My Current Projects

Wow, it's been a year since the last post. Guess it's time to post something. In an attempt to try to at least temporarily revive the blog, I'm going to post a little bit about what I'm working on in my spare time.

First off are a couple of programs I'm working on for Halo Combat Evolved PC. I wanted a kind of stats thing to keep track of my stats between games, including things like kill/death ratio, kills/game, laps/game (I play a lot of race), deaths/game. So I figured out with C# it's possible to access Halo's memory and read those values directly, and I spent a while playing around with that. Now I've got a mostly finished program that keeps a running tally of your stats.

While playing around with Halo's memory values, I found out that you can see your (x, y, z) coordinates, as well as the coordinates of everyone else on a server. Although I'm not entirely sure how often those coordinates update, my eventual plan is to try to read those values and display them on a top-down view of the map, so you can have a live map of all the players in a game. This will probably take up most of the screen in order for it to be efficient, so it would most likely have to be on a separate monitor. Or, it would be even better if I can figure out how to overlay the map over the Halo window when you press Shift or something. But I haven't done enough C# to know how to do that, or if that's even possible yet.

And one last quick idea to add to the statistics program is to have heatmaps for each map for kills, deaths, shots fired or whatever. But I haven't started any coding for that yet, so I'm not sure how feasible it is.

The next C# program I'm working on is one I started a while ago in PHP, but PHP is much to slow to run it, and I'd like a nicer interface that PHP can't offer. Or maybe it could, but I decided to switch to C# anyway. The program parses through log files from MSN Messenger, which are XML and really hard to read, and outputs HTML to display them in a nice table. Eventually I would like to make an interface that lets you add people and custom emotes for people for it to display in the HTML files, since at the moment it just displays the custom emote code (ex :jump:). More on this later.

We have talked about providing a WPA cracking service, and I think we have most of the back end already, and a massive dictionary, I just need to work on the website and integrating the two. I haven't really started yet, but that's something that's on my todo list.

Another project I was working on, but am taking a break from at the moment is a TV show visualization-type-thing. I want a nice way to display how many episodes I have of certain TV shows in my web browser. I actually wrote a good bit of code for it, but I got bored and stopped working on it. But once I get back to it, I'd like a main page with a list of all the TV shows I have. I want to create a graph that shows the percentage of episodes I have out of the total number of episodes. And ideally I'd have a page for each TV show that displays info about the show, all the episodes, and which specific ones I have.

And that's about all I can think of that I'm working on for the moment. I'll probably make more specific posts on these projects as they progress.