Sadly, it turned out that Tribes:Vengeance really sucks. Vivendi cancelled the very FIRST patch for the game, with a couple of lame excuses. Such as “we only sold 7800 copies in the first week”. It’s pretty straight forward guys. Release a game that is broken, unfinished and no fun to play, and nobody is going to want to buy it. Simple economics. If you had at least bothered to fix it, you may have caught the “long tail” and benefited from the loyalty of the fanbase.
It’s a pity. Tribes was the best team-based Science Fiction game of the last two decades, and I’m going to seriously miss it. Every other game I look at that doesn’t have jetpacks simply gets a “poor groundhuggers” response from me. Perhaps community games like Renegades, or StarSiege:2845 will bring back some of the goodness that was Tribes, but it just simply isn’t going to happen in the next year or two.
*sob*
I have however dabbled in some Tribes:Vengeance development, but only briefly.
VengeanceSpawn – infinite spawn-like tool for Tribes:Vengeance
VengeanceMaster – info about the Gamespy system used by the in-game T:V matchmaking
It seems like journalists in general are having a hard time to distinguish their gigsfrom their bytes, and their kilobits from their kilobytes. When reporting on internet connectivity in this country, it seems many journalists are incapable of distinguishing one from the other.
Now, I could create this guide by starting WAY from the back, and explain to you whata byte is, and how it differs from a bit, and so forth, but it would probably fail to get the message across. So let’s just start by saying that internet “stuff” and capacity is typically measured along two factors:
Speed is normally measured in BITS per SECOND. This is called the bit rate. Don’t ask why, it’ll just get confusing. Just like wordly things are weighed in grams, and kilograms, so speed gets measured in *bits*, and *kilobits*. Instead of tons we have megabits. More or less a thousand bits make up the next unit, i.e. kilobits. Another thousand kilobits make a megabit. Exactly like kilograms, and grams, and tons. Except, a ton in bits is a *gigabit*. Bits, kilobits, megabits, gigabits. Each indicating the next 1000th unit.
The bit rate indicates how FAST one can get data from A to B. When someone says he has a one megabit line. It means that his line can transfer roughly 1000 * 1000 bits per second. See how we got to that?
Each megabit is made up out of 1000 kilobits and each kilobit is made up out of another 1000 bits.
Simple, isn’t it? Just like grams, and kilograms.
“Speed” in internet terms is exactly the same as “how fast does your car go?”
Speed is normally measured in kilobits, megabits, or gigabits per second – the bit rate
Technically when someone talks a bout a “one megabit” connection, he should be saying “one megabit per second” connection, but because speed is normally expressed in bits per second, everyone knows that he means 1 megabit per second, because he used the word *bit*. This is part of slang. “I have a one gigabit connection” will make most nerds want to hump your leg. This is a useful phrase to throw around at a geeky convention where you’d like to elicit some response from otherwise clamped up nerds.
I ran TheFridge (as a partner) for a number of years. Some of us a little “older” in the teeth, and with a taste for Gothic/Industrial music, might remember the club.
I will finish ranting about this at some stage, but let me tell you: being a Nightclub Owner really just isn’t worth it. It sucks your will to live.
The Fridge, is located here http://thefridge.co.za
Lots of MyWireless users have reported that cutting a hole about 4cm from the back of a Pringles can, and sticking the modem’s antenna into it has increased their gain in signal from ~5% to 15%
This is very likely due to the fact that the PringlesCan acts as a basic “waveguide” which causes the modem’s output signal to be more directional than the standard omnidirectional antenna.
Simply cut a hole in a Pringles Can, and move your modem around towards the direction where it gains the most signal.
Of course, the rolls royce of CanTennae is the 750g Frisco coffee tin, with a PigTail.
A series of tweaks for the Win32 USB drivers of the IPWireless modem, and some more tweaks for the “Wireless Broadband Dialler”
The USB drivers log a lot of useless information about the USB protocol used to communicate with the modem, using the win32 DbgPrint kernel function-call. This causes some serious overhead, and can amount to quite a bit of extra CPU cycles when running at high speeds. This “spam” is quite obvious when you run a tool such as DebugView. (Try it, you’ll note the spam, and remember to ‘Capture Kernel Events (Ctrl+K)’) In addition the kernel has to buffer any DbgPrint data in an internal buffer until it overflows, or an application such as DebugView reads it off the stack. This incurs even more ring 0 overhead on systems using the USB driver.
The DbgPrint spam is controlled via a registry entry in the ipw_*.inf files… It’s easier, to just find the keys, after installation and change the debug flags, than reinstalling the drivers with modified .inf files.
By disabling the debug information and the extra overhead when talking to the USB device, I’ve managed to shave around 5-8ms off my ping times. (A completely subjective measurement) [YMMV] <— Under profiling conditions, with a kernel debugger the call overhead per USB poll dropped from 230 cycles to 89 cycles which is a considerable saving in CPU cycles wasted. (This was an objective measurement).
I find it quite insane that a company such as MCCI can distribute drivers for production release with full debugging turned on.
Hopefully, once I patch the drivers this may drop to around 3-4% levels since there is still considerable overhead in checking the debug flags.
In the meantime, to at least reduce the syscall overhead when using the drivers, the following can be done:
_Warning, the StandardDisclaimer applies when attempting any of the following:_
*Fire up regedit.exe
*Do a search for the string “~MCCIUSB_~DebugLevel” by pressing Ctrl+F (enter it without the quotes)
*Once you’ve found the value (the default will be 0xffffffff), change it by double clicking on it.
*Change the value to 0 (decimal, or hexadicimal)
*Click ok.
*Press F3 to find the next occurrence of “~MCCIUSB_~DebugLevel” and keep on changing the values to 0.
*Once there are no more entries found, reboot your PC.
The dialler application, has a few registry entries to show more “debug” information in it’s window. This kind of information is actually useful, and has very little overhead, since the debug info is only printed during the connection establishment phase. If you’re like me and want to see what your modem is doing, then turn on the debugging for the dialler as described below.
To turn on full debugging for the dialler application:
*Fire up regedit.exe
*Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREIPWireless Inc.IPWireless PC Software
*Right click on “IPWireless PC Software” in the tree, and on the popup menu select New->Key
*Type in “Debug” (without the quotes) and hit enter, to create a new Key.
*Now, left click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREIPWireless Inc.IPWireless PC SoftwareDebug in the tree.
__theloop__
*Right click in the blank area (NOT in the tree) and click on New->String Value
*Enter ATCMD, and hit enter
*Double click the ATCMD entry and type in “Enable” (without the quotes)
*Repeat starting at __theloop__ for the following values:
**ATRES
**ATRESP
**~RasTrace
Now, when you use the “Wireless Broadband Modem Dialler” application, some more debugging information will be shown in the “ISP” window.
The “Wireless Broadband Modem Dialler” has an option on the “ISP” tab to “Reconnect if line dropped”
When you turn this checkbox on, the dialler will retry for a maximum amount of 5 times to reconnect to the Sentech network.
This is pretty useless, since we all know: _When it goes down, it goes down for a while_
To increase the number of attempts that the dialler will use when attempting to redial do the following:
*Fire up regedit.exe
*Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREIPWireless Inc.IPWireless PC Software
*Find the entry named RECONNECT_ATTEMPTS on the right-hand side.
*Double click the RECONNECT_ATTEMPTS entry, and change the value to 10000
*This will cause the dialler to retry 65536 times when the line gets disconnected.