Tutorial How-to – Shadowgun On Non-Tegra Devices
Friends! I bring to you Shadowgun! Probably one of the most bad ass Android games to date. It’s Tegra only so if you have a tegra device you are good to go. Nab the game, install, download, done. If you don’t have a tegra device you aren’t left out in the cold. Here’s how you get this epicness working.
- Grab Chainfire3D https://market.android.com/details?id=eu.chainfire.cf3d The free version should work just fine.
- Grab the Chainfire plugins which include the tegra plugin. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4P9LEW7P
- Finally grab the Shadowgun 1.0.2 APK file. I do not condone piracy. You do this at your own risk. Buy the game it’s that good! http://brockh.at/tiOUcP (google search)
- Install chain fire.
- Install Shadowgun.
- Unrar the plugins(should have 3 zip files).
- Copy the zip files to your SD card.
- Open Chainfire install the chainfire driver(requires phone reboot).
- Open Chainfire again. Choose Install plugins/shaders.
- Install the Nvidia plugin.
- Go to “Per-app OpenGL settings”
- Tap Shadowgun
- Uncheck “Use default settings”
- Check “Reduce texture size” and “Disable MapBuffer emu”.
You can now run the game. If you want it even more buttery smooth and don’t mind giving up a little visual quality you can also check “reduce texture quality”. It’s also worth noting this little tweak could be applied to any tegra game you want to run and can also be used to increase performance for demanding non-tegra games especially if you are on an older device.
Happy hunting!
Farewell Battlefield 3 Till Next Time Perhaps
I’ve all ready voiced, very loudly and very clearly, my reasons for boycotting Battlefield 3. That having been said I’m not one who can justify to myself or others talking about something I don’t know anything about or have had no part in. That being said here is my experience so far with the Battlefield 3 beta.
For starters I wasn’t even invited to the closed beta a month or two ago. Never mind the fact that I’ve beta tested for a decade or more, have run a beta for my own game, played Battlefield since it’s inception and until recently owned Bad Company 2 on every system it exists on and even on the PC *TWICE!*. All that aside, here is my experience with the current beta.
Again I wasn’t invited to the PC version. Mainly because I chose not to buy my way in to it. My buddy Chris got his invite, downloaded the game and…can’t play it. First it only works on IE(officially any way) and second when he tries to launch the game he runs it, it finds a server and then the website tries to launch the game it won’t run. I spent about 45 mins googling and trying different possible solutions and nothing fixed it. This is 2 x 45mins so a total of an hour and a half man hours and no solution. He had spent some time before I got home from work trying to get it to work too so all told I’m sure it was more than 2hrs spent trying to fix it. Not a great start.
Tonight I discover that I’m able to download the PS3 beta no key or anything required. This, unfortunately, made a worse impression than the game not launching at all on the PC. Now before you jump down my throat about how it’s “beta” etc. and I should expect some issues. I fully understand that. Recall my comment above about having beta tested for over a decade. This, this thing, is a giant pile of garbage. It’s hard to know where to begin. Being as close to official launch as it is I assume they are throwing preview code out to aid in hyping the game. But lets be honest this is not what you want the first impression of your game to be.
For starters I had a tough time discerning lag from glitches from lag hacking. On more occasions than I can count I would watch an enemy player appear out of no where and kill a team mate or, with no footstep noises or other indication of his presence he would kill me from behind in our spawn. On one occasion I turned a full 360 degrees seeing no one only to be knifed from behind in an area with out cover. I mention the lag hacking or possible exploitation of the maps because there were several times the kill cam would seem to be moving in the floor. Another occasion I was covering a door and facing a teammate who was also covering the door from the other side. An enemy simply appeared from no where in front of my team mate and knifed him in the face before he could respond. I managed to kill the guy but only after he turned around and simultaneously killed me too.
This lag, or what ever it is continued in to other areas of the game. I would frequently throw grenades that an enemy would stand directly over as it went off, he would shoot me and kill me and his kill cam would show 100% health. Also while attempting to fire, even sited, I would be struck not only by recoil but apparently by epilepsy too. It would appear that recoil was happening but also that my character was sporadically bending at the waist. The flash light is way way way over powered. From a range of 30-40 meters away it would obscure a 10-15 meter radius keeping you from being able to hit not only the enemy carrying it but any enemies in the immediate vicinity. It’s like they ripped one of the lights from the 9/11 memorial and attached it to a weapon rail. Last but not least were the weird buggy smoke trails lit like muzzle flash but with no one present. Other than obscuring vision and flashing sporadically they don’t move, they don’t do anything. Like a programmer was testing muzzle flashes but forgot to remove the particle system and lighting. Finally about every 3rd spawn or so I would spawn with no retical.
