RenEvo

Pretty

Dante — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:48:17 GMT

Just a random thought, haven't posted in a while.

I am still alive, one more house warming party to go, them I am free and clear to start my regular life (well, as regular as it gets with a new house) again.

Hope everyone is groovy!

Home Sweet Home

Dante — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:21:19 GMT

So, in case some of you did not know, or read any previous blogs, I am in the final process of purchasing a new house and should be getting the keys on Wednesday to move in!

Here is a picture of my new home, in Orange California.

So, needless to say, I do have my Sprint Card for my laptop, but I may be offline for a few days during the move.

Get Your Wiisis On!

vloktboky — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 19:41:00 GMT

The wait is finally over! Today, RenEvo Software & Designs is proud to present a project that had started out half a year ago as a simple question: could the Wii Remote be used by a PC modding community? We think Wiisis has answered that question. And now, we would like to offer you the opportunity to see for yourself. And for our modding friends, we have a special gift for you as well!

Wiisis

Download: Wiisis 1.2

Available now as a full-featured C++ modification for Crysis, Wiisis will allow you to explore the fun world of Crysis using your Nintendo Wii Remote and Nunchuk controllers. All of the controls in the game have been mapped to your Wii Remote and Nunchuk through buttons and forms of motion. Everything from movement and aiming, to Nano Suit controls and menus, to vehicles including tanks and VTOLs, are fully supported.

Wiisis supports many different gesture controls, including:

Jumping by flicking your Wii Nunchuk up
Crouch by tilting your Wii Nunchuk down or prone by tilting it even further.
Punch or zoom in with your weapon by motioning your Wii Remote forward
Pick up objects by lifting your Wii Remote up
Throw a grenade by lobbing your Wii Remote over your head

Wiisis supports many other unique features, including use of the Wii Sensor Bar (not required) for higher-precision aiming, utilization of the remote's rumble ability, and extra game features such as Retain View Mode for aim assistance.

With Wiisis, you can experience Crysis in a whole new way.

Note: In order to play Wiisis with your Nintendo Wii Remote and Nunchuk, you will need to have a Bluetooth receiver installed on your computer with an HID profile created for the Remote.

WRLib C++ API

Download: WRLib API 1.0

As a special treat to the wonderful Crysis modding community, we have prepared for you a C++ API complete with documentation, tutorials and a tool which you can use to bring the Nintendo Wii Remote into your own Crysis modification!

This API can be compiled into a custom CryGame.dll, allowing you to receive input from up to four (4) connected Wii Remotes. You can operate the remote’s rumble and LED lights, receive buffered button input, handle motion control, and receive IR input data easily using the Wii Remote Library (WRLib) class set! A complete feature set is included in the API. This library is well documented with a comprehensive tutorial that will guide you through setting up and using the library in your own mod.

Also included is the Wii Remote Sandbox tool. This handy tool will allow you to play around with your Wii Remote to test its many features. It also has a real-time motion chart for the Wii Remote and Nunchuk’s accelerometer to help you plan out gesture controls!

But that’s not all! We have also included for you the source code for Wiisis as an aid for getting a Wii Remote in your own Crysis modification. This source code, along with the library itself, is released under the ZLib license, which is included in the download. Even if you don’t plan on using WRLib in your own project, you may find this code to be a handy learning tool for the Crysis Mod C++ code.

Special Thanks

RenEvo Software & Designs would like to give special thanks to Crytek for allowing them the honor of being one of the exclusive teams to receive the Pre-SDK. Without this, we would not have been able to complete Wiisis and deliver it so soon to this game’s wonderful community!

And of course, we would like to thank the Crysis Modding Community and the Crymod Modding Portal for their continuous support and unquestionable drive to be the best. The amount of amazing and unique content that has been born in such a short period of time has been a great inspiration to us.

Related Links:

Download – Wiisis 1.2

Download – WRLib C++ API 1.0

Link – Wiisis Website

Link – Wiisis ModDB

Link – Wiisis Support Forum

Link – WRLib C++ API Support Forum

Happy Wii-ing from us to you! And please, do make sure that wrist strap is on tight and the area around you is cleared before playing. We don’t want any “remotes through monitor” pictures coming in. ;)

(And now if you’ll excuse us, it’s Super Smash Brothers Brawl time!)

- RenEvo Software & Designs Team

Wiisis Release Date Set!

vloktboky — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 00:55:00 GMT

RenEvo Software & Designs is happy to announce that Wiisis will be available for download on March 9th, 2008, just a few days away! Be sure to check back here at the RenEvo website or the Wiisis website at some point during that day to download your copy of Wiisis!

Also available on the same day: something extra special. But we're not revealing what until it is released!

Edit: Mod is now released.

Reborn Infantry Beta

Dante — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:19:00 GMT

The day everyone has been waiting for has arrived.

RenEvo Software & Designs would like to announce that the Command & Conquer Reborn: Infantry Beta v.0.8.0.0 is now officially ready for download and into Public Beta!

Current Supported Features:

C&C Multiplayer Mode
14 GDI Characters
GDI Ion Cannon Beacons
14 Nod Characters
Nod Cluster Missle Beacons
3 Fully Light Mapped Infantry Maps
LAN Server Support
*WOL Server Support
Level Editor Included
All 3 maps from the release .lvl files are included

Download Links

More Mirrors Coming Soon

Bug Reports
Screen Shots
Server Discussion

*At the time of writing, WOL still requires a cd-key, this will change in the future, please see the Beta Server Support Forum for more details.
** Reborn Testers & Staff please un-install any previous versions of this software before installing the final build.

