Archive for February, 2009

Asset-O-Matic update details

I’ve tweaked a few things here and there, cleaned up some code and should have a release fairly soon. The current status is:

* It’s faster! I’ve updated the number of threads to match Bungie’s website listings and things are coming in faster. But, the speed is still limited by Bungie.net’s responce time and other factors such as your own network settings (during a search the program has 26 threads all pulling in data from Bungie.net)

* Either Matchmaking or Custom games can be searched and you can go directly to the files for any of these results (Thanks Bungie Web Guys!)

* Campaign searching will be enabled in the release, I just need to code the section dealing with the different layout of these pages.

* Campaign results will not have direct links to the related files (nothing I can do at this time, it’s down to the Bungie Web Guys)

* Templates are working (sorta, no word wrapping enabled and no way to clear the output box). This allows you to enter some text in the top section, hit a button and have your text repeated with the following tokens replaced by data from the currently loaded database: %SCREENS%, %CLIPS%, %GAMEID% (used for linking directly to the game), %GAMETYPE%, %GAMEDATETIME% and %MAP%

* Things are slightly more stable (basic error checking put in etc). Turns out I had already coded around network threads failing and give them 3 chances to recover. When one fails I lose resources, I’ve changed the code around this so it should be fixed but further testing is required…

* I know the interface is basic, I’ve seperated a lot of code from the GUI so I can work on something better at a later date. I need to refactor a bit more of the code to do this. If you want to get funky with your results you can always open them up in any SQLite viewer.

* I’m still not sure why sometimes you can start a new search and sometimes you can’t (app hangs after pressing the search button). All the relevent threads are dead and the app is in almost the same state as it started. I’ll keep watch on this (it may be related to the network code I’ve updated), easy fix if this happens to you is to restart the app..

* Databases from previous versions are not compatible with this new release. Here’s where I wish I’d added a version number to the DB itself. I might knock up a quick tool to update old DB’s to the new format but truth be told you’d be better off doing a fresh search anyway as this is when the direct linking to files data is populated.

Release will be shortly after I’ve coded the campaign section which I hope to have done in the next week or two.

Another Bungie.net update, another revision required

The latest changes to Bungie.net broke Halo 3 Asset-O-Matic again. I’m working on a new build featuring:

  • Search Matchmaking or Custom Games
  • Direct linking to the files page
  • Faster searching (5 times more grabbing threads)

A problem with increasing the amount of network activity is that the thread checking for the next page of results sometimes times out. It’s fine if a grabber thread times out because there’s 24 more left to continue to continue the work but there’s only one thread looking for the next page. I’ll have to see if I can add some fallback code to reinitilise the thread if it falls over.

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Halo 3 Video Rendering is here!

Well almost..

Halo 3 File Rendering is here!

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Beta 3?

Halo 3 Asset-O-Matic Beta 3

Halo 3 Asset-O-Matic Beta 3

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