I've redesigned the page again so now it's easier to read and less cluttered. I'm not completely happy with the downloads page yet so it will probably change sometime. Maybe now I'll start to have more posts with actual content rather than announcing redesigns.

I've also switched to ArchLinux as my main OS, so there will be very little (if anything) about Windows/C# after this.

This tutorial is for creating .cur files on XP. I haven't tried this on Vista/W7 but it should work for them too. I don't know how to make animated cursors, but who uses those anyway?

Create a 32x32 image of your cursor in your favourite image editing program. I will use a dot cursor as an example. I don't recommend you actually use this cursor because it's horrible as one.



Save your image as a .png and download png2ico (actually you can use anything that can save as .ico, I just do it this way). Convert your .png to .ico by running "png2ico dot.ico dot.png". Obviously replace the filenames with what you want.

Open the icon in a hex editor (I use XVI32). Jump to address 2 (assuming the first address is 0) and change the value to "02". This is so the file is seen as a cursor rather than an icon.



The values at offset 6/7 should both be 20 (32 in decimal). These are the icon dimensions.

Jump to address A (10 in decimal). This value is the X coordinate of the cursor hotspot (where clicks occur). In my example I am setting this to 02. Remember to convert your value to hexdecimal before inserting it (if you wanted to use the centre of the image, you would use 0F rather than 15). Repeat this at address C, the Y coordinate. Again, I am using 02 for this.



Now save your cursor as whatever.cur and move it to %WINDIR%\Cursors (%WINDIR% is usually C:\WINDOWS). Now you can select it from the Pointers tab in the mouse control panel.



Click ok and you're all done! If you want more information, take a look at Wikipedia. Get my finished cursor here.

I've redone the design for the website so it's not as painful to read it on a high resolution monitor and it should be a little easier to navigate. The new design is heavily based on (and/or a complete rip off of) the ArchLinux website, which alone makes it fantastic. Any suggestions on how to improve the look would be appreciated.

As usual there have been several bux fixes, mostly related to comments (hence why they took so long to fix). I also found a page crippling bug when trying to post this for the first time...

I plan to have the new projects page up and running with the old projects (and a few new ones) this weekend.

Updated it so everything works with the recent updates and also added a nicer scoreboard, improved the medic HUD and made your health colour change to red when you are low on health. I also split my HUD and config into separate archives.

hud.zip (66.3KB)
cfg.zip (7.1KB)

I've updated my Radial Menu to actually be usable. I've created a page for it and added a link in the sidebar. There's no point explaining anything here, since everything you need to know about it is on its page.

Radial Menu

I've updated the website again and as usual, most of the changes on the admin/PHP side of things.

There are some changes for the actual site though; obviously there is now a sidebar (although the pages linked to in it are incomplete). It would be nice to get some suggestions for things to add to it, since it looks pretty stupid when it only takes up a tenth of the page.

Another nice change is the website now uses mod_rewrite, so URLs are easier to read (only for the index and links on the right, although I may make it rewrite URLs for other pages too).

I'm also working on a new version of the MHFU damage calculator which should be ready to upload soon.

First version of my damage calculator. It's not fully accurate as it doesn't take into account class variables (eg GS charges) and you can't properly set the defense modifiers.

I plan on adding proper defense modifiers, fixing it to use class variables and if possible, saying how many hits it will take to kill the monster. I may also write a C# version of it.

MHFU Damage Calculator

http://www.minecraft.net/
If you actually saw this sign and came here because of it, sorry for wasting your time.


I have also started work on a damage calculator for Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (which is a fantastic game and it is worth buying a PSP just for it) however, I don't have many weapons in it yet and I'm not sure of defense/HP values for each quest so it's not very useful yet (unless your weapon is from the MHF2 part of the Iron Gunlance path). If someone could send me a list of weapons split into classes (individual, not pairs) and in a logical order, preferably in text form, I would greatly appreciate it.

Fixes a bug that spammed error logs and made players spawn at default spawns, adds a spawn noise, adds code for a kritz powerup (but there's no model for it yet so it doesn't do anything) and adds an option for regeneration to start after a kill (tf2dm_regenkill).

Download: HERE

Update: moved to HERE.

One of my first programs in C#, a radial menu for launching programs.

Simply run the .exe, right click the system tray icon, add a few programs to the list then hit alt+space. Moving your mouse towards one of the icons will make it enlarge and vice versa, while moving your mouse away from the radial menu or clicking on something that's not an icon will hide it.

Radial Menu is 30KB and won't modify anything in the registry - all it will do is create a radial.ini in the directory you launched it from, so it'll work fine on a USB drive.

Radial Menu is free for personal and commercial use.

Problems:
Uses a crapload of memory, even when hidden
Isn't very CPU friendly when you move your mouse
Icons can look pretty bad
There's a control coloured outline around the icons/ring. I'm not sure how to get rid of these
There's no option to resize it so having lots of icons will be messy
Options dialog is incomplete. Will update it to let you rearrange icons, resize the radial menu, possibly change colours, disable icon resizing etc

Has only been tested on Windows XP 32bit.

Download: Radial.exe
Source: src.zip

Fixes the timer errors that would fill your error logs and possibly cause the dash to break. Thanks to Tsunami for the fix.

Download: HERE
AlliedModders: HERE

Stops people from using 2 skywalking exploits that have been known about for over a year. (woo Valve)
Works by spawning a pair of invisible physprops so people can't jump/build into the sky.
Just put in your plugins folder and load.

Download: HERE
AlliedModders: HERE

After looking through the logs and seeing that the search function has only been used once, it reminded me that it was terrible and desperately needed working on. The new search engine is a little slower but will return much better results (although that's not really saying much, given how the previous engine was worthless).

It's still not great however, as it orders by post ID rather than relevance.

Since 1.2: added cvars for disabling airblast jump/dashing/gliding, added option to make fireaxe ignite people on hit, fixed bug that meant people ignited by a fireaxe would never be extinguished and fixed CloseHandle error that's been there since the first version that would fill your error logs.

Download: HERE
AlliedModders: HERE

Allows you to use filename as a parameter for sm_autoupdate_check/download/rem. Also removes the "Removed." from sm_autoupdate_rem.

Download: HERE
AlliedModders: HERE