Secret Underground Base

New MMM Forums

Chris — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:35:25 +0000

Because the secret base forums are being spammed by Russians all the time I’ve made a new forum specifically for MMM at www.secretundergroundbase.com/mmm/forum. This time I’m using SMF so it might go somewhat better.

The Evil of Macros

Chris — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:32:28 +0000

I was doing some work on an XInput extension for Ruby, and after making some changes I stopped getting controller input data. I had a look, and somehow I’d done this :

XINPUT_STATE state;
if( SUCCEEDED( controllerIndex, &state ) )
{
...
}

Instead of:

XINPUT_STATE state;
if( SUCCEEDED( XInputGetState( controllerIndex, &state ) ) )
{
...
}

Of course, SUCCEEDED was perfectly happy with this, since the following is perfectly valid code. Unusual, but valid.

XINPUT_STATE state;
if( ((HRESULT)(controllerIndex, &state)) >= 0 )
{
...
}

Evil.

MMM Wiki moved

Chris — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:44:03 +0000

I’ve moved all development of MMM over to Assembla. Link is here. I’ve been updating the Wiki as I go, and it’s easier to store everything over there than it is to manage it here.

MMM Wiki

Chris — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:23:01 +0000

MMM Wiki is up, will be updating it as I go through the code and improve it.

Darwinball

Chris — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 01:33:20 +0000

I’ve recently developed an exciting new game while laying on my bed thinking. To play this game which I call Darwinball, you will need :

1 x Baseball

1 x Bed

1 x Barely lit room

0 x Common Sense

To play, lie on the bed face up, and throw the ball into the air above your head. If you catch the ball, you win, if you miss/drop the ball (possibly landing on your face) you lose.

Not Dead ( Again )

Chris — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:32:08 +0000

Forgot to post for some time again. I was in America for 10 days of last month, and have moved back to Derby to do the final year for Uni. In the next few weeks expect the usual slow trickle of posts and content. Also, I might post some pictures of Base 1 at some point.

MMM and Secret Forums

Chris — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:50:49 +0000

I’ve added the page for MMM here. I’ll update the project status as I complete parts.

Also the Secret Underground Base secret forums are now open at forums.secretundergroundbase.com. May defeat the point of it being secret, but who cares!

Overdue update again

Chris — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 06:53:28 +0000

Well looks like I forgot to update the site in nearly a month. Oops. I have an excuse though, its because I’ve been busy working on my mod for Star Trek Armada 2 (and hopefully Fleet Ops 3), Megadroid’s Mission Mod, which adds Lua to allow people to make single player missions – something people haven’t been able to do since the tools to do so were never released. It’s required much poking around, and endless use of function pointers.

I was initially considering using Javascript, but V8 seemed far too complicated for what was needed, and I’ve embedded Lua before. Instead of storing any data Lua side, Lua objects just store an id which is used in calls through to C++ which then looks it up to provide any data / functions. Seems to work ok.

I’ve also decided to take a new approach to secret project, and will be attempting to make it all ‘C-ey’ as opposed to all ‘C++-ey’, which should be interesting.

Lardfish Improvements

Chris — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 23:05:03 +0000

While working on my super secret project, I’ve made some improvements to Lardfish. The main improvement is the addition of saving and loading to and from memory, which is useful for packed files (which my secret project uses). I initially though that it would be complicated, but since Lardfish::Internal::InternalLoad and Lardfish::Internal::InternalSave already used std::ifstream and std::ofstream, I was able to change them to use std::istream and std::ostream, and then used a stringstream to load the data in and save it out. It basically meant that I had to change very little code to add the feature.

The files on the website have not been updated yet, but I will do that asap.

Most of my time is being spent on the secret project, and work for WorldWeaver, which is why there hasn’t been any updates recently. I will try and update more often. Not that anyone (other than bots) read, heh.

Chris Plays Divine Divinity : Part 2

Chris — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 22:04:24 +0000

Previous Part : Here

Last time I had just opened the catacombs and received the teleporter stone from Lanilor. However, it’s not very useful unless you have the second stone. To get it, you either need to teleport to it using the first stone, or fight your way through the catacombs to get to where it is. It’s also guarded by various undead angry types, so you need to get it and get out if you are going via the teleport route.

So, I dropped and used the teleporter stone. I was taken to the other teleporter stone, and kicked and beaten by skeletons until I managed to pick it up and use it to get back outside. Now that I have my teleporter stones, I can go back to the base and set up my plan. In my house, there is a bed and all the storage I need (in my chests). That way, if I get injured, or need to store some stuff for later selling, I can do so. I’ll use this house for storage for most of the game. Here be it.

So, I took out my Worn Knife and entered the catacombs to start my quest for better stuff! And I found this. Great.

I started the quest to find Slasher, by talking to Smiruk. Basically, throughout the catacombs there are lots of axes. Well about 5. One of these is Slasher. These axes are pretty good though, so you can sell them for some good money, which I’ll be doing at some point.

Anyway, much fighting, running and teleporting later, I reached the third level of the catacombs. By this point I realised that either hard mode is much harder than normal, or my character is a bit useless. I’ve had to retreat from most enemies, and ended up learning meteorstrike and freeze, since I’ve yet to find a bow that isn’t broken. I might even actually buy one from George or something.

After getting past the Skeletal Guardian and the Skeletal Conjourer by running away and spamming meteorstrike, I started to find some decent armour. Still not found Slasher yet, since that is down on one of the lower levels. I do have a few axes stashed at the base that I can sell though.

In the room with the 4 tombs you have to open, I barely managed to kill the Skeletal Conjourer. I actually ended up killing it by throwing stuff at it. You can throw any object around in DivDiv, and if it hits an enemy, will do damage. I used all the boxes from my house to kill a Skeletal Lord, while hiding behind stuff.

I also actually found a decent weapon, a composite longbow, which I have used here to kill some skeleton types.

So after killing Thelyron and curing Mardaneus, I went to George’s to find he was murdered. Bah, I was going to sell him stuff as well. I went and spoke to Goemoe and learned restoration for healing his patient. Probably should have done that before I went into the catacombs.

I then moved on to the house in the northeast where my epic quest will continue next time.