Wiisis Preview Video

vloktboky — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:12:00 GMT

(Yes, it’s real, and it’s spectacular.)

Progress Report

It has been quite some time since we last clued you in on the progress of Wiisis. This has mostly been due to the fact that, well… it’s sort of done. It’s been, like… done for awhile now. In fact, I’m honestly getting sick of seeing it on my desktop.

So why haven’t we released it? As we have stated previously, RenEvo Software & Designs is under a Non-Discloser Agreement with Crytek GmbH as one of the modification teams that received the pre-SDK. This SDK has allowed us to reach the 99% completion point on the modification. Until our NDA is lifted (which will occur at the same time the public SDK is released), Wiisis cannot move into the 100% completion point and be released. Wiisis must be built on and tested with the public SDK to ensure the integrity of the mod and its corresponding API is maintained with the retail version of Crysis, Sandbox 2 and the SDK’s contents. As soon as the Public SDK is made available by Crytek and RenEvo Software & Designs’ NDA is lifted, we will put all effort into getting Wiisis released in its entirety shortly thereafter.

Previously, we released a video to demonstrate Wiisis as best as we could. It’s rather hard to show a mod that revolves around playing with the Nintendo Wii Remote when you do not have a digital camera or camcorder to record one physically playing the mod with the controller. (Doh!) So we opted for the next best thing: bootlegging! And it definitely succeeded in getting the word out. The only problem was: nobody really believed it was real. (Our bad.)

Well this just simply will not do! And so after finally getting a little extra free time, I have crafted for you a new 13 minute video composed entirely of myself actually playing the darn thing. If anyone still wants to insist it is a fake … well, I suppose the only thing I can really do then is just cry. I really don’t think anyone wants to see me cry. So I beg of you, please believe it is real for all of our sakes.

Wiisis Preview Video

And so, without further a due, I present to you the Wiisis Preview Video! You will find that the video is broken down into multiple chapters, each which details a particular set of controls. Each chapter will witness me playing the mod while I narrate what is going on. If you have any questions or comments on the video or the mod, as always, please direct them to our Wiisis Support Forum.

Click here to view the video.

In addition, you can also view each chapter individually from our Stage6 Channel.

What’s Next?

I don’t plan on making another video for Wiisis in the future, because quite frankly, with the SDK not too far away, the mod will be released to the public and that will be that. So the only thing I have to say for what is “next” is the release of the mod! Just keep your eye out on the Wiisis site for the announcement when it comes.

And don’t forget, with the release of Wiisis will also come the Wii Remote API and the source code for the mod, so you can have a valid resource for C++ coding with the Crysis SDK and the ability to integrate the Wii Remote into your own Crysis modification!

Weekend Updates

Dante — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:54:57 GMT

Well, just to post a quick update.

Our bid got accepted for the house we want to buy! We start Escrow tomorrow morning and should close Escrow around the 10th of March.

Also, this weekend I worked on the Reborn Installer a bit, it looks like we just need to do some internal testing on the install, then move it to the beta testers, then we can release, which finally will hit the planned schedule for the mod. The current installer is for the game, editor, and WOL components, for the infantry beta I will probably just include the FDS with the game and not standalone, although it will be a bit bigger, but not a huge amount. Once we release the vehicle beta, I will definitely tear down the always.dat and .mix files to create a smaller FDS. Right now though the install media is about 220mb, which isn't bad, although it seems very large to me, so I need to find out why (did someone sneak in a crap load of TGA files, that's my guess, or huge MP3 files).

Anyway, will keep everyone updated.

Update about me

Dante — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:57:29 GMT

Just to let everyone know, I am going through the process of buying a house right now, so my focus is really on making that process as smooth as possible right now. If you need to contact me, I am checking my messages daily and will respond, but it might be a few.

Reborn is still on track, and looking good to make our goal, Dead Six is celebrating some very big news that I will be sharing soon, Wiisis is also doing very well with some accuracy updates that make it very precise.

Have a good weekend!

Web 2.0 Text - The Easy Way

Dante — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:31:11 GMT

This tutorial will quickly outline the way to make a "Web 2.0" styled header image with minimal effort.

What you need:

Photoshop CS3 (CS2 may work, not sure, been a while since I have used it)

Open up Photoshop, and create a new document with the following settings:

Next, add a black background just so you can get your bearings, and set the transparency to about 50%, this will keep the grid in the background, but tame it down quite a bit to make the top layers a bit more visible.

Now, using the text tool, click anywhere and type in "Web 2.0 Logo". I use white in this tutorial since I can create an overlay later to change the color. For your font, set it to Segoe UI (or your other favorite font) and a size of 48. Now resize the text area so that your text is snuggly inside of it, this allows you to better position it later.

Your logo should looks something like this now:

Now comes the fun part, lets duplicate the text layer, name it "Reflection", select the Move tool, click on "Show Transform Controls" and simply drag the top of the middle gizmo down until you get a semitry that you like, see the bottom image for how I chose to lay it out. This sets up your "flat area", so the angle you use will force the eye to see the reflection at that angle. The longer the text is in the "reflection" side, the larger the slant will appear to your eyes for the reflected surface.

