New version of this map, a remake of hue from battlefield vietnam, the port being made originally from a friend of mine (fellow mapper Bry).

Call of Duty: Source

Moddb.com is a website for team of modders to promote their mods. This is the place I have been looking at for a mod of the HL2 engine geared toward a world I am friendly with: the CoD serie and the MoH serie. I have been playing MoH since the Playstation release and it is an all time favourite when it comes to FPS with a WWII theme. I have since been playing vCoD (vanilla CoD), the expansion pack for it UO, CoD2 and CoD4. I had a go at CoD3 on XBox, but I was less than impressed. I have tried a few FPS on the side, but I consistently came back to this serie for the fun I have with it, even with the last instalment I played (CoD4) which changes the theme to a modern area (IE the weaponry was suddenly more forgiving with all those full automatic assault riffle and other added features).

Like so many others in the community I have been less and less happy with the development of the franchise (the first being run by EA, and the second by Activision). So many things have been left out. So many things are being implemented that should be left out. But I have no access to the code and modding for the CoD serie means that every year or so the current code base has to be ported to which ever new game is being released, as Activision is seeing this as a product to be pushed every 12 months. I won't even look at the modding situation in the MoH serie as EA has not only a bad reputation of after release management, but proved it many times over.

So I have decided to have a look for myself at the possibility to port MoH and early CoD games into an environment that is a bit more stable. The choice of the Source Engine is quite obvious for someone like me: in between a gamer only and solely a developer. I've heard so many things about the Source Engine that I have to see for myself. The good point about this engine is that it is modding friendly: you have access to the source code, it is fully in C++ and it is related to the Quake engine. I don't have to remind anyone that the MoH/CoD series have been developed from a modified version of the quake3 engine. So I hope I am not making any mistakes assuming that it'll be easier to navigate through that code than, let say, the UT3 one. And being a engine still in use for recent games (L4D being the latest) there is good hope that the support will be far greater, even if it is from the community.

So I've spend a day configuring my dev machine to have the following: a working installation of HL2, steam, HL2DM, VS2008, SVN to be able to go through the different explanation of the code I could find online. I am hoping to be able to make some progress.

Daft Music Industry and Greedy Pigs

Sorry for the Harsh title, but I had to put it down.

In an on going terror campaign from the music industry upon its consumers, many people and a lot more companies have felt down as casualties because of the stupidity of this industry to not to be able to embrace the advent of the new technologies brought by the internet. This is so true in the light of the most recent event (December 2008) when the RIAA officially declared not being interested any more at bullying internet user suspected of SHARING music files.

An article published back in 2002 (R.I.P. Audiogalaxy) retrace the life and death of an internet music provider that had been forced to close down because of the same inability or the RIAA's members to change at the same pace as the technology. Here is an excerpt that is very interesting:

"[...] As most people with a clue realize, it is extremely hard to filter digital media. Unless you have a person sitting there listening to an mp3, you have no way of knowing that an mp3 titled "unsigned band - lame song.mp3" is actually nsync's latest hit. At first we had simple text matching, but users are obviously smart enough to figure out how to rename files in ways that make sense only to humans. After increasing pressure from the RIAA, we actually went to an extremely complex system based on a checksum digest of the first megabyte of an mp3.[...]"

This is fact quite impressive to read that upon receiving almost inconsistent batch of data from the different copyright holders to compare with the files transferred on the network, those guys actually manage to do anything at all. But the solution is even more impressive. A more logical solution would have been to create a unique master database for every single track existing and to have a unique identifier per track based on the actual sound. This is something that is implemented right now (Feb 2009) in many software solution and available for free for personal usage and possibly under some sort of commercial licensing scheme if someone needs.

