Schot
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Posts posted by Schot
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Ayup! As long as Interlacing is off everything should be ok. Though I do believe the issue of this topic is now resolved. Alternatively, if you're feeling adventurous (ooooooooooh!
), we could use PNG-8 instead of gif. Same abillities as gif, slightly better compression. I'd wager 16 colours would be enough even for stat images.Nicely done on Equilibrium and Megalcarwen's. Noticed the nice job you did on Remnants of Drizzt as well. Regarding our campaign to reduce file sizes it was largely in response to a lot of 1MB+ size images that we had from the old days so don't kill yourself over the stuff under 300kb. It's ol to leave those alone if you'd rather be doing something else. However I'm a fan of optimizing so carry on as you please! ^^ I trust you'll be as particular as I would, haha.
Oh and if you happen to stumble across this list of images and then freak out about the sizes like me then don't worry too much about them. They've been optimized but their file sizes aren't being displayed properly. To make sure you can go to whatever pictures page and then use the refesh link from the wiki's left menu. It will update the picture's page with the current file size. I need to find a maintenance script that will update all those...
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That's terrible Ysne. I hope you're not in too much pain.
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Well it's been months since this whole thing got started and when last I posted we were waiting for the server techs to fix this problem. So! Is it fixed? Hmmmmm....
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As the title implies. There is a link called Refresh that I added some time ago but never got around to explaining. Months ago I added a type of file caching system to sacredwiki to reduce the size of it's database for easier backing up. Now pages are cached as html files on the server. One downside is that it's a somewhat persistent cache state. Sometimes when you visit a page on the wiki you might expect to see a change on a certain page but for some reason it hasn't. Two possibilities. Your browser cache or the wiki's cache.
The Refresh link will force the wiki to generate a fresh render of whatever page you are viewing and sometimes this resolves a problem of a page not displaying what you expect it to.
Our file cache system for the most part works fine though. Whenever an edit is made to a page the system is supposed to generate a new cache version. Also when I make system edits it should also re-render the cache. In the case of the many images I optimized the re-rendering of the cache did not kick in for those pages.
To see for yourself just go to a page, like an image page with an incorrectly written file size, and press the Refresh link to see the file size change. I already did a couple and when we use the Refresh link on a page it affects not only our own view but everyones view of that page.
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Why do you have to make such well thought out and effective points Silver. You're really making it difficult for me to be lazy.
I was looking at the template earlier with this problem in mind and two other options did occur to me that we could try. I'm loathe to alter the delicately written template but there is a chance I could toss in an additional variable with a default that would maintain the existing dialogues we've added to pages. Not sure but I think I know what to do. The other thought was to write a new template that would accomodate this situation of same named NPC's.Side note: Not a bad idea for German, French and Spanish I think. May not get used right away but handy to have. As for naming standard. Yeah. It's not pretty... Leftovers from our early days.
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As far as batch-converting goes, it surely was not completed for PNGs (at least the ones I brought up are still there), but I wonder if something along those lines was applied to some JPGs. I was checking set pages for Mutation sets - main pictures are still the same large PNGs but JPGs that were used to display stats of Glimborin's Garments of Mutation: http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Glimborin%27s_Garments_of_Mutation and some others look distorted. I'd like somebody else to check them, but in the images displayed for me the amount of JPG artifacts and color noise is so big the text is not entirely clear. Versions of these images that I have sitting on my hard drive don't look like that, so I guess it might be a result of some optimization done by the wiki. Pages that were done with GIF images for stats (like Arbereth's Garments of Mutation: http://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred_2:Arbereth%27s_Garments_of_Mutation) look perfectly fine, but JPG ones are a bit messy. This is another reason why I thought of re-uploading some images - as GIFs are both smaller and better-looking, I'd rather make all set pages have them.
By the way, why is the forum refusing to link those pages when I try to insert the links using 'Sacred 2 Wiki' tag? I know that ' (%27) symbol is what breaks it, but I have a feeling it worked better before.
Can you link to jpgs that you suspect looked better in the past please? I have all images backed up from before I ran the batch process. I'm curious about how much change occured.