Next we are going to add a layer mask to our reflection layer, click on the Square with the Circle in it on the Layers toolbox as highlighted below:

By default, the layer will have 100% opacity (i.e. solid white).

Select the layer mask on the Reflection layer to select it, choose the Gradient tool, press "D" on your keyboard to reset your colors. We want to select the Gradient brush that is white on the left, and black on the left.

Now, using the gradient tool on the layer mask (you selected it right?), put your mouse cursur just below the loop in the upside down G, and drag the mouse downward while holding the right mouse button and the SHIFT key (this makes it a straight line), you want to drag it until about 3/4 of the way through the upside down text. Once you release the mouse, it should look something like this:

Now, lets go over what type of surface we want to "reflect" on. Generally most reflective surfaces are not perfect copies, right now, ours is. There are some small adjustments that we can do, as well as some blending properties we can set that will give it a better look, without killing the actual text that is in the reflection, making it easier to update and change the colors as we please.

So that we can get a better look at our reflection, lets change the background layer's opacity back to 100%.

Not the most impressive logo yet.

Move the reflection layer below the logo layer, go to the blending options for the Reflection layer, and add an outer glow with the following settings:

This will now give us a Gaussian blur look without actually rasterizing our reflection layer.

And finally, change the opacity of the reflection layer to 50%, this will tone it down and blend it into the background a bit better. Now your image should look a bit like this:

That looks much better, but our logo is still way too high, lets move the reflection layer down a bit, so that it doesn't look like it is sitting on the surface, a good rule of thumb is to not cross the under case letters too far, else it will look like the letters are going "through" the bottom. After adjusting the height of the reflection, lock the two layers together so when you move one, you aren't separating them.

So there we have it, a quick to update Web 2.0 Graphic that didn't take a lot of fancy tricks.

With some small work to the background, adding some foreground text and a quick logo, you get a nice appearance to the graphic.

Download the PSD

Loading Config Files from non-Default Locations

Dante — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:33:00 GMT

I have spent a good deal of my time trying to figure out how to load a *.config file that is compatable with the System.Configuration.Configuration object. Over the years I have done several "fake" .config files, which where nothing more then glorified structured xml files that I manually load. I have also even created fake 0 byte files so I could load the .config using the OpenExeConfiguration.

Until recently, this has been a viable solution, and since these files where mostly hidden by ClickOnce installations and storing them in the Application Data file structure. Now though, I got a hair up my butt to do it correctly.

Enter the System.Configuration.ExeConfigurationFileMap class. This lets you specify an exe config file name, and allows you to load it up at runtime without having a valid executable to load off of. So now, I can save logged in specific users along with windows users configuration files.

For example, my goal was to do the following:
Allow the user to setup connections and save them to the Application Data\Product\ folder under their user account.
After authenticating with the server, I want to store per-logged in user settings.

Just short of using datasets and/or serialized objects, I was using folders to seperate between the different logged in users.

Now, to the solution:

   1:  Imports System.Configuration

2:

   3:  Public Class LocalConfiguration

4:

   5:      Public Shared Function GetConfig(ByVal Path As String) As Configuration

   6:          Dim retVal As Configuration = Nothing

7:

   8:          Dim configFileMap As New ExeConfigurationFileMap()

   9:          configFileMap.ExeConfigFilename = Path

10:

  11:          retVal = ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration(configFileMap, ConfigurationUserLevel.None)

12:

  13:          Return retVal

  14:      End Function

15:

  16:  End Class

That is it, now you can simply load a valid application config file and get a System.Configuration.Configuration object back. All it takes is the following line of code:

   1:          Dim config As Configuration = LocalConfiguration.GetConfig("./data/user.config")

The beuty is, the file doesn't even have to exist. When you save the config, it will automatically create it if it doesn't exist.

The next step, which turned out to be a bit tricky, was actually saving stuff, like appSettings, to the file, specifically if they didn't exist to begin with.

   1:      Private Sub LoadSettings()

   2:          Dim config As Configuration = LocalConfiguration.GetConfig("./data/user.config")

   3:          Dim newSection As AppSettingsSection = Nothing

4:

   5:          If config.Sections("MySettings") Is Nothing Then

   6:              newSection = New AppSettingsSection()

   7:              newSection.SectionInformation.AllowExeDefinition = ConfigurationAllowExeDefinition.MachineToLocalUser

   8:              config.Sections.Add("MySettings", newSection)

   9:          Else

  10:              newSection = config.Sections("MySettings")

  11:          End If

12:

  13:          If newSection.Settings("Text") Is Nothing Then

  14:              newSection.Settings.Add("Text", Me.Text)

  15:          End If

16:

  17:          Me.Text = newSection.Settings("Text").Value

18:

  19:          config.Save(ConfigurationSaveMode.Minimal)

20:

  21:      End Sub

On line 2 I call the method from the first example to get the configuration object, next I define an AppSettingsSection which is a key/value pair collection that is used in the <appSettings> in normal .config files. Depeding on whether the section exists or not in the current file I either set the newSection to the existing reference, or create a new one, set the SectionInformation to Allow Machine to Local User, then work with the keys as normal.

Finally, I save the config file, just incase it didn't exist before I read it into the application.

