Thursday, August 24, 2006

Your Very Own Personal Tank - Popular Science

Now this thing looks interesting.

Your Very Own Personal Tank - Popular Science

Monday, August 14, 2006

Macworld: News: Microsoft allows anyone to create XBox games

Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio Express is a new development kit, to be released in beta form in August, that will be available for free to anyone using a Windows XP PC.

Macworld: News: Microsoft allows anyone to create XBox games

Saturday, August 12, 2006

BF2 Folder Redirection - Revisted

Fred left me a comment on one of my older posts for BF2 and Folder Redirection. EA programmers or designers are being morons and causing problems by not thinking things through fully and not having the proper level of knowledge of the host OS system and all its features (which they ARE required to know) and to my knowledge, that is still the case today.

However, I have not been playing much BattleField 2 of late. It is still installed and minus a patch or two, I could pop back into the fight, but the only gaming I have been able to do of late is WoW, and not much at that rate.

The following are the only work-arounds I have for this issue and they are kludgy at best. If anyone else has this issue, I urge you to take the time to contact EA and vent on them (politely), and if they are clueless on how to fix it, have them contact me. (My services are not free, but I can be contracted to tell them how to fix this globally on all their products if needed).

  • Anyhow, usage of a local account is the best work around, though a pain in the ass imposed upon their customers by EA.
  • The other is manually redirecting the documents back to the local drive (if possible, depending upon if you use Group Policy or not on your home/business network).
  • A subset to the second option is to use another tool to mirror the data in both locations, on your network file share (as redirected by design) and on the local drive under the profile. The tool I have been using for this is SyncToy from Microsoft, which is freely available for download (requires piracy validation from MS). Nice simple tool to set-up file copies locally or across a network. There are of course other tools, but SyncToy is what I have been using thus far. Then, prior to game time, you can just manually or scriptomatically redirect the My Documents folder and not have to worry about the cached shaders, which are needed to speed up the map loading in BF2.


Otherwise, there is nothing else I am aware of to do other than bug the hell out of EA and get them to get their shit together.