As for the Sacred 2 Wiki' tag problem... It's our forum software. It happened somehwere along the way of updating the forum with official patches. Even on the dev site for our forum software this function is broken. I made a biiiiig public stink about it on their customer forum, lol. A real big stinky public display of their... FAILURE.
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Oh boy. I got a lotta esplainin to do! Somewhere around here I posted about a fairly extensive batch process of all our jpgs. Since it was a batch not all the jpgs benefited but most did. We had a lot of jpgs that were not saved for web but rather in the old "save as" kind of jpg. Not sure if that makes sense... But in the end I managed to reduce space used by over 2GB. In hosting/server terms, that's a lot. JPG is great. I just needed to optimize the ones we had. It was the biggest easiest impact I could make in terms of saving space. PNG was the next step but I can't batch process PNG since it's a near lossless compression. The only benefit would be to replace png with jpg but in order to maintain contribution credit I would need editors to update their own images. There's a lot of details. I'll try to find that other topic I posted some time ago about all this.
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Thank you, gogo (both for restoration of my editing superpowers and for the warm welcome)!
Now I'll bring the topic back... well, to the topic. I decided to go through the quest pages I did before to apply this new template (and rid the wiki of some heavy PNG dialogues), and already ran into a small issue. The template leaves no opportunity to change the NPC name (it automatically assumes that the name in game matches the title of respective wiki page) which is a bit troublesome in case of side quest NPCs with generic names like Kobold or Soldier (and there are a whole lot of such guys). They all have their own NPC pages titled with location suffix (for example, right now I'm working with this one: Kobold Chieftain - Happy Cow Farm). So what should be put as the dialog caption? Writing it the way it is in game would result in either red or misleading link (with the example above it would link you to the random enemy). Writing it the way it is in the database is even worse... So can you please add the opportunity to use aliases for these NPC links, or suggest some workaround.
Quite the conundrum. How about a Hermit index page of all NPC's named Hermit which would list them all with a prefix or suffix and do the like for all other same named NPC's with regards to dialogues. Sound good?
Any user who wants to fill in dialogues on the Wiki can copy the text from this .txt file.
The decoder/encoder itself is still internal but the decoded text shouldn't be a problem since it can't be used for anything besides a reference.
Excellent resource Flix. Thank you!
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Made a quick Sacred Underworld Dialogue template SX. Not sure if you were wanting one more akin to Sacred 1 but here it is anyway! I've had a lot of problems with the line breaks too SX. The way the wiki interprets line breaks vs the way browsers do is causing a bit of a headache. Do the best you can for now!
http://sacredwiki.org/index.php/Template:S1_Dialogue
That idea of using the res file to generate dialogue text sounds great!
P.s.
WONDERFUL to see you back Silver Fox.
Regarding Player dialogues it would be nice to use "The Player". I started using that after I had done a few. gogo and I started replacing the campaign dialogues first if you'd like to look through that.-
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Well this sure has been an experience. While trying to build this monster our wifi router has been in it's death throws. For the past several days we've barely been able to keep a connection which hasn't helped with trying to get all my apps into the new pc. I learned a bit about the mtu setting in my router. It was in it's default setting which was causing 75-100% chance of packet failures. Eh heh. Did some testing and found the magic number to use. Things are smooth. For now... So back to the fun!
*lurking*
Haha. If you haven't started purchasing yet then I would highly recommend you look into the collection of Asus Socket 1150 Maximus RoG boards. Some really impressive features... I'm loving my vi Impact.
Oh god this is terrible! I forgot how much shoving, cramming, squishing and tweaking goes into building a pc. Been so long. Everything is juuuuust slightly out of alignment so I'm having to do a lot of forcing in order to get holes to align and whatnot. One thing I was smart about though was heating all the wires before assembling so that they would bend easily. I managed the wires so well that I think I could have easily gone with an even smaller case... One minor snag in the works though. The stock CPU cooler is blocking access to the socket for the io side panel audio connector. I don't really need the mic and audio jack on the side of the case but I may find myself wishing I could use it one day soooo... I'm probably going to buy a heatsink tomorrow.
To be continued!
I feel you man, but that feeling when you've finally crammed everything in there just right, and the air is flowing, and you plug it in and hit that power button, everything lights up and the fan start blowing....