Once saved, the user.config looks like this:

   1:  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

   2:  <configuration>

   3:      <configSections>

   4:          <section name="MySettings" type="System.Configuration.AppSettingsSection, System.Configuration, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" allowExeDefinition="MachineToLocalUser" />

   5:      </configSections>

   6:      <MySettings>

   7:          <add key="Text" value="My Application" />

   8:      </MySettings>

   9:  </configuration>

As you can see, it created a new config section named "MySettings" using the System.Configuration.AppSettingsSection.

Pretty simple once you get the hang of it, and I could very easily see a CAB based, or plugin based application really taking advantage of loading different config sections per module/plugin, and reading other settings from other modules/plugins.

In the next discovery, I will be trying to figure out how to merge multiple configurations into a single config file to ease the reading of multi-configs.

Update to the Build Automation

Dante — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:52:26 GMT

Well, after a few months working on this off and on, I thought I would share the current status of our operations.

First and foremost, we got Cruise Control up and running, this made a huge step forward with the process, and it is open source, so that allowed me to create a custom UI for it to run. This resulted in us having a custom application that runs very similarly to the Cruise Control Tray Application (CCTray), except I implemented grouping by categories, displaying the categories, as well as auto-discovery of projects, rather then having to set them up.

Additionally, because we don't need everyone in our department building every piece of software all the time, I created a pseudo permission system that is bound into an xml file, like the example below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<security>
<add user="tanderson" viewConfig="true" projects="*" />
<add user="jsmith" viewConfig="false" projects="RecipeEditor_VB6;Rocket;QReports;" />
</security>

As you can see, it is a very simplistic permissions system, the user is the currently logged in computer user, viewConfig is a small permission to see if they can view the servers ccnet.config, and the projects are a semi-colon separated list of the names of the projects they can see status of, or for ease of people like me, an asterisk for all projects.

Below is a screen shot of the current version of the software.

I have made quite a bit of headway with the system in getting more and more projects completed and into the daily build. The "DailyBuild" is the only project that is built nightly, and it builds everyone of the other projects.

The actual process of creating all of this mayhem was a few steps.

Creating an Environment

The first thing I had to do, was get an environment going that was as clean as possible to do the builds, this is a remote connection only off the domain standalone box that only myself and the VP of software development have access to. The computer is loaded with Server 2003 Standard Edition, SQL 2000, SQL 2005, Visual Basic 6, VS 2003, VS 2005, and RedGate toolkit.

Starting the batches

When someone told me I would do a crap load of batch files as a quick solution to get a process done, I would have laughed at them, but in this case, it seemed to be the quickest route to the finish line. In total for what you see above, I have roughly 38 batch files.

The first ones that I built, where simplistic, setup the compiling environments, and then get the latest code from source control. I created two separate batch files for this to ease the calling of them from other batch files.

SetupEnvironment.cmd

@rem Setup all variables here
@SET SSCMLOGIN=user:password
@SET SSCMSERVER=server:4900
@SET CBSSoftware="C:\Build\CBS Software"
@SET CBSLegacy="C:\Build\CBS Legacy"
@SET CBSProto="C:\Build\CBS Prototype"

@SET VB6EXE="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VB98\vb6.exe"
@SET VBCEXE="C:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v2.0.50727\vbc.exe"
@SET VS2003="c:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\common7\ide\devenv.exe"
@SET VS2005="C:\Program files\microsoft visual studio 8\common7\ide\devenv.exe"
@SET VS2008="C:\Program Files\microsoft visual studio 9.0\common7\ide\devenv.exe"

@rem Build utilities here
@call Utilities/BuildUtilities

@EXIT /B %ERRORLEVEL%

I added a utilities folder to store a lot of extra files that I didn't want in the main batch folder, such as:

Icons
Sign Keys
Winrar.exe
XCopy exclusion lists for different types of software
Cruise Control Log Files

I also added a BuildUtilities batch file that allows me to compile and use stand alone class files in .Net, such as one that I use very frequently, the List.exe.

Utilities/BuildUtilities.cmd

@rem add any utility compiles here
@echo Building Utilities

@rem Building List
@"%VBCEXE%" /target:exe /nologo "C:\Build\Utilities\list.vb"

@EXIT /B %ERRORLEVEL%

List.exe is a very simple executable that basically outputs a file from disc to the console.

The next batch file that I built was to pull all of the code for our products from source control.

GetSource.cmd

@rem Retrieve all source
@echo Retrieving latest source code
@mkdir %CBSSoftware%
@mkdir %CBSLegacy%
@mkdir %CBSProto%

@sscm workdir ""%CBSSoftware%"" "CBS Software" -y"%SSCMLOGIN%" -z"%SSCMSERVER%"
@sscm get *.* -d""%CBSSoftware%"" -p"CBS Software" -r -e -q -wreplace -y"%SSCMLOGIN%" -z"%SSCMSERVER%"

@sscm workdir ""%CBSLegacy%"" "CBS Legacy" -y"%SSCMLOGIN%" -z"%SSCMSERVER%"
@sscm get *.* -d""%CBSLegacy%"" -p"CBS Legacy" -r -e -q -wreplace -y"%SSCMLOGIN%" -z"%SSCMSERVER%"

@sscm workdir ""%CBSProto%"" "CBS Prototype" -y"%SSCMLOGIN%" -z"%SSCMSERVER%"
@sscm get *.* -d""%CBSProto%"" -p"CBS Prototype" -r -e -q -wreplace -y"%SSCMLOGIN%" -z"%SSCMSERVER%"

@EXIT /B %ERRORLEVEL%

We use Surround SCM from Seapine software, so your command lines may differ quite a bit.

