A blog about my rantings, including Games, Game Development, Gaming, Consoles, PC Gaming, Role Playing Games, People, Gaming tips & cheats, Game Programming and a plethora of other stuff.
I won't be linking the content, however earlier today some video of "Blackbird" leaked, it was syndicated on some news outlets, such as the Metro.
I have to say I have no idea from where the files came and it really quite annoyed me. On a personal level, no-one I know of has nor ever tried to leak anything about that brilliant project; and as one of the first engineers on the task of bringing it to life it really irks me.
This video leak however is more annoying, not least because that was very old footage, it might even have been from a very early prototype build, and it clearly wasn't using the fantastic all ray traced renderer nor were the assets all the final ones we had (yes, live ray traced engine on an XBox Series X! Or a 2080 RTX min spec!).
People liked what they saw, but it wasn't mind blowing, Blackbird actually was. Sure we had a ways to go, but the play loop was ace, the scope of the world was massive, the movement systems were top notch, I'm not saying anything others have not already said and I look at the predicted releases for XBox in 2026/2027 (our release window) and honestly I don't see much coming from their own mews.
Indeed, with the RAM shortage & it's costs it's pushing hardware options out into the future too, so it's likely Blackbird might have had 6-8 months added content creation before the next XBox hardware was even announced.
And remember this is Zenimax Online, their track record for live service games and regular content creation is right up there, we knew what we were doing (for the most part), we were realistic in dealing with things, we were moving into a massive tech debt and the tooling was all in place to start churning out the worlds and the stories we had to set in that living world.
Honestly, a gem has been buried, never to see the light, but unlike the Arkenstone the theif didn't come to steal from the dragon, instead the thieves stole our sweat & tears, I believe an unrivalled team.
So this leak, take it all with a pinch of salt, the game, the real game, looked so much better, fast paced and beautifully sultry.
In software engineering I am one of those people who like to embrace change, I will in my own projects and even in professional situations (time permitting) stand up a new version of existing functionality in a side-by-side manner to try out new things, seek better solutions or performance or simply to understand how someone else's solution solved for the problem at hand.
This mentality broadly sits under the "Prototyping" method of software engineering, however, prototyping itself often says you should create a prototype in a wholly other language or platform than your target; a little like when planning to make a game in a brand new custom game engine you might want to prototype in an existing one, so benefit from both your own engineering expanding your eventual product, but building confidence and a marker post for performance & the content to which you can work.
The same is then true when I just want to elaborate on a single target piece of code and rework it.
I say all this because I like change.
What I can not abide however is change simply for changes sake, changes or reengineering something for no purpose.
The biggest villian in this space for me, sadly, has to be Microsoft with the Windows Operating system.
The only reason I even still run windows is to test games I'm working on (not even to run those games in most cases).
And today they've drawn my ire by reengineering, for no purpose to me, nor benefit to any user the Lock Screen.
You could just Windows Key and L your way to exiting to lunch or to go away securely from your desk, it's a natural reaction for me to lock the screen, even when I'm working at home! So ubiquitous was I taught about security, through hard learned lessons and practical jokes.
So it irks me massively to return to my machine just now, find it has installed an update and now when locked I come to wake the machine it sits.... and sits... and does nothing... and nothing happens.... and you wait....
To the point I believed the machine was locked up or crashed.
When really it's opening four widgets on the lock screen.... Four..... Inane news articles which do not interest me, junk adverts and even the weather app I must have uninstalled three times on this machine, yet it returns constantly.
The delay? Yeah, it was off loading whatever framework it needed to show these embedded widgets.... Some Javascript framework taking a gig of ram no doubt, which has taken the lock screen of instant, consistent and functional usage to a dismal mess I am going to have to disable for my own sanity.
Microsoft, just NO, stop doing this.
Why the widgets? And then you remove them, after trying to figure out what's wrong and even with the value set to "NO" do not show me these widgets it still adds another app to the list of things it can show, it's so insidious; not to mention slow. And when you finally do disable these needless widgets?..... Oh it's still massively slow and doesn't work as it did before.
Yeah you sould press any key and wake the locked screen to give you a log-in prompt... now only escape seems to give me a log in screen.... I have no idea why that change was done, I presume whomever was tasked with this change just likes or was themselves used to using the escape key; but it's the many tiny little changes the gas lighting of "this used to work <that> way" only to find it changed - without any visual reconfiguration it just now works differently - it all just beggars belief.
Today Microsoft Outlook is back at it's old habits of being utterly dreadful.