...Nothing quite like it.
lol Flix. It IS! It finally IS! Riiiiiiise! Riiiiiiiiiiiiiise! xD Funny you mention air flowing and whatnot. When I got it going for the first time I was excited but then I freaked. I didn't hear any air flowing.
I quickly looked inside the case and found that everything was in fact alright. The fans are just THAT quiet. Hurray! Up and running! Very nice
I'm just waiting on some case fans now, but already installed windows on the PC because everything else is there. And dang! First comp I've used with an SSD, I mean I knew it would be fast, but it took something like 10minutes to complete a fresh windows installation!Oh SSD's are truly gold for the pc geek in all of us, lol. It really is amazing what a difference it makes. Don't forget to make backup images!
10 minutes for a fresh windows...
I remember that I needed 3 1.4MB discettes for MS-DOS and 7 more for Windows 3.1 in a time long long ago, I think it was 27.12.2013. Reanimating a 80486 machine for a shortwave radio card which is not running on new machines.
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In my experience the heat problems at a motherboard is not the cpu but the voltage converters. Try to avoid to block the air flow to them with cables, cards, watercooled cpu...
Good point about the source of heat. I'm noticing in my monitor that the major parts of the motherboard are fine but there are two sensors that are reading temps that are double what my cpu and gpu are. I can't tell what it is yet though because the high temps are labeled as "temp5" and "temp7". Thanx fer nothin temp monitor, haha.
As for temps I'm managing well. I bought after market thermal paste, (arctic cool MX-4). Temps were averaging around 40. Today I found the fan controls so I set my front and rear fans to stqay at about 90% rpm. They don't spin very fast. Their max rpm is about 1100. I have them sitting at about 920 rpm. Now my temps are averaging around 32-37 at modest loads like browsing and stuff. While playing Diablo both CPU and GPU were around 50. Celcius. I'll try and write a bit of a "wrap-up" and likes/dislikes when It's all set up.
P.s.
Nice little surprise. I happy little red Start button inside the case. Handy for building and diagnosing while the case is apart.
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I opted to not use the front panel audio connectors for now and kept the stock cpu cooler. I'm still getting a feel for temperatures so I may still end up buying a cpu heatsink but for now temps are reasonable. Average CPU temp is 38-44c. Temps were very eratic for the first day or two but it's possible that was because I was using hwinfo to monitor my CPU. Now I'm using the cpu monitor software that came with my motherboard which appears to display much more steady results. I still have a lot of work to do to get this new pc setup with all the apps I had on my old one. Such a long process!
Here's the tool I'm using to monitor my pc. The motherboard is a "RoG" board by Asus which is a category of boards for gaming/overclocking. It's very impressive.
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Oh god this is terrible! I forgot how much shoving, cramming, squishing and tweaking goes into building a pc. Been so long. Everything is juuuuust slightly out of alignment so I'm having to do a lot of forcing in order to get holes to align and whatnot. One thing I was smart about though was heating all the wires before assembling so that they would bend easily. I managed the wires so well that I think I could have easily gone with an even smaller case... One minor snag in the works though. The stock CPU cooler is blocking access to the socket for the io side panel audio connector. I don't really need the mic and audio jack on the side of the case but I may find myself wishing I could use it one day soooo... I'm probably going to buy a heatsink tomorrow.
To be continued!
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Woohoo! The final two parts arrived today. I'm working on the new super pc now.
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Dangit! I missed the party too. Happy Birthday Delta!
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Oh wow. I never noticed but now that it's mentioned... Yeah, that doesn't work well at all the way it is. Pretty sure the name used to be directly above the avatar in past versions. We'll have to see what they do with the new version coming out before I begin tackling the forum look again.
Yup Timo. Very do-able in this paid version. I'm wondering if putting the titles vertically along the left side of the avatar could look cool. New web language codes allow us to do things like rotating live text which would be fun to experiment with.
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Good one. I'm using that too.
No more adobe reader. -
lol, I can't!
Waiting for the SSD and PSU to arrive. Most likely Monday. 
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Whoa there whippersnapper! I'm gettin tuckered out just readin all that crazy adventuring.
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Awesome work Flix! Awesome awesome awesome! The colours and styles are just fantastic. I hope you're very proud of your work. You should be!