Creating a compile project

To do anything, I needed to be able to compile the projects, this was done mostly via command line to the proper visual studio, I wanted to do the direct calls to the compilers, but there was entirely way too much legwork that would have had to be done first.

Although, in order to make my giant "DailyBuild" batch file as well as a by-product batch file, I needed to separate some of the logic from the build to only do certain things, for instance, I don't want to get the source for all projects each time I build one project. Instead I created two files, one with the product name "Application.cmd" and another with "BuildApplication.cmd". The Build*.cmd sets up the environment, gets the source, then calls the application.cmd batch at the end.

Iconifier.cmd

@echo Building Iconifier
@echo ------------------------------------------------------------------
@echo This build requires .Net 2.0, Visual Studio 2005
@echo ------------------------------------------------------------------

@rmdir /S /Q "./Output/Iconifier/"
@mkdir "Output/Iconifier/"
@rmdir /S /Q "./Output/Iconifier/Icon Templates"
@mkdir "Output/Iconifier/Icon Templates/"

@echo Building Iconifier

@%VS2005% "./CBS Software/Desktop/Utilities/NorthStar.Desktop.Iconifier/NorthStar.Desktop.Iconifier.sln" /rebuild Release /out Output\Iconifier\build.log
@"./Utilities/List" ./Output/Iconifier/Build.log
@del output\Iconifier\build.log
@IF NOT EXIST "./CBS Software/Desktop/Utilities/NorthStar.Desktop.Iconifier/NorthStar.Desktop.Iconifier/bin/release/northstar.Desktop.Iconifier.exe" EXIT /B 1

@rem copy over all the files
@xcopy "CBS Software\Desktop\Utilities\NorthStar.Desktop.Iconifier\NorthStar.Desktop.Iconifier\bin\release\*.exe" Output\Iconifier /S /Q /Y
@xcopy "CBS Software\Desktop\Utilities\NorthStar.Desktop.Iconifier\NorthStar.Desktop.Iconifier\Icon Templates\*.png" "Output\Iconifier\Icon Templates" /S /Q /Y

@rem Archive
@"./Utilities/winrar.exe" a -r -idcdp -sfx.\Utilities\default.sfx -ibck -ep1 -iimg.\Utilities\sfx_logo.bmp -ts -iicon".\utilities\default.ico" -z".\Utilities\SFX_default.txt" ".\Output\NorthStar.Iconifier.Daily.exe" "Output\Iconifier\*.*"
@"./Utilities/winrar.exe" a -ag-MM-DD-YYYY -r -idcdp -sfx.\Utilities\default.sfx -ibck -ep1 -iimg.\Utilities\sfx_logo.bmp -ts -iicon".\utilities\default.ico" -z".\Utilities\SFX_default.txt" ".\Output\NorthStar.Iconifier.Daily.exe" "Output\Iconifier\*.*"

@EXIT /B %ERRORLEVEL%

Quick recap, remove existing directories (clean), create them, build the solution file, output the log to the console for logging purposes, copy all the files from the build directory to the output directory, archive using winrar (giant command lines for the win) a daily file, then archive again with a date stamped file.

BuildIconifier.cmd

@cls
@rem Start Iconifier Daily Build

@echo ------------------------------------------------------------------
@echo Daily Iconifier Script Initialized
@echo Version: 1.0
@echo Author: Tom Anderson
@echo ------------------------------------------------------------------

@call SetupEnvironment
@IF NOT %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 EXIT /B %ERRORLEVEL%

@call GetSource
@IF NOT %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 EXIT /B %ERRORLEVEL%

@echo ------------------------------------------------------------------

@call Iconifier
@IF NOT %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 EXIT /B %ERRORLEVEL%

@echo ------------------------------------------------------------------
@echo Deploying to http://servername/Downloads/NorthStar.Iconifier.Daily.exe
@copy Output\NorthStar.Iconifier.Daily.exe C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Downloads\ /Y
@echo ------------------------------------------------------------------

@ECHO ERROR LEVEL: %ERRORLEVEL%

@EXIT /B %ERRORLEVEL%

And here is our setup and build batch file, which can be called stand alone. Only thing unique is that I copy the daily.exe to the web server hosted on this machine for download ability within the company.

The project pasted above is actually a pretty quick and simple one, some of our projects have upwards of 12 compiles to make the final product, and quite a few supporting files.

Wrap up

It is still a work in progress, and I still have about 6 projects to get in that are the most complex, and a database to create a daily build off of, but the progress is going pretty well.

Kane's Wraith = Helmet Head

Dante — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:31:42 GMT

Uhmm, Can someone tell me either of the following?

Why is Kane wearing a dorky helmet in the teaser trailer for Kane's Wraith?
Why did EA skimp on creating cybernetic prosthetics?

Seriously, this has to be about the worst head prosthetic known to man, half his face is supposed to be gone, and instead we get a cool looking helmet that is way too big for Joe Kucan's head. I mean honestly, am I supposed to buy this crappy make up job?

Lets hope they got a bit more higher budget to create the FMV's.

