaluation to calculate a final pointer offset. The only case where you can force the evaluation order of the left-hand side here is if you're using overloaded [] operators, forcing a left-to-right evaluation. Even assuming this would be the case though, the compiler is still free to hold up the post-increments until the end of the statement, resulting in

• [1] = 0 (quite a different result). The only assumption I've made here is that the right-hand side of an assignment expression is typically (possibly even definedly) done first.

Now to read through the discussion, I expect some goodies.  

87

Completely Unrelated / Whats your level of experience??

« on: 2006-05-01 12:08:05 »

Ten years. As has been said, one's age tends to be a bit of a limitation when trying to rack up experience.

Personally I'm not as interested in complete projects as I am in specific low-level implementations. I'm fascinated by meta-programming, or other approaches where you use the language to tweak/extend the language itself, in order to make the language even more high-level with you being in complete control of the intermediate abstraction layers.

My personal favorite challenge is to raise the level of abstraction with virtually no performance loss. This can then be utilized in order to speed up and increase effectivity of actual larger-scale projects, but as I said I rarely do those myself. In fact, I rarely even release my work. I simply work for the personal challenge of it, it's not important to spread it or gain any kind of recognition for it when I can instead devote my time to the next challenge.

88

Completely Unrelated / Dance, Monkeys, Dance

« on: 2006-05-01 02:09:29 »

But what is "right" or "good"?

Congratulations, you've discovered ethics, a by now rather well-established disciplinary field of study. I bet if you continue you will discover even more things most of the people around you already know about.

It is simply defined by what God (or w/e) dictates. Something is right because it agrees with what your religion says. Think about it. People dont steal (normally) because they feel they lose soemthing, but out of fear of punishment.

So Christians around the world are against genetic manipulation because "thou shalt not splice"? And atheists always live purely anarchistic, egoistical lives, because no god has told them not to steal? Sorry, but that statement simply does not work. If you have dropped so far that you need your religion to tell you what specific things you as an individual cannot do if you're going to live in a working society, then the foundation is already rotten. "Thou shalt not kill", well D'UH! Would you like for someone else to be allowed to do that to you? No? Well that's your answer then. The golden principle is rather popular in the theories regarding ethics, I might add. I know that at least I make frequent use of it, intentionally, when faced with severe moral dilemmas. It is not far-fetched to imagine it strikes upon a deeper instinctual attitude from our flock-living days.

If anything, it would be more logical to assume that religion borrowed its central moral code from the existing morals (which have emerged naturally in any human society since the animal days), in an attempt to lend it more credibility and more importantly to keep the rules that enable a stable society. Early religious leaders wanted control over the people, so putting themselves as the issuers of the very laws everyone already obeyed obviously provided yet another means of keeping people in submission. But even if they had not made those rules "official", they would still have been followed, and still enforced.

It's a natural effect, in order for any society to grow above a certain level you need for the people to respect each other's and society's needs, and at a further level you'll need to enforce those rules. But these basic rules would still always originally be self-imposed, even unspoken.

And the swim thin, you expect to get wet though, right? You dont jump in expecting to to be dry after hopping out. Same thing applies, people expect that by doing good things and not bad things they will get rewarded and not punished.

While I hear the Lord Messiah was allegedly very capable in the use of effective metaphors, you, my friend, is not. This is quite possibly the worst attempted approach of a metaphor I have ever seen; either you completely misunderstood it, or more likely it was none too comforting so you attempted to re-shape it into something which supported your point. Which is less. Pointless, that is. Namely, the original (most prominent) weakness of your argument is still there: that you widely generalize things you seem to just think up as you go.

Very tired, with much apologizings to any intellectual readers for any spelling errors as a result of this.

89

Q-Gears / INFO?

« on: 2006-05-01 01:11:52 »

Closed, to be deleted shortly. Don't post if you don't know. Let me be clear, this is not a place for frivolous questions and answers, but a place where we hope to get some work done. If it turns out that can't be done with a public forum, it will disappear and there will be no insight into the project. Your choice.

