Might not be the right Site to post this but I wonder if I can edit an older game files that are MSH , TEX , AIS and PLC formats.
I've searched google about those formats but can't actually find solid solutions.
I have this :
They come from an old game named IGNITION (a.k.a. Bleifuss fun or Fun Tracks) and I love this game so much , it made my childhood.
Now what I want is to somehow edit the files , make the cars have more balanced speeds or add new cars , maps etc.
Related
i was messing around organizing my music files when i asked myself why windows nor linux offer a way to organize a folder by custom tags in a database-likle manner rather than hierarchically.
The problem i wanted to solve is the following:
I have music files
A titled "tempest" from Beethoven, classical music in a piano only version.
B titled "whatever" from Mozart, classical music orchestral
D titled "one winged angel" from Uematsu, classical style, game ost, orchestral
C titled "one winged angel" same as before, violin only, cover from Taylor Davis.
And whatever "main" information i use for grouping, makes listing files by any other category immpossible.
Hence i whished to save files in an hidden folder with a simple increasing number.format, and have a program in which i can add files, add categories, search by tags, and end up with a list of the files i want. E.g. today i want to listen to all piano only pieces independently of their composer-time period.
I started making a structure of vectors containing vectors (aka matrix) but indexing lines and column by string started getting complicated when i want to remove a column.
And searching files by tag would require me to have each tag as an object knowing all files that use it, and it starts becomming more similar to a 3d matrix.
I though it would be better to think of this as a database, started with sqllite but ended with the problem of being unable to remove columns (i know i can create a copy etcc, but i wanted to avoid messy workarounds).
Also an sql-like database wouldn't allow me to have an area dedicated to a list of random tags for each file without a definite category.
Is there any existing library that rather then working as an sql database offers me something similar to a search/insert optimized matrix for strings? I don't think i was the first one thinking about that, someone must have done something similar.
This is very similar to what i want to achieve (strictly speaking about functionality), but rather than having only a bunch of random tags, i'd like to have some categories AND a set of random tags.
The problem with random tags only is you can't use the same word when it refers to different things. For example if the title of a piece is A and there's a film named A with a piece titled B, filtering A in the mess of tags would give both, while with categories i could filter pieces titled A. But the random mess of additional tags without category is useful too, for information you don't want to fill in most of the files and that would take pointless space in a standard database.
This is my first year using Kodi. I have a main library of general music. The file structure for my music is always music > artist > album > songs.
I doubt it matters, but I'm using Kodi 15.x on Win10, Confluence skin.
I set up a generic smart playlist to read all music in my library and shuffle it (I have to say I can't believe how hard it is to tell Kodi just to shuffle a recursive directory full of music -- MediaMonkey, MusicBee et al do this drop dead simple -- point at a directory and say shuffle).
The problem is that I have a second directory full of Christmas season music. Obviously I don't want that mixed into my general catalogue during playback and I don't want to spend a lot of time tagging stuff that can simply be segregated easily by directory.
The rub comes when I try to set up a second smart list to shuffle across my that Christmas directory. Again, should be simple if I were using any other media player, but I can't seem to figure it out with Kodi. It either starts mixing in non-Christmas music (which I don't want) or won't play anything at all.
Any chance of figuring this out before Christmas? ;)
Thanks in advance...
Not sure why you mention the first playlist, but here is a way without smart playlists:
Add the parent folder of your christmas folder to your files. Don't scan it to library.
Select the christmas folder, go to context menu (hit c if your using a keyboard) and choose queue media. Your songs will start playing, just go into the currently playing visualization and hit randomize at the bottom.
I want to make an interactive fiction game editor, in this type of games a story has many story-lines where each gamer can finish the game with a different story. For each section of a game story we need a node that tells the story and interacts with player.
I will make an editor for drawing story sections (nodes), that every node can link to minimum one node and maybe many, also each node has some properties (like text, photo, sound, ...) and variables (like gold on the ground, HP reducer, ...) that must be used in the game story.
What's the best way for saving this story-line (nodes) in a file for loading with my game player?
If you can write a code example in C++, Pascal or PHP it is better for me.
You want to do a couple of things:
Figure out what you need to reconstruct a saved node completely enough to use it again.
Prepare all that data you need.