New Reborn Wallpaper

Dante — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:16:56 GMT

With the recent release of the Reborn Logo to the public, fan art is already pouring in. Below is a very nice wallpaper made by one of the community members: EvilGoodGuy.

Download it now

Burn Week

Dante — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:53:22 GMT

Just to let everyone know, I am currently in a software burn with work, so excuse my absences.

Rounded Rectangle Tutorial

Dante — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 02:18:13 GMT

After seeing a lot of samples on the web, and a lot of different methods, I have decided to write up my own little tutorial on getting Rounded Rectangles in .Net

First off, lets start by opening up Visual Studio and creating a new Windows Forms Application.

Next, resize your main form and add a new picture box to the form. Resize the picture box to 400,400 and adjust your form size to where it looks something like this.

Double click on the form to access the Form Load event handler, and lets start some small bits of code.

Instead of just showing you how to do this, I am going to first demonstrate exactly how each part of what we are doing actually works.

Start off by creating a new Bitmap object, I decreased the size a bit to allow for the borders and padding of the picture box.

Now lets setup our picture box and display the new bitmap in it at runtime.

Next, we are going to create a new Graphics object (System.Drawing.Graphics).

You may also want to set the smoothing mode of the Graphics object, this will produce much cleaner lines while drawing shapes.

With the graphics object you can draw and fill all kinds of wonderful shapes and colors. We are going to first concern ourselves with the Graphics.DrawArc method.

To get a good feel, lets first start with the obvious, draw a single arc on the image.

The method above is drawing an arc with a black pen at position 10,10 in a 10x10 size a start angle of 0 degrees, and an sweep angle of 90 degrees, which is a right triangle.

If you run the application, you should see something like this.

Not very impressive, but a good start to the rounded rectangle we are going to want to create. Working around in quarter circles, we can then display all 4 sides of the circle.

When you run the application now, you should see a complete circle like so

Neat huh? Comment out the lines one at a time to see which angle is which, just to save you some time, here are the mappings for our corners.

Starting Angle 0 = Bottom Right

Starting Angle 90 = Bottom Left

Starting Angle 180 = Top Left

Starting Angle 270 = Top Right

That is a very basic understanding of the Arc drawing, lets make a rounded rectangle now!

Stub out the following method

This method will create a GraphicsPath Object that defines the shape of our rounded rectangle. A graphics path can best be described as a way to draw piece by piece the lines, points, etc… of a shape, and then "fill in the blanks" by connecting all the points. A lot of samples I have seen, and used, usually draw all the internal lines, or create a bunch of boxes, etc… But in this tutorial, we are going to do it the "easy way".

Lets first take care of a small issue that I have noticed with this method, For some reason the right side and bottom always gets clipped off, so I manually add a padding of 1,1,2,2; that’s top 1, left 1, right 2, bottom 2. This will center up the rounded rectangle quite nicely. And as you noticed in the constructor, I added a way to put in a padding for the actual drawing so that you can grow shrink it using the padding.

That should be pretty self explanatory.

Now, using the logic that we built above, we are going to create arcs at each of the four corners of the image, except using the GraphicsPath.AddArc method (same as the Graphics.DrawArc, except it doesn't contain a color in the arguments).

Following the code, you will see that we start in the upper left hand corner to create an arc, move to the upper right hand corner, bottom right hand corner, then finally the bottom left hand corner, now we will want to take a big shortcut

Here we tell the GraphicsPath to "connect the dots", basically it takes the current path and fills in the blanks to create a solid shape.

With the method complete, it should look like this

Only thing left to do is make a call to this method to get a path, and then use the Graphics object to "fill the path" - back in our form load under the smoothing mode set

Big call, simple understanding. Call the Graphics.FillPath, set the brush color, then pass in the return from our call to MakeRoundedRectanglePath that we created above.

Now run the application, and look at your rounded rectangle goodness.

Now, lets dress this up a bit, to make it a bit more attractive. Use a System.Drawing.Drawing2D.LinearGradientBrush instead of a standard SolidBrush.

And now our newly applied fill path method

And, our final result:

Pretty simple! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, below is the full code for this tutorial. With some practice and modifications of the function calls, you can very easily get this result

Source

*Yes, they are images, you should type to learn.

32bit Internet Explorer on Vista 64

Dante — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:15:59 GMT

I have been having a LOT of freezing issues with the IE 32 bit on Vista 64. I have temporarily switched to IE 64 as I don't have the freeze issues, although, this has hindered my experience on the web massively, due solely to the fact that Adobe still hasn't completed their 64bit version of the Flash player.

Needless to say, I am browsing without Flash, and it really isn't that bad (until I want to view YouTube, or other heavily based flash sites).

RenEvo's German Support

Dante — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:12:12 GMT

I have come to be quite surprised by the support we have in the German communities. From showing up very consistently on http://www.pcgames.de and many German game sites.

This is quite an honor, and I thank all of our European fans, this might even push us to do some German language packs just to support you all!

In other news, it seems the Wiisis video we released at the beginning of the week is getting rave reviews, I for one can not wait to play this on the retail version of the game, we are just pending the public SDK, and we can get it out to everyone! Who knows, maybe this will be the first released C++ mod for Crysis?

Website Updates

Dante — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:39:25 GMT

As some of you may have noticed, I have remodeled a bit of the web site as well as replaced the top logo with one I have been playing with for a while. I do plan however to replace the banner once again with one along the same theme.

