2006 November

 

 GarageGames

November 19, 2006

This is the company that the ex-developers of Dynamix went to, when [Vivendi] started firing all the talented people that made them rich. These guys rock, and are the next generation studio to be watching.



 

 GameSpy threatens litigation against developer

GameSpy has a bit of a monopoly around online services for multiplayer games, including server listings etc. They use a lame XOR encryption technique to ‘restrict’ third party access to these master servers. Fortunately, due to their monopoly they can’t really quickly change things without breaking it all, and thus the algorithm has been documented and became available for opensource developers thanks to the efforts of Luigi Auriemma of http://aluigi.altervista.org.

Unfortunately GameSpy then decided it would be good to threaten him with litigation.

Yay. Go Go GameSpy. Read about this pretty sad story at http://aluigi.altervista.org/papers.htm#distrust



 

 Dynamix

The gods of game programming.



 

 DataPro

DataPro are one of the best ISP’s in South Africa, in my opinion. They really seem to  care about their staff and that is something I have to respect. Certainly keeps one motivated.

I’ve been hosting, and dealing with them for well over 4 years now, and I have never had anything but awesome service from them. Even when we were arranging a Europe — Britain game of Tribes2,  they  went to the trouble of reprioritizing their traffic, and assuring us the best ping times for .za vs .uk. They were even prepared to let us use their offices to reduce any possible latency.

They’re also the first people in South Africa that came out with an industrial grade UNCAPPED ADSL product, including a firewall, and 16 hours support per month.

All I can say, is that in my opinion DataPro will go a long way. Their MD Doug Reed  is approachable, knowledgeable and friendly, and their technical staff are comitted.

Plus, they have one of the most beautiful hosting facilities I’ve seen in my life. 😉

Rock on DataPro.



 

 CanTennae: A cheap way to improve MyWireless signal strength.

A Cantenna is a homemade antenna using a coffee can, or even a Pringles can. These are typically called “WaveGuide” antennae since they guide/focus the waves.

This section will be expanded once I take some time to complete it. In the meantime, there are some pictures available here:  https://rodent.za.net/files/cantenna

Since MyWireless generally uses the same frequency as 802.11 kit, any 802.11 antenna design should suffice.

A lot of marvelous, yet highly experimental information about CanTennae is available at http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/DirectionalAntenna

This is what my Cantenna design was based off.

The best kind of antenna for MyWireless is a *directional* antenna, since it allows you to improve your return signal to the base station.

Cabling:

Cabling from your antenna is very important. You can calculate how much signall loss there is in the cable by using this calculator http://www.timesmicrowave.com/cgi-bin/calculate.pl

LMR195 seems to be used quite often, but over a 15m stretch of LMR195 you will lose 9db. LMR400 is more expensive, but over the same length will only lose 3dB