22 July 2012

How to play your own music collection in Guild Wars 2

Not only can you play your own music in Guild Wars 2, you can also control when they will be played.

All you have to do is to create playlists which include your tracks and put them into a special folder. This folder can be found under: C:\YOURWINDOWSNAME\Documents\Guild Wars 2\Music\

Supported types of playlists:
.wpl .m3u .pls .asx .wax

Supported types of audio files in those playlists:
.mp3 .ogg .flac .wav .aiff .mid .it

This folder will most probably be empty. You have to name your playlists a certain way to have them played at the appropriate time. The following names are recognized:

Ambient
Battle
BossBattle
City
Crafting
MainMenu
NightTime
Underwater


All mp3players like WinAmp, iTunes, etc make it really easy to create a playlist. Just create one with the right name and put it into the Music-folder.


Troubleshooting:
If you are using Windows Media player you can run into a problem with the playlist where GW2 doesn't recognize the audio file paths because WMP saves them in relation to the playlist as opposed to saving the full path.
If that happens open the playlist in a texteditor and change the absolute paths including the drive letter.
For example WMP would write \bandname\title.mp3 instead of D:\mymusic\bandname\title.mp3

01 July 2012

Using the Diablo 3 RMAH without an Authenticator.

Well the title isn't entirely correct. You have to link an authenticator to your Battle.Net account at one point to start using the RealMoney Auction house. But the trick is that you can delink it afterwards and still use the auction house. I sold several items after that and all went find through the audit.

This may not be a big deal for some people, but for me it is. Because almost all german ISPs forcibly disconnect you after 24h you have to re-authenticate yourself to Battle.Net every day, which does get a bit annoying after some days.


17 May 2012

SharpKeys 3.5 - How to get rid of CapsLock

Who needs the CapsLock-Key anyway? In my opinion it is the most useless key on the keyboard and only used by angry internet citizens.

There are several ways to deactivate CapsLock or give it a new function. I used a AutoHotkey-script for a long time but utilizing the Windows-registry is the cleanest albeit not easiest way to do so.

This is were SharpKeys comes into the picture. It's a small program which lets you change the function of any on the keyboard and makes the necessary changes in the registry. You don't even have to install it, it works out of the box.

CapsLock is useless and my LAlt is broken.

Just select the key which function you want to change and then select the new function. That's it. Reboot and you're done.

You can get SharpKeys 3.5 here and here.

26 April 2012

Detailed maps of Legend of Grimrock

Level 1 - Into the Dark

Level 2 - Old Tunnels

Level 3 - Pillars of Light

Level 4 - Archives

Level 5 - Hallways

Level 6 - Trapped

Level 7 - Ancient Chambers

Level 8 - The Vault

Level 9 - Goromorg Temple I

Level 10 - Goromorg Temple II

Level 11 - The Tomb

Level 12 - The Prison

Level 13 - The Cemetery
You should be able to get what the symbols mean by yourself. The green dots are Monsters I had not yet killed in my playthrough or Monsters that respawned.

The maps themselfs I screenshotted while having developer mode enabled.

Thank a lot to Punchy on the official Forums who told the world how to exactly do that in the first place.

20 April 2012

Better Skyrim Controller Support: 8 hotkeys, quicksave -load and more!


-----===>) WHAT IS THIS (<===-----
If you use the xbox360-controller with the pc-version you normally have only two hotkeys for your favourites. Those are *Left* and *Right* on the d-pad. You hold those and they will get assigned to the items.

This file adds 6 more on the D-pad to that. You still enter the favourites menu with *Up*. In the menu though you use the left Analog Stick to browse. The new hotkeys are:

D-pad-Up 
D-pad-Down 
Sprint + D-pad-Left 
Sprint + D-pad-Right 
Sprint + D-pad-Up 
Sprint + D-pad-Down

You have to enter the Favourites Menu by pressing Back on your Controller.
If you want to Wait you have to press Sprint+Back.

For the Quicksave Function you have to press X+B. Hold X then press B. Quicksaved. :)
To Quickload press A+Y.

Taking Screenshots happens by pressing Sprint+Start.
To Autowalk press Sprint+Right Stick.

There is also another Version for Lefthanded People where I swapped Looking and Moving




-----===>) TROUBLESHOOTING (<===-----
Delete the file ControlMap_Custom.txt in your Skyrim mainfolder.

-----===>) INSTALLATION (<===-----
To Install, just extract the zip inside your Skyrim-Data-folder under X:\programs\steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\Data

You can download my mod from skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=246

-----===>) DEINSTALLATION (<===-----
Just delete the file controlmap.txt in X:\programs\steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\Data\Interface\Controls\PC

17 April 2012

Bluestacks, an Android emulator, lets you play apps and games on your PC!

Well, technically it's not an emulator but a virtual Machine. In the end that doesn't matter though. :)

Bluestacks lets you run almost any Android app or game on your PC. I killed a lot of time with Drag Racing and Angry Birds Space. :) If you need some kind of multi-touch controls try experimenting around with the keyboard. A lot of standard user interfaces seem to be mapped to the keyboard. That way you can use keyboard and mouse like you would anyway on a PC.

At this time it's still in beta but already runs like a charm. It crashes maybe once a week but I'm sure that's not as annoying as real phones telling you that their Battery is getting low.

Until it is officialy released it's completely free to use. After that it will cost some money but it should still cost much much less than a new Tablet or Phone.

If you want to give it a try you can download it here.

Should you own a Mac and be interested, the developers have said they're working on a Mac-version as well.

All in all I'm really excited about this and I'm looking forward to the actual release.