If you notice any issues, specifically with the smaller font, please let me know :)

First Release For Dead Six Information

Dante — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 23:32:46 GMT

I have just passed the final feature list for the First Alpha release for The Dead Six, versioned at .0.5.0. This version will be made available publicly, as well as the source and tools to start creating your own assets and buildings for The Dead Six, or your own C&C Based modification for CryEngine 2. As you can see, we still have a few more decisions to make about some of the assets, but the list is pretty final. We are going to go with the "Release early and often" rather then "Release once and pray we actually release" methodology.

Planned Release will support the following:

C&C Multiplayer Mode
Custom Maps: d6_islands, d6_coast, d6_canyons
Custom Buildings: Refinery
Custom Vehicles: Harvester
Purchase Terminals for Characters and Vehicles

GDI Infantry

Minigunner - Machine Gun
Heavy Gunner - ??
Sniper - Sniper Rifle
Engineer - Make do Repair Tool

Nod Infantry

Minigunner - Machine Gun
Stealth Troop (cloaked) - Silenced Gun
Sniper - Sniper Rifle
Engineer - Make do Repair Tool

Vehicles

Harvester
Humvee
Tank
Nod Helicopter
GDI VTOL
Boat

Buildings - Prefabbed

Refinery
Power Plant
Barracks
War Factory

Multiplayer Levels

D6_islands - This map will be an island based map that can utilitize air, sea, land vehicles.
D6_coast - This map will be a land based map with water on one side that will utilize air, sea, land vehicles.
D6_canyons - This map will be land locked that will utilize air and land vehicles.

Rockband vs. GH3 on PS3

Dante — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:53:20 GMT

I love my wife, seriously, she always knows what gifts to buy me.

For Xmas, my wife got me Tickets to the Blue Man Group, as well as Rockband for PS3. The game is really a LOT of fun, and if you can play it, do it. We started up a small two person band, with me on drums, and her on guitar, and are making our way through a tour right now on Medium. We will up the difficulty once our agility gets a bit better.

I was quite peeved to find out though that there is a war on guitar controller compatibility with Activision vs. Harmonix right now though, the gist of it is that Activision wants some royalties paid to them for the Guitar Hero 3 controller to work with Rockband, even though Harmonix has already submitted a patch to Sony that will enable the Guitar Hero Les Paul in Rockband.

Hope everyone had a great holiday, and it is back to the grind stone here at RenEvo to get more work done on The Dead Six, as well as an up coming Infantry Beta for Reborn.

Wiisis mini-site goes live!

Dante — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 21:31:44 GMT

Vloktboky and I have spent the better part of this morning getting a Wiisis mini-site online for the holiday. Hope you enjoy it!

Happy Holidays

Dante — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 16:50:23 GMT

With the impending day of celebration for a lot of us tomorrow, I just wanted to wish everyone a happy holidays!

Also, I have updated the front page a bit to be a lot easier for me to update, it is now linked into the Community Blogs, rather then being a manual edit. I have also added some forum shortcuts, as well as the last 3 images added to the gallery.

We will also be starting our affiliate program here shortly, so keep an eye open on how to get linked up with RenEvo!

EA REVEALS TIBERIUM AND LAUNCHES

Dante — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 21:44:02 GMT

PLAYERS INTO AN EPIC BATTLE FOR POWER

LOS ANGELES, Calif., December 18, 2007 – Tiberium is a mysterious extraterrestrial crystal that shatters the energy output of traditional fossil fuels. It has the power to save our civilization. It also has the power to destroy it. Over two-and-a-half years in development, Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) today revealed Tiberium™, a new intellectual property that brings a rich, original fiction to life through intense tactical action and visceral first-person shooting. Set in a stunning sci-fi world with spectacular visual effects and dramatic environments, Tiberium takes players on an adventure through an environmentally-devastated world and places them in the heart of an epic battle for control this powerful energy source.

For eleven years, an alien tower has stood dormant, looming like an unholy mountain over a wasteland once known as the Mediterranean Sea. The tower was thought to be a relic of the Third Tiberium War; a devastating war fought for control over Tiberium crystal. It is not a relic. It is not dormant. Deep within the tower, plans are in motion for an alien invasion. This is where the Tiberium adventure begins. Players step into the shoes of Forward Battle Commander Ricardo Vega and will assemble an assortment of elite squads to combat the global crisis. Armed with an intense arsenal of weapons including a transforming personal weapon system, multi-launch homing missiles, capital ship bombardments and tactical ion cannon strikes, Vega will lead the fight from the front lines.

Featuring a unique blend of first-person shooting and tactical squad combat, every moment in Tiberium is intense, every mission leaves players breathless. To take the first-person shooter experience deeper into strategic combat, players will control multiple infantry, armor, and air squads as the fight escalates. In Tiberium, Vega is the most powerful presence on the battlefield, and the squads are his most decisive weapon. Players can take multi-squad control combat into single-player or bring the action into online multiplayer battles.

“Tiberium is our ‘One Ring’, our ‘Force’. It is the connective tissue that defines this universe and tears it apart,” said Chris Plummer, Executive Producer at EA Los Angeles. “After two years of pre-production, it is exciting to finally reveal this game and its rich fiction to the world. We’ve put a lot of effort into evolving the tactical shooter experience by taking core gameplay compulsions like commanding, choice and dominating your enemies and delivering them in first-person. Some of the weapons and mechanics are truly innovative for a first-person game. We’re very proud to be part of a project that has the potential to really make a mark on the cannon of sci-fi fantasy fiction.”