So I need to put "29th" with the the in superset, it used to do this itself, but not any more.... now you get "2 h" in normal and "9t" in superset... Dreadful!
folder.... The key feature of that hideous path is that it's in my D drive... this is my second drive and you'd be right to ask why it has a windows installation on it?
Well, that's the drive that came with my laptop, and so it had the spyware, adware riddled carcas of a windows installation I never used, I just installed my own new NVMe drive and went with that.
This installation of windows has been taking up like 15GB or more of Space for over two years to it was time to nuke it. The problem? You can't just remove windows trusted installer files.
My way around this is to go into the properties, into advanced, set the owner user and god for that file to be me and remove the other windows junk user groups and such, and make sure everything is inherited down the line....
And I did this, removed windows, program files and windows and program data.... all except for this one file.
Which is totally insidious.
It won't disappear despite my being that very user/owner and even having used "runas" to launch explorer and cmd as myself for 100% certain.
The security settings can't be set....
It is literally moments like this where I hate that I can't fully control my operating system.
Sure, this is an edge case, who would really want to let windows delete something critical, but I've clearly worked around the issue, jumped through enough obscure hoops and set myself in the driving seat that the OS must know I'm up to something I know I'm doing... and I'm doing it with their UI, so not with some obscure script, so I'm clearly NOT a baddie.... sort of.
Yet, I can't delete a file, the file is actually zero length... it's just crud and evil.
I'll never claim to know everything about Linux nor Windows, I know a lot more about the former than the latter, mainly as the Windows is a closed source product. As such it doesn't get my attention as much, unless something is going wrong.... Today I have found an effect I can't explain (at least not easily) in windows, clearly it's some sort of reserved file name or type effect.... Maybe you can explain this to me.
So, open any folder, right click and go to create a new text file...
Once you have the file...
Change the name to "COM" and a port number, so "COM1" in my case.... It can be any COM port name, even if you don't have that port installed or active on your machine....
Once you complete the name, or change focus of the text entry (by say taking a screen shot - not actually committing the new file to disk) you get this strange message...
"The Specified device name is invalid"....
What device? I'm trying to create a filename. I was immediately a little puzzled, I've used Windows since Windows 2.0 I've never ran into this issue.
Googling around I find a chap on social.technet.microsoft.com saying not to use a whole plethora of names for files or folder as they're reserved, I have never heard of this.
The official Microsoft advice likewise says not to use these values, and it kindled a memory in me from programming in DOS 6 back in the mid 90's, one would in Pascal, you could "println(PRN, 'some message');" and see the message print out on the printer.
I find it amazingly odd that these files are still reserved in 2018, they're proper nouns, they're things you may want to name files, and they have a FULL Path, which makes them very distinct than the COM port device. Its odd, trust me.
But the oddest thing is, what does Windows do, what is the piece of code picked up and made to run that message box upon creation of the file? And I've got to wonder how exploitable that maybe in local malware to open lots of message boxes and annoy the user.
It has been said by far bigger and better minds than myself, that if you sit still, if you don't continue to learn about new things and innovate you will stagnate. This has been a huge problem looming within the business I work, certain things have worked since the industry sector was conceived and even though more than half a century has passed it has largely passed the internals of this industry by.
That is until very recently, where market competition has sprung up, the market base itself has reduced and so pressure is on... Nowhere is this more apparent in my industry than on the software, the front-line of pushing product to customers.
The trouble however seems to be that many people have stagnated, they've stuck with the safe option, the tools which work off of the shelf, I am of course talking about Windows, the entire tool chain that is used by 99% of the company is all Windows based, I am the man on the spot waving the Linux flag.
But just a few days ago, the Windows world had to come to my desk and see their future, I had to show technically minded folks around the code of the new system, introduce them to my imposed coding standard and update them from Microsoft Specific Visual C++ thinking to thinking about platform independent Standard C++ code... I had my work cut out for me. I prepared the cleanest desktop environment I could (i3 on Ubuntu).
I didn't want to startle them, so the editor/environment is Visual Code from Microsoft... They started to look at the system, it's structure, how the code related to the design and the diagrams they already had, we started to follow the process flow diagrams.
It was a success, certainly no-one burst into tears, they saw the kin-ship between this code on Linux and the systems they'd worked with for decades on Windows.
But then, the senior software manager leaned down, peering at the screen, and he said some fateful words...
"I've never seen that before".
Is he talking about some piece of C++14 or C++17, the lambda's, the auto's, the shared_ptr... What technical bolt has he not screwed his nut around?
"That's very good, you can see the whole code layout. I've never seen that before, who did you say wrote this tool?... Really Microsoft, I've never ever seen that before".
This chap uses Sublime, I've seen him using Sublime... Which does exactly the same thing....
