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CS Stats Badges

Now that the CS stats is running correctly let’s all get our badges to display on blogs.

Here’s mine:

Yeah I’m at rank 2 now. Bharath the pro is at the top.

See the tutorial at The Ampli5 Blog to get your own badge.

If you want some more control over the colours in the badge, modify these codes as required and use them in the image URL.

?id=1&template=2&rcolor=red
?id=1&template=2&red=255&green=255&blue=255
?id=1&template=2&rcolor=black&red=255&green=255&blue=255

CS Stats Updated Again

I’ve deleted all the CS stats and reprocessed them from the beginning, a process that took me over two hours! Since I set aliases most of the duplicate names have been integrated with the actual names.

Now the great pro Bharath is on top and I’m going to have extra hard to beat him. Damn you Bharath!

If you want to play the game with us, read this earlier post.

RPG Character Creation Is Not For Me

I have a problem with character creation in roleplaying games, especially ones based on the Dungeons & Dragons rule set. I have trouble deciding what character to chose. I chose a melee character in Neverwinter Nights and it was great fun. I didn’t have some thirty spells to manage and cast and I could use all those cool weapons and heavy armour. However when Neverwinter Nights 2 came out I didn’t want to play a melee character again so I thought about choosing spellcasters. But spellcasters need a lot of micromanagement so after a few hours of being stuck in the character creation screen and reading class advantages and disadvantages on the internet I finally went with a melee character and the game was still fun.

Now I have installed Mask of the Betrayer, the expansion for NWN2. They’ve introduced some new character classes and I want to try them and play differently so as usual I am stuck in character creation even though I have the option of continuing with my old character. I’ve become so fed up that I’ve abandoned the game completely and it is still lying on the hard disk.

I had the same problem with Vampire - The Masquerade. Points based character customization is so annoying! World of Warcraft is better since you level up and your stats increase automatically. You only have to choose your spells/abilities and special talents.

Hitman Blood Money - It’s Mine!

Finally! I have Hitman Blood Money. Well actually I had it earlier but at that time my hardware had trouble running it so I abandoned it. After I got the GeForce 6600GT and the 1GB of RAM I wanted to play the game again.

Hitman Contracts had been one of the best games I had ever played and I just knew Blood Money would be better. After a long long time I got Vijayalayan to download it and installed it and damn it looks good.

Screenshot:

Can’t wait to play. I came online to play CS but looks like no one else turned up so I’m off to be Agent 47!

Portal Is Awesome!

I just finished playing Portal and it was really good. It was somewhat short with some 19 puzzle levels and one boss level but it was thoroughly enjoyable. The puzzles were interesting and though I was stuck for a long time at some places I eventually found the solution. I was running the HL2 engine at high res so it also looked good. The puzzles don’t involve any combinations of pulleys or locks or annoying stuff like that. The AI character that monitors your progress is really funny and levels are futuristic and Tron-like. You should play it.

HL2EP2 Now, Portal Next

Yay! I have Portal (the game). I’m installing it now. Krish came over and gave me the game files.

Right now I’m playing Half Life 2 Episode 2 and it’s way better that Episode 1. Much more excitement, huge open spaces and lengthy action sequences. Coupled with amazing graphics (you should see the water!), facial expressions on characters and a realistic physics engine, it’s just too much fun. However it’s gotten very chaotic now. I have to take out some 4 Striders with these ridiculous sticky bomb sphere things that this guy invented and they are accompanied by some really powerful units called Hunters. I just died some more times and decided to take a break and try Portal for a while.

I’m also considering uninstalling F.E.A.R. It’s just really boring. I also have World In Conflict installed. More about that later.

Counter Strike Stats, Up and Running

Alright, after a lot work George managed to get the stats of our CS CZ game sessions to display with PsychoStats. (I’ve also mentioned that we already have in game stats running. When you die it will tell you who you were hitting, how much damage was caused, how much damage you got hit for and all kinds of interesting stuff.)

Check it out: http://ampli5.org/stats (bookmark this and check sometime after every game)

What happens is at the end of every game logs are generated and these are processed and displayed as detailed statistics on the site. Players are ranked on their skill which depends on how many they kill, how many times they are killed, the weapons used and other factors. It also tells you if a person moves up or down in the rankings. If you click on a username you get detailed information about the user, what guns he uses, accuracy and more. There are also awards, clan support and lots of features.

We encourage players to use the register link to create an account and claim their game name so that their username will be highlighted in the rankings when they visit the site.

Also got some screenshots from the game when we were playing today:

CS CZ Server Mods

Hopefully tonight with George’s help I should get some of the server modifications working. Using AMX Mod and some plugins, I will be trying to display stats on the game screen. It’s all server side, which means that the clients (you people) don’t have to install or change anything.

The mod will display running statistics on the screen as we are playing. For example, if you kill someone with a headshot it will tell you how much damage you caused and what parts of the person’s body you hit. This is how it looks:

We also have some new players who should be joining us tonight.

George
Rehan (George’s Brother)
Adithya
Ragha
Gokul (back after long hiatus)
Gowtham (ditto)
Xavier

And there are the regular players:

Bharath
Vinod
Hariharan (Vinod’s friend)
Ram Prasad
Lakshminarayanan
Ganesh (if his phone line is fixed)

It’s going to be awesome! (Provided everyone comes to play.) We start at 9.30 PM.

CS CZ Delivery Boy

Oh what a hectic day, running around here.

First I went to Indian Overseas Bank to open a Savings Bank account. But by the time I got there it was closing time for the bank and they told me to come the day after. At 4 PM in the damn afternoon. Ah screw them!

Then I went with George to buy him a microSD card for his new phone. And then later burnt a copy of CS CZ for him.

After that it was off to Ragha’s place to confront Arun and ask him where the hell my DVDs were. They had a lot of comics on them.

Later I burnt a copy of CS CZ for Adithya and Ragha and hopefully they’ll come to play today too.

I still have to go to Xavier’s place and give him a copy as well as pick up the rest of the Stargate seasons from him. I’ll have to do that tomorrow. No time today.

Nuts.

Disk Defragmenting - A Pain

One fine day last week I decided to defragment my hard drive, hoping that it might increase performance in games and such. I was greeted with the following fragmentation analysis of my games drive:

I simply do not have the time to regularly run Disk Defragmenter. On the rare occasion that the computer does not have me or my sister working on it, there will be some download going on in the background. The defragmentation tools requires that no other programs should be accessing the hard disk.

The size of the games these days adds to the problem of fragmentation and it just keeps adding up. Surprisingly, the operating system drive was only slightly fragmented and the other two drives didn’t require defragmentation at all.