PRACX v1.10 Release

[Lord Avalon]

I built the Supercollider, and the video had no sound. (I don't know about other videos, as I usually close them right away.) Back to the game, and it has sounds.

[Yitzi]

Ok, here it is.

[PlotinusRedux]

Here's the patched version.  Hopefully whatever was making pracxpatch.exe crash doesn't also crash prax.dll.  I hate MS compilers with all the hidden dll links--I might switch to GNU C to avoid them.

[Yitzi]

It seems to be working.

[Lord Avalon]

I built the Supercollider, and the video had no sound. (I don't know about other videos, as I usually close them right away.) Back to the game, and it has sounds.

OK, maybe never mind. I built Pholus Mutagen, started a new game and built Human Genome Project - no sounds. But then I restarted my PC. Got HGP sound. Just one of those things?

[PlotinusRedux]

Yitzi--antivirus maybe?  Or not running pracxpatch with admin rights?  What antivirus are you running, if any?

Lord Avalon--could be, my sound gets corrupt playing this old games from time to time--it doesn't go away completely, but gets very distorted.  If you want to test more and know how to use the command shell, you can go to the "movies" directory under your SMACX directory and run:

playuv15 -software supercollider.wve

That's what I have it shelling to to play in game movies now to avoid the movies+alt tab issues.

[Yitzi]

Yitzi--antivirus maybe?  Or not running pracxpatch with admin rights?  What antivirus are you running, if any?

I ran with admin rights, antivirus was both Windows Defender (which I had been running on the old computer where it worked properly) and AVG (which IIRC I had not).

[PlotinusRedux]

Yitzi--if you get time sometime, you might try running the patch program with AVG off to see if that's the issue.

If AVG is the issue, the solution would be to just distribute patched versions of terranx.exe and terran.exe.  I don't want to distribute terranx.exe at least myself, though, because I don't want someone installing my patch to overwrite yours.

So, we could either have you do the distribution of both patches together, with me only releasing test versions with a renamed terranx.exe in the interims, and/or we could add a version resource to terranx.exe--when they installed mine, I'd check the terranx.exe version, and if it was above--well, anything, since it doesn't exist now--I would assume they had your patch and not overwrite it.

Fortunately, I don't expect my patch to terranx.exe to ever need to be changed--all I need from it is to load prax.dll if it exists, and the dll can do everything from there.  So as long as your terranx.exe contains the changes I sent tonight, it should always be enough to work with anything I do in the future.

Well, unless, of course, I am able to make a fully re-compilable version of terranx using Scient's IDA database--in which case we can all start modifying that source code in git and any compilation from it will have all our changes.

[PlotinusRedux]

Actually, adding a version resource to terranx.exe wouldn't be a bad idea in general, so people could easily verify they have the right version of your patch, etc.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/284258/how-do-i-set-the-version-information-for-an-existing-exe-dll lists a few free ways to add a version resource if you don't have a version of Visual Studio that will do it (the free Express version I'm using won't, I've been adding them to my dll's manually).

[Yitzi]

I've just been editing the hardcoded text referenced by "show version number".

[PlotinusRedux]

I've been sitting on 1.04 for a while--the only significant change is the zoom level calculations, but it is a pretty big improvement.

This is probably the last version of a while--I'm going to switch focus to more foundational work for a month or two (especially when Scient releases his IDA work) that will greatly increase the ease of making changes, so I wanted to go ahead and release this.

[Mart]

I will have more detailed reports on PRACX working soon, but one thing, that seem to be connected to the patch is, that sometimes left-click generates like 2 events, both left-clicks subsequent. So for example:
I select a "button/window"? in unit workshop for some field (armour, engine, etc.) then instead of the usual window with options, one of these options gets selected, armour type, engine type, etc. And the window with options appears to blink in a fraction of a second. It looks like my left click generated two the same events (left-click).
Any idea, why this happens?

[Lord Avalon]

... Lord Avalon--could be, my sound gets corrupt playing this old games from time to time--it doesn't go away completely, but gets very distorted.  If you want to test more and know how to use the command shell, you can go to the "movies" directory under your SMACX directory and run:

playuv15 -software supercollider.wve

That's what I have it shelling to to play in game movies now to avoid the movies+alt tab issues.

It works now. I don't remember having any sound problems before your patch (but of course, I could be wrong).

[PlotinusRedux]

Mart--I'm not able to reproduce that, and offhand I can't think of anything I changed that might cause that.  If you find a pattern that seems to make it happen or can think of anything that might help me reproduce it, please let me know--that's the kind of thing I have to be able to reproduce to track down.

Lord Avalon--it's possible one of my "if (0==strcmp(player_name, EVIL_SPOCK))UseBadLuckRandomNumberGenerator();" might be interfering with the sound system.  (It's the internet, so I have to explicitly state that was a joke--you wouldn't believe some of the things I've had people take seriously.  If it is related to patch, the only thing I can think of is maybe since SMAX is already using DirectSound, sometimes that interferes with playuv15.exe accessing DirectSound?  That's just a wild guess, though.)

[Lord Avalon]

You are mistaken. I am Good Spock, aka Cool Spock. ^_^