What is the lesson to be learned? When we're talking about stagnation in software we are not only talking about the language, but also the tools, and then not only the IDE, the whole environment.
Certainly I was introducing Windows users to Linux, and even then on an unusual minimalist desktop manager, but still the lack of connection between a tool I've seen people already using and what it was capable of demonstrated tools are not being leveraged to their full potential... Certainly learn your new languages, learn your language updates, but keep your tools and environment up to spec too...
Today, I've been working on a brand new project, which literally I thought was parked just yesterday... My mistake it seems this project was expected to be being worked on.. A coworker is currently slogging through the same API but for a different (embedded platform) and it's taken him quite a while.
So the product owner for this new piece of software from me (which is to call XML Web Services through SOAP up stream and a hardware device over USB or serial down stream) was quite upset when they arrived at my desk and asked how their product was coming, and my reply was "Doesn't exists, waiting for the hardware".
After a short, and shirty, moment with them I assured them I would do all I could with the interface, implement ALL the XML Web Service calls through the published ASMX tomorrow... Which is today... They looked sceptical, gave me that long stare saying "no, no you won't"....
And of course I have!... Microsoft Visual Studio Troll tool award of the day, it is so simple to work with a published ASMX, just add a service reference to the URL and it generated everything for you, then tell C# you're using that name space and voila there it all is laid out for you on a platter.
I just finished this project, less than 5 hours after starting it, so have dished it back to the product owner to find the hardware, I know they're not going to believe how quickly I've completed this cycle on the development, not least because the other chap has been on it weeks and has only done about 60% of the calls so far... Yeah, I say... But he's not using troll Tools.
Sometimes, times like this in fact, I quite like C#... Don't let on, it's my dirty secret.
I'm back from tinkering, trying to help some poor unfortunate souls... Like old64goat, whom advise removing the caps lock key as a way to stop it operating... And then Lloyd here has actually broken his keyboard, and recommends you take your key off... Guys, if you remove your caps-lock key, all you have is a BROKEN KEYBOARD!
So, just calm down, calm down, everything will be okay, I'm going to explain everything to help you out... Lloyd, the "noise" thing... I cover that... And to all, read on, because there is of course a better solution.
I'm not saying this is an easier solution, because it's not, it's complex and all about configuring software, but there are No HACKS! No Hammers! And No Needle Nosed Pliers required!
Best of all however, your keyboard can remain fully functional, other people can come and use your machine without being absolutely frustrated at your having acted like some kind of keyboard mohel.
Before I start however, I'd like to shout out to vwestlife as he pointed this one out, and I recently caught up with all this very interesting coverage and made me aware of this world of keyboard destruction. The Video From my live stream of the 23rd May 2016... Read the full solution below, this video is very rough & ready...
Unacceptable Sound Solution
So, what can you do to sort his problem out?... Go down to the start menu and type just the word "Keyboard" without any ENTER key, just the word and watch what comes up...
I've highlighted the first and simplest one which can help with the caps lock problem...
"Change How Your Keyboard Works"
Now, if you're not a touch type-expert and are constantly looking down at your keyboard, rather than at the screen, this can really help you hear if you've hit the caps-lock key... Lloyd, that's for you!
Simply go into that option and turn on the option to hear a tone whenever the caps-lock key is pressed, now if you have speakers, or headphones on, you can hear a passing impression of an old Pong machine whenever you press the caps-lock key!!!
However, that just might drive you stark raving mad after a while, and since Lloyd posted his rant in 2009, I'm sure he's pretty much sick to his hind teeth of his machine beeping like this, if he ever found this solution out.
Unacceptable Horrible Hackery Solutions
And as I made mention, there are horrible, trickster hackery tricks to go into the bowels of the Windows Registry and unmap the caps lock key, however, this pretty much going to do the same as taking the key off, but worse, because it's removing the functionality for all users, and unlike with pushing the key back on, there's not a quick and simple way to undo the change!
Plus some applications you do actually need the caps-lock key!
DO NOT HACK, DO NOT HAMMER, DO NOT PRY YOUR KEYS!
Acceptable Solution
There is a much better, though more complex, software solution... If you go back to the start menu and now type "region", you'll be able to see "region & language"...
Selecting it opens this box:
And you can immediately see the tab at the top about the keyboard and languages, we're going to be coming into this later, remember this page!
Then we see this intriguing "Change Keyboards" control. What can we do in there? Well, we can see there's a way to add other language keyboard layouts, and if we add them, the language bar becomes available to switch between language and layouts.
However, ALL the layouts in there have the CAPS lock key set to modulate the letter key codes, what we need is a new language/layout we can add, which does not respond to the caps-lock key.