I surely hope the people behind those investment decision in the music industry for the past ten years are getting fired as it is a similar case of public pressure as it did happened for the printing industry with Gutenberg.

mp_wroclaw

Newest project. It all started with some personal history interest about the eastern part of Germany, namely a city previously named Breslau. Since then it became part of Poland and is now a very pleasant town. Anyway, the main interest was some of the building that survived the madness of both armies in 1944/1945 and the effort put into the reconstruction and preservation of the historical center by the Pols. But today it is the Cover Market (Hala Targowa) that attracted my attention. What started as a simple personal challenge to see whether I could make a "CoD" version of this real life building is slowly but surely moving toward a full map in its own right. Check the screenshots:

mp_dbridge

The project has come to a stall. Anyway I have been plenty busy and there is only 3 buildings to finish before the map can be made playable. Here are the latest screenshots: You can see that there is an attempt to make some custom signs for this building as well as making some prefabs for canopies and fridges. NOTE: those screenshot have been taken while the map was being developed and may not represent the final "product".

mp_destroyed_bridge

I have started a new project, for CoD4 this time. It is based on the layout of the mp_brest of MoH:AA. It is far from finished, but the feel I am giving to this map is very specific. The aim is to have a city center, middle eastern place, where the war has left its mark. I have plenty of screenshot on my profil on xfire: touristtam.

None of the building is definitive and you certainly can't seen the connection right now between the name and the map. :p

Random generator class

I was involved into a project over the winter where we didn't have any data to fead the system, even though we had the format (or at least a fairly clear idea of it) in which each data file should be. So I wrote a class to randomize the data for creating several different .dat files. I did a bit of digging at the time, and even though I can't recall where I found the list I've used into the Enum, they were at that time the most popular one in the UK. I've had a lot of fun working my head around this, using Enum for the first time!


using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

namespace MonkeyScience
{
class WriteRandomBrokerToFile
{
const string fileName = "members.dat";
const int panelIDStart = 100001;
const int firmIDStart = 1001;
const int firmIDEnd = 1030;
const int firstNameRandomizedMin = 1;
const int firstNameRandomizedMax = 50;
const int lastNameRandomizedMin = 1;
const int lastNameRandomizedMax = 100;
const int telMin = 0;
const int telMax = 9;
const int companyMin = 1;
const int companyMax = 20;
const int wayMin = 1;
const int wayMax = 6;

enum firstNameEnum
{
Jack = 1, Thomas, James, Joshua, Daniel, Harry, Samuel, Joseph, Matthew, Callum,
Luke, William, Lewis, Oliver, Ryan, Benjamin, George, Liam, Jordan, Adam,
Alexander, Jake, Connor, Cameron, Nathan, Kieran, Mohammed, Jamie, Jacob,
Michael, Ben, Ethan, Charlie, Bradley, Brandon, Aaron, Max, Dylan, Kyle, Reece,
Robert, Christopher, David, Edward, Charles, Owen, Louis, Alex, Joe, Rhys
};

enum lastNameEnum
{
Smith = 1, Brown, Wilson, Thomson, Robertson, Campbell, Stewart, Anderson,
MacDonald, Scott, Reid, Murray, Taylor, Clark, Mitchell, Ross, Walker, Paterson,
Young, Watson, Morrison, Miller, Fraser, Davidson, Gray, McDonald, Henderson,
Johnston, Hamilton, Graham, Kerr, Simpson, Martin, Ferguson, Cameron, Duncan,
Hunter, Kelly, Bell, Grant, MacKenzie, MacKay, Allan, Black, MacLeod, McLean,
Russell, Gibson, Wallace, Gordon, Marshall, Stevenson, Wood, Sutherland, Craig,
Wright, McKenzie, Kennedy, Jones, Burns, White, Muir, Murphy, Johnstone, Hughes,
Watt, McMillan, Mcintosh, Milne, Munro, Ritchie, Dickson, Bruce, King, Crawford,
Docherty, Millar, Cunningham, Sinclair, Williamson, Hill, McGregor, McKay, Boyle,
Shaw, Fleming, Moore, Christie, Douglas, Donaldson, McAndrews, MacLean, Forbes,
Mcintyre, Findlay, Jamieson, Aitken, Reilly, Thompson, Hay
};