If you want to get in touch with the team behind Bluestacks you can do that best over Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/bluestacksinc



Customization


You will probably see that a part of Bluestacks, the RocketDock, gets autostarted with Windows. Although I love Bluestacks, this thing annoyed me, because I found exactly no use for it. I got rid of it after killing the process "RocketDock.exe" and renaming the exe itself in "C:\Users\Your Name\AppData\Local\BlueStacks\RocketDock\" to "RocketDock.meh"

Other than that I can see that some of you could get annoyed that you "have to" login to Bluestacks with your Facebook account. Well you actually don't. You only need to do that if you want to synchronize Bluestacks with an actual android device you already own. Because I don't own an android phone I could not test the cloud functionality of Bluestacks.

If you want to change the path of the SDCard -file Bluestacks uses you can change that in the registry under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BlueStacks\Guests\Android\BlockDevice\2\". There are other options you can fiddle around with, like the resolution of the Bluestacks window while it is not in fullscreen mode.

Also you should get yourself another launcher because the default one is at this moment a bit lackluster. I'm using the AWDLauncher.


Android/iOS Drag Racing Half Mile Tunes Level 1-10

Here are the half mile tunes for Drag Racing


Level 1 2 3 4 5
Car Honda S2000 Honda S2000 Honda S2000 BMW M3 Aston Martin
est. Time 19,080 16,639 15,499 14,417 14,006
Upgrades 011010 011545 555555 555555 111012
NOS  length 4,31s 4,30s 4,30s 3,18s
Final Drive 3,564 4,852 3,085 2,492 1,845
1st Gear 3,134 3,135 4,000 4,062 3,998
2nd Gear 2,650 2,649 3,150 3,358 3,401
3rd Gear 1,950 1,402 1,922 2,299 2,800
4th Gear 1,552 1,098 1,578 1,801 2,351
5th Gear 1,248 0,901 1,351 1,499 2,000
6th Gear 1,111 0,775 1,172 1,349 1,680



Level 6 7 8 9 10
Car Aston Martin Novitec Rosso Pagani Zonda SSC Venom GT
est. Time 12,879 12,363 11,639 11,141 10,896
Upgrades 142455 555555 443455 252455 555555
NOS  length 2,50s 2,32s 2,36s 2,16s 2,15s
Final Drive 2,248 3,609 3,418 1,616 3,324
1st Gear 3,152 1,779 1,792 3,042 1,498
2nd Gear 2,648 1,485 1,518 2,501 1,261
3rd Gear 2,048 1,165 1,191 2,021 0,959
4th Gear 1,702 1,026 1,050 1,719 0,850
5th Gear 1,439 0,916 0,932 1,492 0,759
6th Gear 1,282 0,825 0,822 1,330 0,688


Have fun! :)

Android/iOS Drag Racing Quarter Mile Tunes Level 1-10

I played almost entirely through Drag Racing on Bluestacks and wanted to make my tunes public because I had a really hard time finding a place where just all tunes would be on one place.

Most of these tunes are from around the interweb and all of them customized for myself. All of them also start in second gear. That means you punch the pedal to the metal and as soon as the race starts you shift into second gear.

Fire your Nitros as soon as the tires stop smoking not earlier because that would waste the extra boost.

I'm not the world leader in any race or level but these tunes are all very competitive and you will first place about 90% of the time.

Let's start with the quarter mile tunes:

Level 1 2 3 4 5
Car Mazda RX-8 Honda S2000 Nissan Skyline BMW M3 Lambo G
est. Time 12,374 10,657 9,992 9,581 9,409
Upgrades 011412 011545 555555 555555 011451
NOS  length 4,39s 4,38s 2,86s 3,18s 2,52s
Final Drive 4,596 4,074 5,000 3,364 4,551
1st Gear 3,869 3,998 4,949 2,949 3,299
2nd Gear 3,202 3,152 3,670 2,498 2,402
3rd Gear 1,901 1,761 2,000 1,702 1,462
4th Gear 1,601 1,458 1,501 1,451 1,158
5th Gear 1,380 1,202 1,119 1,269 0,962
6th Gear 1,221 1,022 0,930 1,139 0,870
7th Gear \ \ \ \ \



Level 6 7 8 9 10
Car Lambo G CM Biturbo CM F1 FXX Veyron 16.4 SS
est. Time 8,638 8,305 7,878 7,594 7,269
Upgrades 433555 112555 151555 235555 555555
NOS  length 2,40s 2,06s 2,32s 2,23s 1,99s
Final Drive 4,438 3,594 1,994 2,557 3,341
1st Gear 3,312 3,162 3,779 3,498 2,903
2nd Gear 2,733 2,499 3,100 2,879 2,201
3rd Gear 1,759 1,550 2,058 2,100 1,680
4th Gear 1,299 1,249 1,779 1,799 1,349
5th Gear 1,049 1,051 1,559 1,598 1,109
6th Gear 0,891 0,880 1,452 1,462 0,919
7th Gear \ \ \ \ 0,780

Next Post will be all half mile tunes.


Edit: 24.04.2012 Screwed up the time for the lvl2 Honda S2000.

Deleting undeletable registry keys

I did help the father of a friend with his computer and among other things he wanted me to install a newer version of Avira Antivir.

To uninstall the old version you actually had to download and run a special tool by Avira to clean up after the normal uninstallation process which was idiotic enough...

The big hurdle I faced was that the tool couldn't delete a handful of registry keys no matter how I started it. As admin, in safe-mode, etc. Nothing helped.

I couldn't even delete it by hand. Again trying every special trick I and Google knew...

It was then that I learned that the registry had actually a permission system like you would knew from the Windows NTFS-Filesystem. So I had to first rightclick the key I wanted to delete give everyone all the permission there were and then I could delete it.

In hindsight it seems pretty simple but at that time I did not found a single solution to this problem. Maybe my googleFu betrayed me but I am posting this Information here to help maybe a single person. :)