90

General Discussion / MySQL data base issues

« on: 2006-05-01 00:48:21 »

Not unaware, just annoyed by it. It has a tendency of happening between me typing up a post and me trying to submit that post. Most likely server-side load issue, like a badly coded site sharing the same physical server, or such a site suffering a DoS attack. Will look into it, but not much I can do other than make rude and impolite faces behind the maintenance staff's back.

Update: It looks like GoogleBot is crawling the site right now. Possibly connected?

91

Completely Unrelated / Post Your Desktop

« on: 2006-04-21 15:00:52 »

Anyway, the bre... best desktop ever.

*drool* Ehem! *cough* Not work safe! Danger, Will Robinson!

92

Completely Unrelated / Post Your Desktop

« on: 2006-04-19 08:50:56 »

Eh. Most peopel type on the internet like how they would speak, which is different from typing to read.

Eh. This happens to be a place for sensible people who realize that typing is typing, and that the reading process -- a crucial aspect of communication through the written word -- is the same whatever intention the author had while writing it. "Taiping ass yu wud spik is djast stoopid", the equivalent of speaking without moving your lips or with your tounge so far out you spray the listener with lukewarm saliva. It's plain old annoying, and unless that is your intention you'd be well advised to reconsider your habits.

The written language was invented for a reason, namely to ensure successful communication in a limited medium. When speaking you have a whole range of additional means of conveying meaning, such as intonation, facial gestures, hand gestures, body movement or additional sounds. None of these apply when your entire message is condensed into a few characters on a computer screen, which is why you will write proper goddamn English if you expect someone to even understand you, much less care about anything you say.

P.S. Only two spelling errors in as many lines. Quite impressive, and yet so far still to go.

93

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Introducing Q-Gears

« on: 2006-04-19 07:38:13 »

In case anyone missed it, I too am in favor of closed source. Or at least keeping the sensitive parts closed source. We could maybe have some "modules" like the field rendering engine and the game mechanics as open source, but I'm definitely thinking we should keep the actual "core" closed. More specifically, enough of the important code so that someone can't just take all of the open source code, write a tiny .cpp with a main() function and then have their own "FF7 engine".

Since we're already talking about legality here, I have one question:

If an engine is able to run custom content, too, is it then "more illegal" than an engine that runs only the original game content?

If yes, then why?

In my non-lawyer opinion, I'm suggesting that it is probably "more illegal", but it is definitely more offensive. It means that not only are we altering the presentation (new engine), but also the content. Even if we do not do any content modification ourselves, the fact that we made it a whole lot easier will probably make us a hotter target.

Say what you want, but even with the current state of FF7 hacking going on here, it is far from easy to do any form of large-scale modification of FF7 that actually alters its "essence" to any significant degree (except perhaps the translation projects). The new engine, if it allows (or is easy to modify to allow) custom data, will make it easy. This is problematic, since Square-Enix won't like if someone turned one of their best-selling games ever into a mod-able game, without their permission.

And no, I seriously doubt we would get permission to do this if we asked. To them, we say we're making an application that can run FF7 like the original .exe, but are they supposed to simply trust us on that? They won't accept that someone else's copyrighted engine claims to run their game, and they won't accept any attempt to circumvent this, such as us granting them ownership, since they certainly won't accept responsibility for it either.

Our best shot is probably to use every means to try and stay below the provocation radar, and maybe we'll actually get somewhere before the proverbial fecal matter collides with the equally proverbial oscillatory ventilation device.

And now that I've done so much to lower everyone's morale on this, let me clarify that I to am very much in favor of the project, and I'll do my best to help out where I can. I put forth my above points simply because I don't want the project to be found out, found offensive and then found dead because we did it in too provocative a fashion.

94

Completely Unrelated / Post Your Desktop

« on: 2006-04-18 14:27:21 »

It's the spotted dog of hell! :erm:

Run away! Run away!

Could've sworn I've seen that ...thing somewhere in Doom 3.

95

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Introducing Q-Gears

« on: 2006-04-18 13:22:38 »

My own humble opinion on this matter is that anyone claiming a project like this is perfectly legal is either desillusioned by wishful thinking or is plain old naïve. Q-Gears (*giggle*) will use copyrighted content, its name and application will be closely interlinked with a trademarked product, and it will encourage additional intellectual property violations by indirectly granting access to the game content (the file format code will let anyone extract data and use it for any purpose = encourages dilution).