Unlucky for us we have to create this layout... Luckily though Microsoft provide the "keyboard layout creator", which we'll now need to download & install from this link:
Install that and open it, you'll get a program looking like this:
Of course you can install your own keys now, clicking on each one, toggling it... etc... Play about, but all we want to do is create a clone of our favoured layout, for me this is "English (United Kingdom)", so from the file menu we can load that existing layout:
And it's presented to us...
We don't want to change any keys at this time, but we do want to change the properties to give the keyboard layout we're creating a name so we can spot it.
So, open the Project menu and select properties...
You'll get the default values...
Change them... so I'm going with this....
And just save this new layout project file...
You'll get a file, where-ever you saved it, looking like this...
Open it in Notepad, or whatever text-editor you favour...
Click to zoom in!
This looks like a lot of information, but whatever text editor you're using TURN OFF WORD WRAPPING!!!!!
And you'll see these columns in the center... the third column is "caps".
This column tells the keyboard controller (when is uses this mapping) what to do with a key when the VK_CAPITAL key code is received. We want all the keys to do nothing, and some already do - such as the number keys.
Those keys already ignoring caps have zero's int his column, so we need to edit the letter keys to do nothing when caps is pressed, change any 1's or 5's you see in that column, especially against the a-z keys to a zero....
Click to zoom in!
Save the text file, and now re-open that "klc" file in the Layout Creator application from Microsoft again... I did this by right clicking on the file and selecting "open with"...
Don't touch anything, don't twiddle any values!!!! If you do, the creator takes liberties and can change things back in your klc file.
Just go back into "project" and select "Build DLL and Setup package"...
The application will now try to validate the keyboard and you will be told (hopefully) that the verification succeeded, but that there were warnings, you can view the result I got...
Here...
Click to zoom in!
Those warnings tell you pretty much that everything worked as we expected, the CAPS LOCK is not set between 'a' and 'A'... etc... that's what we want to see!!!
When the DLL is built you can open the folder straight away...
And doing so, we see we have a bunch of msi and a setup executable...
Install the setup executable...
You will see that the name I entered in the properties is the window title, so this is "United Kingdom - NoCaps"....
Go back into the region & languagages menu, the keyboard again, and this time when you look you should see either... "United Kingdom - NoCaps", but more likely it just says "United Kingdom - Custom". Select to enable them! Anything new, this is a little sketchy, but this is Microsoft not what you've done.
Now, because you have more than one keyboard layout available in the languages, the language bar should show up...
Click to zoom in!
In that you can pull it down to select the "NoCaps" version!!!
Doing so in an editor now, I find caps lock has no effect!!! Exactly what people have been looking for. And this only affects the capslock key, you can still get capital letters using shift!
You're Not hacked anything... Not been in to the guts of the registry, and best of all, you can uninstall it later... or deploy the same keyboard layout to any version of windows you like (above windows Vista at least).
And, best of all, you can just go back to the language bar and select the original standard "United Kingdom" default layout, and the caps lock is back on and working!
There are other options to let you select between key layouts on the fly too, so you can opt into and out of the NoCaps version at the press of a key combination... The default being "Left ALT + Shift", search your windows for "Text Services and Input Languages".
I'll be honest, I was coming to write to you all today to give windows another well-deserved roasting. Unfortunately, I found the same issue in Linux. Well, when I say issue, perhaps this is my own expecting something more logical from a system.
Lets take a look at the folder I'm talking about:
It's any folder you like, within it, I've created a folder called ".example", another without the leading period "example" and then a file which includes the word "example" within it's file name.
When I go to search this directory, with the explorer search bar within the window presented, I expect it to work by using exactly what I type...
So, if I search for "txt", only the "example.txt" file should come up, and it does...
But if I search for "example", I'm getting three results, as they contain the word, therefore I aim to be more specific and search for ".example"... The result of this last search:
Yup, I still get all three results. Clearly only one item matches ".example", and this annoys me.
And I jumped to Linux to take screen shots of this not working this way, but I found ls does work this way too... To be more specific I had to use "find":
This annoys me, I want the search to be specific, unless I add wildcards like "?" or "*" then I want what I type to be what it searches for, and if they have to put dumbed down searches in there, make it obvious that what you're getting is not an exact match.
The reason?... Imagine you have 300,000 files and you select 2,49 of then based on an exact filename search, and you give it a cursory glance, assume it to be correct, select all and delete?!?!?!
Yes, you end up deleting a load of stuff you didn't intend.
And I know, I know, I assumed what it was doing, and I know assumption is the mother of all fuck up, but still....