Look into file i/o. There are loads of tutorials online, search for "c++ file i/o" or something similar.
Now you implement file saving/loading.
I'd guess you'll end up with something like this for saving.
write number of nodes
for node in node_list:
write node info
And then for loading
read number of nodes
for i in range(0, number_of_nodes)
read node info
If you run into a specific problem ask a new question.
I think you should take a look to xml.
There are a lot of libraries to work with it, personally in c++ I prefer pugi but you can take a look to libxml2, xerces, etc...
Pugi XML
If you don't want user interaction you can always encrypt the xml before save it.
I want to create levels in my cocos2d game and I do not know how to do that with .plist files ... I searched the Internet but unfortunately I couldn't find significant information on how to implement these property lists. Can you please help out ?
Check out Tiled Map Editor. Tiled's TMX format is supported by Cocos2D.
As with any Apple technologies, the first place you should start searching for is the developer.apple.com website. In this case, here's the Property List (plist) Programming Guide.
However, I find property lists very awkward to work with, specifically if you want to create them manually and whenever they contain more than just a few entries. It certainly can't hurt to evaluate rolling out your own file format, text-based plain and simple. I would always rather work with simple text files like these rather than messing with property lists:
X=10;Y=10;Tile=30;
X=12;Y=11;Tile=28;
X=16;Y=19;Tile=22;
It's a different story if you actually design the data with a tool or within an app, where you'll be able to make use of the various collection convenience methods that save and load property lists, for example to and from a dictionary or array.
Because the open source geo-coders cannot begin to compare to Google's or even Yahoo's, I would like to start a project to create a good open source geo-coder. Just to clarify, a geo-coder takes some text (usually with some constraints) and returns one or more lat/lon pairs.
I realize that this is a difficult and garguntuan task, so I am wondering how you might get started. What would you read? What algorithms would you familiarize yourself with? What code would you review?
And also, assuming you were going to develop this very agilely, what would you want the first prototype to be able to do?
EDIT: Let's set aside the data question for now. I am going to use OpenStreetMap data, along with a database of waypoints that I have. I would later plan to include other data sets as well, and I realize the geo-coder would be inherently limited by the quality of the original data.
The first (and probably blocking) problem would be: where do you get your data from? (unless you are willing to pay thousands of dollars for proprietary sets).
You could build a geocoding-api on top of OpenStreetMap (they publish their data in dumps on a regular basis) I guess, but that one was still very incomplete last time I checked.
Algorithms are easy. Good mapping data, however, is expensive. Very expensive.
Google drove their cars all over the world, collecting this data among other things.
From a .NET point of view these articles might be interesting for you:
Writing Your Own GPS Applications: Part I
Writing Your Own GPS Applications: Part 2
Writing GIS and Mapping Software for .NET
I've only glanced at the articles but they've been on CodeProject's 'Most Popular' list for a long time.
And maybe this CodePlex project which the author of the articles above made available.
I would start at the absolute beginning by figuring out how you're going to get the data that matches a street address with a geocode. Either Google had people going around with GPS units, OR they got the information from some existing source. That existing source may have been... (all guesses)
The Postal Service
Some existing maps(printed)
A bunch of enthusiastic users that were early adopters of GPS technology who ere more than willing to enter in street addresses and GPS coordinates
Some government entity (or entities)
Their own satellites
etc
I guess what I'm getting at is the information was either imported from somewhere or was input by someone via some interface. As my starting point I would look at how to get that information. In an open source situation, you may be able to get a bunch of enthusiastic people to enter information.
So for my first prototype, boring as it would be, I would create a form for entering information.
Then you need to know the math for figuring out the closest distance (as the crow flies). From there, try to figure out how to include roads. (My guess is you would have to have data point for each and every curve, where you hold the geocode location of the curve, and the angle of the road on a north/south and east/west vector. You'd probably need to take incline into account, too to get accurate road measurements.)
That's just where I'd start.
But in all honesty, I wouldn't even start on this. Other programmers have done it already, I'm more interested in what hasn't already been done.
get my free raw data from somewhere like http://ipinfodb.com/ip_database.php
load it into a database, denormalizing for fast lookups
design my API
build it out as a RESTful web service
return results in varying formats: JSON, XML, CSV, raw text
The first prototype should accept a ZIP code and return lat/lon in raw text.