Game Development Diaries - 003: Yay for freetype issues!

Well, not really freetype's fault. Just my lazy/incomplete coding that doesn't have full support for font metrics yet. Still, it's pretty nifty considering all a developer using my engine would need to do is the following:

font = new CSFont(&WSImage::loadImage);

font->load("monaco.ttf");

...

font->drawString(T("Hello World!\n This is a multiline text."),42,42);

Also, I haven't posted info yet but the last iteration of the WynterStorm engine was thrown away in favor of a new one. I've started once again at designing the engine, though this time with a few key ideas in mind that are not related specifically to WynterStorm.

I'll discuss the current design of the WynterStorm engine at a later time.

iPaint ideas...

I'm gonna admit it. I too, just like Colbert below me, want an iTablet. It's not even officially announced yet, and I want it. I want it for ideas. I want to be able to write on it. To draw. To paint. iPaint.

At least, when I (or some other developer) decides to develop the app.

So in preparation, and because I had about 30 mins of boredom time today, I started outlining my specific requirements for a decent painting program. This is just a rough document, but it makes some of the ideas clear.

You can find this sketch and more information here: http://zerotri.net/wiki/doku.php?id=ipaint

Stupid internets look what you did.

UN Network Maintainer Released

Today is the first release of our first Useless Tool, the Useless Ninjas' Network Maintainer. It is a .NET application that monitors a specific network adapter, and upon detection of that adapter losing internet, switches a backup adapter on until the primary adapter receives internet again. The GUI is a bit basic, and likely won't change much as simplicity is one of the key goals of our Useless Tools set of software applications. The application is very unobtrusive, fitting in at under 300K on your hard disk, and hides itself in the system tray while maintaining your network adapters to ensure that it does not get in the way of your work.

You can pick up the application here: UNNetworkMaintainer.zip

Feel free to comment here regarding questions, concerns, and any bugs you encounter during the execution of this application.

My network version 28.1.9

So I wanted some faster internets to go along with my new server so made the most elaborate and ridiculous network I could with the parts on hand!



I have a second sb6120 for comcast and decided that I would add it to my current one for double the speeds, originally I was going to just use the multiple nics in my server to use the second modem along side my existing network however that didn't work how I wanted.

My next attempt was to use a ClearOS virtual machine and just bridge the adapters to the vm, the nic with the modem and my existing network, then connect another XP virtual machine to that with a virtual nic. This also didnt work out so well, the multi-wan in clearos didn't want to work with the direct modem bridge.

At last I arrive at my current configuration, poorly visualized by the image above. I will start from the top and work my way down.

But first I had to add another computer to my setup, so I used my old workstation, an old P4 with 2gb of ram with a couple bonus nics.

My main/first modem is connected to my dd-wrt router via gigabit from there it goes to
my main computer, a 24 port switch with various thing plugged in and my new ClearOS box
The second modem plugs directly into the ClearOS box with gigabit, the new box uses multi-wan to manage the 2 connections and then provides network access to a third nic

this nic is connected directly to my server via one out of its 2 nics, the second nic is connected back to my orginal network for file sharing and other local network apps.

In order to keep the local area network nic on my server from connection to the internet, I simply changed the dns server to the local interface creating a loopback, this allows the server to only connect to the internet by the second load balanced nic.

I get very good speeds using this config with usenet, torrenting I get good speeds but I have to work out some bugs. Here is a screenshot of newsleecher doing its thing, I am getting 9.24 megabytes p/s download

 

There is a configuration issue on the second modem that will only allow it to hit 2 MB a second with usenet, I need to talk to comcast because I think my account is on the wrong tier :/

---

My new 12TB server

My old server was a MSI wind u100, it had 2 gb of ram a 1.6ghz atom with HT and a total of 2 TB of storage, well I ran out of space so I built a new one......
The new one kicks the old ones ass by far, however I deeply respect my old it went a whole year 24/7 without a single problem and still works great.

I named its replacement US which is a a shorter version of USELESS the name of its predecessor.

Its specs are as Follows:

EVGA Nforce 730i on board nvidia 9400
Core2Quad Q8400 2.66GHz
8GB of DDR2
Nvidia 9800GTX
650 watt silverstone psu
1 TB WD Black
6 2 TB Seagate 5900 HDs
Generic case

I built mostly with spare parts however I just bought all the 2TB drives  for about 900$ from newegg.
It is running windows 7 Ult x64 because I dont like any of microsoft's server distros for my personal server. For thos of you asking why I used a 9800 in a server, its because I plan to run folding@home on it (Fold for team 135878 1.4 million points!).

I am running the 2 TB drives in a RAID 0 config and even though they are only 5900 rpm drives the performance from them is shocking, I used ATTO for a simple benchmark:

I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw that, here is another one

So thats all, let me know if you have any other questions!

I need a yellow sharpie!

7, originally uploaded by steve_price82.