The interface has about as many problems. The outfitting menu is some what similar to Battlefield Bad Company 2′s but they’ve added so many do-dads and cruft elements that it’s just a visual mess. The kit selection menu was kind of jammed towards the bottom like they hadn’t scaled the elements for console and half covered the deploy button indicator. Weapons, as you would expect being metal, are a grey color and much of the kill indicator text is a sort of semi-translucent blue. When you’re weapon is sited the text is nearly invisible. I couldn’t tell if I got a kill at range or not due to this which essentially left me chasing ghosts on occasion.
All said this has been one of the worst beta’s I’ve ever played. I can give a lot of forgiveness to a game since I know what it takes to make one but this, I’d call this beta and probably wouldn’t let any one with out an NDA see it. This has completely re-enforced my belief that not buying this game is the right thing to do beta or not.
The Rick Roll In Pictures
A few days ago I came across some instructions on how to setup your own URL shortener. It appeared pretty simple so I followed the instructions. So now I have use of http://brockh.at as my own URL shortening service. With this nifty utility at my disposal I soon realized it’s power to surprise. Unless you’ve got a twitter service that reads ahead for you there is really no way to know whats on the other end of that link. So it occurred to me that this was the perfect opportunity to perpetrate that dearest of Internet traditions. The RICK ROLL! Behold, the results.
Incident number two of the RICK ROLL looked something like this.
May be I should have titled this post “Losing Friends and Influencing People”. Last but not least I’ve got one of my earlier attempts at the RICK ROLL in Minecraft no less.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this presentation of some Rick Rolling in action. If you’d like to Rick Roll you’re own friends you can use my link. http://brockh.at/lt3EFR
When We Left Earth: I Didn’t, Other People Did.
Image via Wikipedia“Space! The final frontier…” If you are a geek like me those words give you a little tingle up your spine. You’ve probably also contemplated, for at least a moment, becoming an astronaut and exploring the vast universe that awaits us. While thats still really expensive and only a few humans get to do it you can at least see how far we’ve come by getting your hands on an HD source of “When We Left Earth”. A multi part documentary of our trek in to space with tons of rarely seen video inside NASA and outside the atmosphere.
They kind of down play the level of risk that the Apollo 13 astronauts were under and they highlight some other instances of sketchy space hijinks early on in the Apollo program. This I think was one of the most striking aspects of this video compilation. Additionally there is a ton of video that I had never seen before that was extremely insightful in to what Astronauts see and go through. All of it is spectacular!
Netflix has most of it in HD streaming but they cut you short minus the last couple of disks. So you’ll have to order it up through the mail if you want the full experience. That or if you would rather own you nab the DVD from Amazon here: When We Left Earth – The NASA Missions (Limited Edition)
Pleading The Case for Blu-Ray
Image via WikipediaLately there have been more and more posts touting streaming of content over ownership of specifically DVDs. While I completely believe that streaming is a viable option I also believe a fair apples to oranges comparison should be had.
With out digging to deep in to the technical aspects of streaming some things should be understood. The HD resolutions are just that. A height by width measure of number of pixels with no accounting for the quality of those pixels. The higher the compression the worse the picture quality. Services like Netflix vary the image quality to fit your internet bandwidth in order to maintain that HD pixel number. There is no way your home internet bandwidth can match the bandwidth available to the internal components of a Blu-ray player. To be clear most internet connections are between 3 and 50Mbits. “BD Video movies have a maximum data transfer rate of 54 Mbit/s“. So until fiber and gigabit to the home is ubiquitous a streamed video will never match the quality of a Blu-ray disc.
As I mentioned I believe streaming is good for most cases but for those couple of treasured movies that you watch over and over Blu-ray is the way to go. This constant preaching that physical discs should not be owned at all is selling both quality and control of content up the river to the giant corporations. Don’t let it happen.