Even more annoying however, whilst setting up this example on windows, I did find something minor to moan about:
You can't create a folder which starts with a period in Explorer...
I'm an Atari guy, there I said it... This doesn't mean I've not been around the block, my first computer was a Commodore, but my first LOVE was an Atari.
An Atari 520 ST FM to be precise, and here I am 36 years old, married, with two houses, two cars and a busy life, but I still love that Atari.
So, seeing news of an Atari centric documentary I took a look:
Good stuff, except, its on XBOX?... I have no interest in XBOX, and I had read recently how Microsoft was winding down original programming on XBOX... GG Microsoft, GG...
Do I come on here to bemoan the seeming incompetence of others a lot?... Because I have just had an annoying 20 minutes talking to one of our "Network Experts", there's a server box running Ubuntu, its actually a virtual machine, and it was being blamed for crippling the network on the host machine - which has to run several other Windows Server 2008 Virtual Machines.
For some reason, this came across my desk, because someone has decided that though I can't advise the company on Linux server usage or adoption, I can be called into sort out the problems other fools create.
So, this server was running, the administrator chap is sat there with PuTTY connected to it and he's saying there's too much network traffic coming from the box.
Looking at the process list the machine is doing nothing, when I ask for one of its users to be made to use it, the CPU usage is a time flitter and then the usage is over, it appears to me the Virtual machine host is waking the VM, using it, and closing it.
The processes being used are simple webservices, so there should be no network traffic unless someone is using the server.
So, I ask.. "What's your idea that this machine is causing the issue?" Very smugly the admin presented me with an A4 sheet with two graphs, one shows all his servers running with the Ubuntu machine present, and there's a whole load of traffic going on... The next is the same graph, with the Ubuntu box removed, and there's nearly no network traffic.
Then within PuTTY connected to the box he opens iptraf...
And he points to the statistics and declares, "See, this is running multiple kilobytes a second"...
Lets recap... "This machine is crippling our network usage on this box".... "using up kilobytes a second"... If any of you don't grasp how absurd this is please stop reading now, because the guy was clearly serious. He's not that old, he's younger than me, surely he realises kilobytes a second on a modern gigbit backbone is nothing? No, he seriously wants the ubuntu box silent.
So, what's causing this tiny trickle of bandwidth... Of course, he's connected to this machine with PuTTY...
"Close this window and take me to the machine in the server room"
In we go, and from the console plugged into the machine I run iptraf... look what we see now...
Yes, its zero...
When he is running his measures and checks he's connected over the network to the machine, he's been measuring his own bandwidth administrating the machine, and apparently the kilobytes per second that took were too much for him, I feel like this guy should be thrown from the building, not be earning far more than me in the "superior" position of "network guru god" which hs holds...
So knowing the machine is idle, I wonder what causes the bandwidth, so with the iptraf still running, I call up the user and ask him to get working again... and sure enough there's little trickles of bandwidth from the Ubuntu box, no spikes, no major blocks of transmission. Hence after a few minutes I conclude the Ubuntu box though active, is only taking a tiny amount of the total bandwidth available to the machine, and so I start to look at the other machines...
And with just perfmon on the two Windows Server 2008 boxes with the user operating his end, I can see that the Windows boxes are spiking their network traffic, just with task manager you can see one box taking 20% the total available to it, and the other over 45%... This is a gigbit connection, and 20% of it is taken for maybe 30-50 seconds each minute and then goes quiet, then the 45% hog is there for maybe every 10 seconds of each minute.
They're scheduled tasks, as the users input items into their programs, the programs process and send out instructions, e-mails and update other databses. The trickle of data I/O to the ubuntu machine is just such a feed, the Ubuntu box sucks/queries data from MS SQL Server on one of the machines and squirts it into MySQL where a very old (like 8 year old) unmaintained program written in C with MySQLConnector picks it up and uses sendmail to e-mail a load of people. Such notifications take maybe 0.25 seconds and run every 5 minutes, the amount of data is small, and looking at the physical name of the Ubuntu box "e-mailer relay" I think it's safe to say its not using a lot of bandwidth and the other machines are to blame.
How I educate the "network expert"... This is my next task.
The new Outlook mail, replacing Hotmail, which I've mentioned before on this very blog, continues to be an absolute pain in the arse...
It was working about two hours ago, now look at it...
Just look...
What use is this?
The fonts are screwed up, icons missing, the panels overlap and you can't see what's going on... I'm seriously tired of how bad this Outlook system is. Oh, and before someone says "Oh you're not using IE, that's the problem"... This is how it looks from IE... Even worse...
