Recent content by scanti

Saints Row 2 Monkey Patch Introduction This project alters the original Saints Row 2 executable file with patches and fixes that can't be implemented by other means. A monkey patch is a patch that is implemented as the program is running instead of changing the files of a program. It has...

I've created a mod that patches the Saints Row 2 executable file on loading to use OpenSpy instead of the now defunct GameSpy. This will allow you to use online multiplayer again. Unlike a similar mod, it doesn't replace the Saints Row 2 executable file with a patched version but uses a...

I have written a dummy version of the DFEngine.dll that basically does nothing. The original DFEngine.dll supplied the game with ads that were supposed to appear on the game's billboards and also sent tracking information about the user. As far as I can tell, Double Fusion no longer supplies...

In my efforts to reverse engineer Saints Row 2 I've discovered what causes the speed-up bug, how a bug in Windows fixes it for some people and how to sort of fix it. I have found that the game divides the QueryPerformanceFrequency by 1,000 and 1,000,000 to give you the ticks per millisecond...

That's my guilty pleasure film. I love the film but friends think it's stupid, which of course it is. It's meant to be stupid. It's also one of the few films where the side kick is the hero and the hero the side kick. (The Green Hornet is the only other movie I can think of).

Finally got my laptop on the 31st December. Took me a day to set up Windows 8. Upgraded to Windows 8.1. Took me another day to sort out all the problems it caused. (It messed up the graphics drivers: the screen was on minimum brightness and it was stuck on Intel graphics in games). I forgot to...

Well I couldn't wait to save up for a really nice laptop and I've just put in an order for the Levono IdeaPad Z500. It looks like the best bang for your buck laptop, even though it has a few annoying problems. It cost me £410 and it has a i5 (2.6GHz) processor, 4GB ram, 1TB hard drive and a...

I think you are right. It's just died again. It looks like I'll be using my clunky old desktop for a few months. Well I did own a Sony VAIO laptop but that died a couple of months after the warranty ran out. Expensive and rubbish build quality. I'd rather have cheap and rubbish build quality...

I must of missed or forgotten about that episode. My laptop is sort of OK now. It's still running way too hot, the GPU is 80°c when it's idling. A laptop cooler knocks about 10°c off of that. I think the fan may need replacing. It looked like it was spinning OK but it's hard to tell. Either...

All the important stuff is backed-up to an external USB drive. I did have a RAID-5 NAS, thinking my data will be really safe there, until the controller board blew. The data was still intact, I just had no way of extracting it. Yeah I did start off having a desktop for gaming and a laptop for...

Well since the repair I've had a couple of graphical glitches, so I'm not sure how long the repair will last. Hopefully it's just the thermal compound wearing it's way in. However it should give me enough time to save for a nicer laptop.

I've been away from the forums for about a week because my trusty gaming laptop decided to die on me. I had left my laptop on all night downloading XCOM: Enemy Unknown from Steam. In the morning I decided to have a quick play and when I started the game all I got was a screen of coloured...

Sorry what I meant was when you merge the diffuse map and pattern map, in order to add the pattern map information, the diffuse map colours get reduced. Each channel in a diffuse map is 8 bits (0-255) and in the pattern map it's 1 bit (0-1). So in order to merge them, the diffuse map gets...

I found a document that confirms they are called pattern maps. I think how it works is you halve the range of the diffuse map so each channel ranges from 0 to 127. Then if a particular channel is colour-able you add 128 to it's value. So effectively if a texture is colour-able you halve it's...

If the texture has a 'P' in it's name I think it means that you can alter it's colour in game. It probably stands for something like pattern.