Mike Verdu, VP and General Manager at EA Los Angeles added, “EALA has a long history of developing groundbreaking real-time strategy games with the Command & Conquer series. That series also originally introduced the Tiberium universe to gamers worldwide. Now, we are growing Tiberium from a simple backdrop to a fully realized universe with its own unique, hybrid squad-based shooter gameplay. This is the birth of a new franchise -- we couldn’t be more excited.”

Developed at EA Los Angeles, Tiberium will be available worldwide in Fall 2008 for the PLAYSTATION^®3 computer entertainment system, Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system, and PC. The game has not yet been rated by the ESRB. For more information on Tiberium, please visit: www.Tiberium.com.

C&C Tiberium

Dante — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:15:58 GMT

Well, I figured I would chime in a bit on this subject, even though it is up for high debate and argument right now.

I received my Game Informer, for those that don't know you can get a subscription for a small cost with the Game Stop discount card deal. Anyway...

The article pretty much just covers the single player aspect, and a small over the shoulder play by play while one of the developers runs through a level. It sounds complex, and not to far from tactical shooters with squad based objectives. Including a commander mode where you can direct units around from the top view of the level.

All in all, it also reflected to me an RTS blend in single player, capture this area, and new "slots" will be made available to you, but I fear that it will come close to the feel of Empire At War's RTS implementation, granted it is a kick ass game, it is about as linear as a ruler when it comes to strategy, not to mention the fact that it looks like you will have a grand total of one weapon with 4 modes. Sure, you can call in Orca strikes, or use titans as basically turrets, but to me, weapon diversity is what makes for fun. Start the single player campaign with a pistol and the shirt off your back, work your way up to multiple weapon selections and load outs so you can play your own style, not "you must use this weapon, or you will never beat this part" type game style.

Also, what is with that name? I seriously hope that is it a working title, and not the final. C&C Tiberium seems like a massively generalized term for the name, if it is C&C past 1995, of coarse it has Tiberium. Why wouldn't it?

Anyway, it is something I will watch from the background, hopefully they pull it off, but if we end up with C&C Battlefield, (which by the way, would have been a better title), then there will be that nitch that will play it, try to get high in the ranks, and not care what the models are they are using, cause it is all about ranking at that point. But as Apoc pointed out on the Renegade Forums (which he just recently registered over at that train wreck of a community), multi-player has yet to be announced, as to play style, etc... At this point it seems like EA has made there first "touch" into the C&C FPS community, but as jacked up as that community has become after the fall of Westwood, hell even before, I am sure that Apoc's frustration with them will result in just ignoring the massive amount of flames that might contain one or two half baked ideas on what the game's experience could be like. I mean, who has the time to hear how badly you do your job because you work for EA, and the fact that if you don't do a Renegade clone with newer graphics you will all but fail (paraphrased from recent posts on there Renegade forums). Last I looked, Renegade was a marketing flop that is only held onto by a small group (yes, 1500 or so is a small group for a game title) that is only sticking around for people with crappy computers, those who actually don't mind 6 year old graphics, and for the few mods that are out there or "coming". Sure I thoroughly enjoyed C&C mode myself, but the game is past its prime, at least games like Ultima Online offer a decent community, not a requirement for flame retardant clothing.

The daily mental thought - Yes or No?

Dante — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:00:25 GMT

So I spend a good portion of my day bouncing back and forth between C# and VB.Net. I have been a VB programmer since vb5 and even earlier writing VBA and VB Script as well as ASP. Lately though it seems that no matter how hard I try, filling the software department at work is a challenge. There are just so few .Net programmers who want to work in VB.

With a new framework being built, as well as a web framework being built, it keeps popping into my head, do I just start farming for C# developers, and switch the house language over? Do I run a mixed house of C# and VB? Or do I keep with the die hard thought of VB.Net is an easier language to read and understand, as well as the massive amount of right pinkie work I would need for C#.

If you want proof of this issue, head to your local book store, you will find a huge array of "Start programming now in VB.Net!", or "Write a VB.Net program", and even the faithful "VB.Net for dummies", while across the shelf you will find more of "Pro C# Development in .Net 3.5" and "Expert Development in C#" etc... The quality of the books that are carried by book stores will show you what people are buying, as well as a good hint at what people are writing. There are just more people working with C# and adapting it over VB.

I am one of the favored arguers that C#, J#, VB.Net, Managed C++, etc... all compile to the same IL code, but when you look at the resources available to you, C# just proves to be more supported, not easier or more powerful (although the unsafe blocks in C# technically does make it more powerful, then again you have background compiling in VB.Net which makes it more powerful in design time, the list really does go on and on for the pros/cons).

Anyway, I picked up two new books from Apress last night for ASP.Net 3.5 in C# and C# 2008 & .Net 3.5. Ironically, they have sections devoted to VB.Net, so I guess I am not the only one out there who is seeing this pattern as well.

Oh, and another quick thought, who decided that no one writes sockets and remoting in VB.Net to not have mentioned it, other then a quick "this is a socket, and this is how to send "hi" back and forth". Yet in the five C# books I own, they are extensively covered, including a lot about how the Marshaling actually happens, downs and ups, as well as different situations to use them.