File Name: Flix's Dragon Mage Sets Mod
File Submitter: Flix
File Submitted: 18 Jan 2014
File Category: Community Patch
Flix's Dragon Mage Sets Mod v2
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Introduction:
This is an ongoing project that adds new set, unique, and legendary items to Sacred 2: Ice and Blood. Currently the mod contains the following items:
*Draco's Garments of Mutation (Full Dragon Mage Set)
*Chaoskampf (Full Dragon Mage Set)
*Auspicious Powers (Full Dragon Mage Set)
*Eternal Return (All Class 2-Ring Set)
*Tooth and Nail (All Class Ring-Amulet Set)
*Shared Player Stash File containing copies of all the above items (optional).
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Installation (Main mod):
Extract the contents of this archive (3 folders [locale, pak, scripts]) into your Sacred 2 installation folder. A typical example of the installation folder is C:\Sacred 2 Gold
Overwrite all folders and files when prompted.
THIS MOD WILL OVERWRITE SOME GAME SCRIPTS!
Back up the folders and/or files if you ever think you may want to uninstall this mod. The overwritten files are:
surface.txt
blueprint.txt
drop.txt
itemtype.txt
iteminfo.txt
global.res
If you have v1 installed, there is no need to uninstall it first. Simply install v2 and it will overwrite the old files. There will be an extra set of unused (completely harmless) icons in pak\data\icons\items\ that start with the number 14000. They can safely be deleted after installation of v2, but it is not necessary.
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Installation (Optional Stash File):
As of v2 this mod now also contains an optional chest file (chest.sacred2chest) that contains copies of all the items (all level 190-200, Platinum-Niobium). They require installation of the main mod to appear in-game.
Be sure to back up your existing chest.sacred2chest file before doing anything! Installing this file will overwrite your Shared tab in your player chest.
For XP, it's located in:
C:\Documents and Settings\<userID>\My Documents\Saved Games\Ascaron Entertainment\Sacred 2
For Vista and Windows 7:
C:\Users\<userID>\Saved Games\Ascaron Entertainment\Sacred 2
After you've backed up your chest.sacred2chest file from the above folder, copy the chest.sacred2chest file to your save game directory and restart your game. You can then find the armor in your shared belongings chest. Grab the armor pieces you want and then save your game and exit. You can then restore your normal chest.sacred2chest file to the Sacred 2 folder and restart and continue your game.
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Compatibility:
If you have another mod installed that changes the same files or if you have made any personal changes to the files listed above, they will be lost.
This mod is designed to be compatible with the latest Community Patch (currently 1.40hf) and was created using those files. If the Community Patch is updated then this mod will be updated to maintain compatibility.
This mod REQUIRES Sacred 2 Ice and Blood with the latest patch (2.65.2.0) plus the latest Community Patch.
This mod is mostly compatible with Wardust's Serious Textures mod, so long as Wardust's mod is installed FIRST. Certain changes from Wardust's mod in surface.txt will be lost however, such as shiny armors and fuzzy animals. All other changes will apply correctly. I can make a fully compatible version if requested.
This mod incorporates Nighthawk's fixes to drop.txt that increase the drop rate of Mutation sets (for ALL characters).
This mod is NOT compatible with Llama Mod. If both mods are installed, whichever one is installed second will overwrite the first. I can make a compatible version if there is enough demand.
Currently only English and German versions are supported. The pieces will not have correct names in other languages. Contact me at Darkmatters.org to request a version in a different language.================================
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Development thread and more info:
http://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/21424-mod-new-dragon-mage-sets-in-development/
Detailed item info and lore is also included in a text file in the download.
================================
Thanks to:
*Pesmontis for his crucial knowledge and tireless efforts in helping me get this project off the ground and completed, and also for translating the names into German.
*Czevak and Dragon Brother for getting me going with starter tips on what files to edit.
*LazyTomcat and those who made mods before me so I could follow their example.