enum companyNameEnum
{
KPMG = 1, BarchesterHealthcare, Nationwide, RBS,
MorganStanley, CarphoneWarehouse, Deloitte, AmEx,
Mothercare, Cadbury, Atkins, ErnstYoung, Vodafone,
PricewaterhouseCoopers, ThomasCook, DeutscheBank,
GalaBingo, LeonardCheshire, BradfordCouncil, Barclays
};

enum wayEnum
{
Street = 1, Road, Gate, Avenue, Lane, Terrace
};

enum alphaEnum
{
A = 1, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M,
N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z
};

enum districtEnum
{
North = 1, East, South, West
};

string foreName = string.Empty;
string lastName = string.Empty;
string oldForeName = string.Empty;
string oldLastName = string.Empty;
string telNumber = string.Empty;
string companyName = string.Empty;
string postCode = string.Empty;
string flatNnumber = string.Empty;
string buildingNumber = string.Empty;
string buildingName = string.Empty;
string street = string.Empty;
string district = string.Empty;
string town = string.Empty;
string county = string.Empty;

Random ran = new Random();

public void Write()
{
string ret = null;
Random ram = new Random();
int panelID = panelIDStart;

StreamWriter sWriter = new StreamWriter(fileName);

for (int firmID = firmIDStart; firmID < firmIDEnd + 1; firmID++)
{
for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
{
if (foreName == string.Empty || foreName == oldForeName)
{
foreName = this.GetRandomFirstName();
if (lastName == string.Empty || lastName == oldLastName)
{
lastName = this.GetRandomLastName();
ret += string.Format("{0}\t{1}\t{2}\t{3}\t{4}\t{5}\t{6}\r\n",
panelID,
firmID,
foreName,
lastName,
this.GetRandomEmailAddress(foreName, lastName),
this.GetRandomTelNumber(),
this.GetRandomAddress());
panelID++;
oldLastName = lastName;
}
foreName = oldForeName;
}

}
}
sWriter.WriteLine(ret);
Console.WriteLine(ret);
sWriter.Close();
}

private string GetRandomEmailAddress(string foreName, string lastName)
{
companyName = this.GetRandomCompanyName();
string emailAddress = string.Format("{0}.{1}@{2}.com",
foreName,
lastName,
this.GetRandomCompanyName());
return emailAddress;
}

private string GetRandomTelNumber()
{
return telNumber = string.Format("0131 {0}{1}{2} {3}{4}{5}{6}",
ran.Next(telMin, telMax),
ran.Next(telMin, telMax),
ran.Next(telMin, telMax),
ran.Next(telMin, telMax),
ran.Next(telMin, telMax),
ran.Next(telMin, telMax),
ran.Next(telMin, telMax));
}

public string GetRandomFirstName()
{
string name;
return name = Enum.GetName(typeof(firstNameEnum), ran.Next(firstNameRandomizedMin, firstNameRandomizedMax));
}

public string GetRandomLastName()
{
string name;
return name = Enum.GetName(typeof(lastNameEnum), ran.Next(lastNameRandomizedMin, lastNameRandomizedMax));
}

public string GetRandomCompanyName()
{
string name;
return name = Enum.GetName(typeof(companyNameEnum), ran.Next(companyMin, companyMax));
}

public string GetRandomAddress()
{
string name;
return name = string.Format("SR{0} {1}{2}{3}\t{4}\t{5}\tWeasel House\tWeasel {6}\t{7}\tWeaseltown\tWeaselshire",
ran.Next(1, 9),
ran.Next(1, 50),
Enum.GetName(typeof(alphaEnum), ran.Next(1, 26)),
Enum.GetName(typeof(alphaEnum), ran.Next(1, 26)),
ran.Next(1, 15),
ran.Next(1, 9),
Enum.GetName(typeof(wayEnum), ran.Next(wayMin, wayMax)),
Enum.GetName(typeof(districtEnum), ran.Next(1, 4)));
}
}
}


I am looking forward to improve this pet project (creating random list of comma separated item) by taking the Enums out of the code and putting them into on or more xml files.

Tam