This is not "perfectly legal", it is not even "relatively safe". If it gets shut down it won't be in the US Supreme Court; it will get slammed out of existence as soon as someone at Square-Enix becomes concerned enough to pick up the phone and send out a single sheet of paper labelled "Cease or Desist". Unless someone here is secretly rich and can fund a team of lawyers for a case where there's a considerable risk of losing anyway, neither the spirit nor the letter of the law is going to be any deciding factor for us.

The project is risky even if we're incredibly strict and perfectly reproduce the original game, and it gets even riskier for every single improvement we try to make (technical or otherwise). And here we are, at the very start of the planning of the project, and -- this never fails -- people are already asking "what kind of custom data will we be able to put into the game?".

The answer is none at all.

That being my two cents. I'm not too sure about the whole open source idea for a project like this, as it very much raises the risks of being shut down before we ever get anywhere, but if everyone involved has the same cautious goal in mind and won't strive beyond that, there's a good chance that the project will keep going long enough for us at least to see some very fulfilling results.

96

Archive / Possible downtime [April Fools]

« on: 2006-04-03 09:50:48 »

What do you excatly work on? Nothing too specific (ad blocking, interface, ect)

Nothing too specific, no. And very little of my work makes into the desktop browser, as I deal more with adapting older versions of the browser to run on more limited platforms.

97

Archive / Possible downtime [April Fools]

« on: 2006-04-02 18:42:15 »

I'm a software developer at Opera Software, more specifically working with one of the versions of the Opera web browser for handheld devices. More than that I won't divulge, as I'm not 100% sure yet of what I'm allowed to divulge.

98

Archive / Possible downtime [April Fools]

« on: 2006-04-02 16:37:43 »

Well there's no Japanese friend (obviously, given the name) and my employer isn't hassling me about anything, apart from expecting me to work in the weekdays (the nerve!). If they were really anal they probably could if they wanted to (potential conflict of interest with my contract and NDA, that much is true), but they're not so they don't. Or they don't know exactly what we do here. Hush, don't tell them!

99

Scripting and Reverse Engineering / Engine fantasy.

« on: 2006-04-02 13:28:50 »

@ C vs. C++: Why not a mix then? I've found that C++ is most useful at the low levels of programming. Smart types/objects, templates, containers, all the "base" code that you write once and then just use, greatly simplifying the mundane tasks. That having been said, using C++ at the higher levels of programming can be bothersome and present unnecessary problems, unless you have a very clear code design document from the start (which I believe a project like this won't have, since so much of the wanted functionality is ...well, yet unknown). Therefore, you could have a bunch of C++ people writing the "tools" which the C people can then use without too much adjustment (learning to write "object.method()" instead of "function(objectptr)" is the easy part).

Just my two cents, since IMHO where C++ really shines is being able to make your code more abstract, more functionality and less form, and being able to do so at neglible or no performance loss.

100

Archive / Possible downtime [April Fools]

« on: 2006-04-01 09:44:31 »

It seems my current employer (a software company wishing to remain undisclosed) is having some issues with me maintaining and being involved in a reverse-engineering community, as it possibly violates my employment contract and/or NDA by putting me in a situation of conflicting interests regarding company policy and trade secrets. I am currently in negotiations trying to convince them there is no such conflict, but since legalese is not my primary language the outlook is not 100% optimistic.

Therefore you should all be aware there's a risk I might have to step down as administrator of this site and refrain from actively participating in the community, as the sad, financial motivated truth is that my job takes priority. However, this does not mean this site will end, as I've been talking with one of my Japanese friends about letting him take over as maintainer of Qhimm.com -- as a backup in case I need to back away on short notice. He will keep a purely passive role and not interfere directly with the current way of things; the other administrators and moderators of the forums will remain as usual. There shouldn't be any real problems, but if he needs to formally take over there might be a short downtime as the site is transferred to his account.

If you need to get a hold of him for site business (like custom ranks etc.) or just welcoming him aboard, you can reach him at [email protected].

EDIT: Yes, it's that time of year again. April Fools, though of course I wouldn't expect any of the regulars of this place to fall for such an easy one.