Saturday, January 30, 2010

Turning off your hardware acceleration for better 2d performance?

No that s not a joke ... if you re working in a heavily 2d using program (Photoshop for example) you should turn your hardware acceleration off on all the new GPUs: -Link-


Really nice to see your expensive graphics card being outperformed by an on-board chip on a two year-old $50 motherboard!

Statement from amd: "Tom’s Hardware has tripped over a workload area (2D lines, etc.) that we have not optimized yet."

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Network security isn't all fun and games

Today i found an interesting analysis about the network traffic of steam while playing Team Fortress 2 by Brett Turner and Andrew Woodward.

Though they have written this some time ago, i think it is still very accurate.

And just again it confirms my view of how Valve is doing stuff but read it yourself here: Network security isn’t all fun and games: An analysis of information transmitted while playing Team Fortress 2

Friday, August 21, 2009

Gamasutra: Dirty Coding Tricks

"When the schedule is shot and a game needs to ship, programmers may employ some dirty coding tricks to get the game out the door. In an article originally published in Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine earlier this year, here are nine real-life examples of just that." Read More ...

Saturday, August 1, 2009

What a day ...

Man i m still shocked about what we have learned today. Our admin version of fps-death got leaked again and this time an admin of xj gave it away to someone who submitted a bhopscript demo to xj and then gave it to kayne who released it. Those people made him and other admins trust them. Since this is inexcusable he ll get kicked out today or tomorrow and we ll have to find a new admin who is doing his work and we can trust in.

What we learn from this is that you can t secure a program from leaking by giving it to as few people as possible ... still the temptation seems to be too big. So for future analysing programs there has to be a system that we know exactly who is using what and when and bind programs to computers even for people you think you can trust absolutly and of course an emergency shutdown so noone can use these progs after a leak. To do this and make it as hard to hack as possible will be a lot of work but it seems to be necessary.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Small update ...

Well the last weeks were full of interesting and new things i learned, while working on kcac, and i can t really talk about them ... except that the next kcac version will be on a whole new level and in no way comparable with the old one. We are a team of experts now with gangien helping me out on the coding side and emti designing the artworks. Here is a preview screen of the current version:

I had to cut out the interface development completely for now because it would have taken too long. So we re working with winapi now to get the prog ready to use as fast as possible.

On the positive side you ll be able to record demos on servers once we released it.

Also there was an interesting story: While i was working on getting some data out of steam.exe we need for kcac i ran into my password saved in plain text in the memory ...

After investigating this a bit more i came to the conclusion that everyone with basic knowledge about reading other processes memory can read my steam password if he wants to. I talked about this with Soulfather and he sent a mail directly to his contact at Valve. Let s hope they ll take the appropriate actions.

Now about the fast demo-checker: The code is finished and i started with adding maps but since my focus is on kcac and i have to learn a lot for university atm i ll pause the map adding for some time. You can get an updated test version here. Ofc the interface will get a redo for the release. Once this is done it ll get the correct record time on all maps from the record list. So this will become the #1 tool for public demo checking.