*Gogoblender and Schot for hosting this mod on Darkmatters.org
*Everyone at Darkmatters who has followed the development of this mod and offered support and encouragement.================================
Click here to download this file (English)-
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Hehe, yup! It was aaaall about the snazzy when I saw it too. Had to have it! It's surprisingly well put together too. I just noticed a couple weeks ago just how well put together it is. The PSU has it's own private semi-enclosed section with intake and exhuast vents which means it will have minimal impact on the air in the main space of the case. Similar concept was designed for the video card as well. It's set up in such a way that when all put together the video card will be pressed up against the side of the case where a nice wide and long intake vent is placed. Again this will mean that the video card will have minimal impact on the air in the main space. So that just leaves the cpu that will be relatively the only thing causing heat within the case. The prodigy comes with two nicely sized fans which will push more air more quietly. I'll take some pictures later on. It's impressive what they did with this case. Oh and the slide in and out snapping modules are pretty high quality. Oh! And you know those lil screws you use to screw your HDD or SSD drives in places? This case doesn't use screws. Just metal pins that press into the holes of the drive. Soooo smart. Comes with dust filters for the top and bottom vents. Ummm... What else? Oh yah! I think I might buy some plumbing pipes to force air from the intake fan directly onto the cpu heatsink. Mwahaha! I should probably stop typing now...
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Well I can't bare to have my pc down for even a day it seems. Plus I really don't trust the age of my existing PSU. Soooooo. I ordered a nice PSU on special plus an ssd drive. Once they arrive I'll be able to build my new pc without having to have my present one offline. Big relief! Never know how long building a new pc can take and with an active design contract I can't afford to be down for even a second. So for the sake of curiousity, here's the price breakdown up to now for the system I'm building:
White mini-itx Bitfenix Prodigy case beside my present old ATX case. - $65(on sale)
Asus MAXIMUS VI IMPACT mini-itx motherboard (teeeeny tiny) - $235
Intel Quad-Core i7-4770K Haswell 3.5GHz $310(on sale)
Patriot Viper 3 16GB 2X8GB $150(on sale)
CX Series CX600M Modular Power Supply $80 (after mail-in rebate)
600 SSD SATA III, 240GB $150 (on sale)Arctic Cooling thermal paste $15
Subtotal = $1005 + 15% tax
Total = 1155.75
Not bad for a fairly high end build but... It doesn't include the cost of a new video card and screen. Those 2 items would be an extra $500 at least. Thankfully I have those already but the video card will definitely be upgraded by the summer.
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Heh, well on the point of nobody wanting 120GB SSD, I can speak from experience. Nope! Not enough space. My present SSD is 160GB and even that isn't enough. For the average user though the 120GB drive that you have would be enough. I've got all kinds of graphics projects and website backups which, along with other user data, is using up about 24GB of space just in my user folder. Windows is presently using 22GB. My wamp server is using 11GB. Program Files is normally about 60GB ( I removed some games recently in preparation to format...). Then there are my even bigger project files + Backups that are stored on my external drive which occupy about 400GB and my spare internal HDD for duplicate backups. Sometimes I bring these externally stored projects onto my C: drive to work with more efficiently.
SSD reliability was a big concern in it's early days. Firmware problems were rampant not to mention hardware compatibility issues. These days SSD and HDD reliability stats seemed to be indistinguishable from what I read. Tomshardware tried years ago to offer a conclusion but simply could not say which is more reliable. Granted, RAID storage came about in the days of HDD so that should tell us something about HDD reliability. We still have RAID which gives us a simple message. Backup!
Of my most important data I have three separate copies. The active C: drive version and two backups on different drives. So! Reliability is really just about being prepared for the worst no matter what your preferred storage technology is. For my work though I value a constant speed boost over the chance of an error. Which in fact has never happened in the 12 or so years I've been buying/using hard drives.
P.s.
I probably shouldn't have said that. I'm going to do a backup now, lol.
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I hope your mom knows how lucky she is.
Great value for money. Did you consider a mini-itx? The mini itx boards are pretty powerful these days. -
Don't party too hard Spock!
Sacred 3 - Official Announcement Trailer
in Sacred 3
Posted
WOOHOO! At long last. A tastey Sacred 3 treat. That was awesome. I love the style they used for the video. Not like those clunky old and awkward trailers from the past, haha. Was like watching a Sacred 3-ish version of the Avengers. Go Sacred 3! Go Deep Silver!