Gaming on ShrimpWorks

MQTT Implementation in UnrealScript

Sat, 09 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TLDR; There’s now an MQTT Client implementation written in UnrealScript

I’ve been doing a bit of stuff in UnrealScript recently, and reacquainting myself with it.

Something I’ve always been aware of, but have never really looked at in much detail, is that it has an actual TCP client you can extend to implement whatever remote communications protocol you’d like.

For whatever reason MQTT popped up as my candidate to play with, with the thought that you’d be able to publish in-game events to some topics and build interesting things with (the first thing that came to mind was a match stats collection service which doesn’t rely on the traditional process of log scraping), in addition to allowing in-game functionality to respond to incoming events by way of topic subscriptions. And being something targeted at supporting very simple IoT devices, the protocol should be fairly easy to work with.

Unreal Archive

Sat, 16 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past several months, I’ve been working on a project to provide a place to catalogue and preserve the vast amounts of user-created content the Unreal and Unreal Tournament community has been creating over the past 20+ years.

This has resulted in the Unreal Archive.

While it may seem a silly cause to invest so much time (and money) into, this stuff directly influenced the lives of myself and thousands of others. I would certainly not be in the profession I’m in, driving my car, living in my house, if not for the direct influence of working on Unreal Tournament maps, mods and community, and personal websites.

UTStatsDB

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

UTStatsDB is a player and match statistics system for Unreal Tournament 99, 2003, 2004 and 3, which parses match logs generated by each game (sometimes requiring additional server-side mutators), and makes stats for each game available through a website.

The stats are also aggregated by player, map and server, allowing you to browse and analyse quite a number of in-depth stats for each.

The project was developed and maintained by Patrick Contreras and Paul Gallier between 2002 and around 2009, where the original project seems to have been abandoned some time after the release of UT3. (addendum: by some coincidence, after 9 years of inactivity, the original author did create a release a few days after my revival/release) Locating downloads (the download page is/was not working) or the source (their SCM system seems to require auth or is simply gone) was quite troublesome.

Running Unreal Tournament 99 on Linux (part 1)

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With all the talk of Unreal Tournament 4 possibly being cancelled one of these days, due to Epic’s runaway success with Fortnite, I’ve decided there’s really no reason to not be playing UT99.

Thus, we set about trying to run it on modern hardware, with a modern Linux installation.

As much as this is about setting things up on Linux, it’s also partially my own attempt at some knowledge preservation, as a lot of this stuff ends up being forgotten or lost over time (it’s been almost 20 years! a lot of the old sites and things you expect to find this info on simply do not exist anymore :()

This is part one of two, and will focus on installing and running the game using Wine.

Kodi and Steam on Debian Sid

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I recently went through the process of reinstalling the media PC connected to my TV, which I use to run Kodi for movies and TV, and Steam in Big Picture mode, which allows me to stream Windows-only games from my desktop to the couch.

I thought it would be useful to describe my setup and the process to achieve it, in case anyone else is interested in creating their own custom Kodi/Debian/Steam builds.

Tribes: Ascend

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:30:43 +0000

Wow. I hadn’t been paying much attention to this, since it’s been a while since anything with the “Tribes” name on it was worth following. This really does look pretty awesome though! It should be out this year as well.

Catchup: Gaming

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 17:18:59 +0000

I really have to use this thing more often than once or twice a year :D. I’m just going to do a few posts on a couple of subjects just for personal lols.

Lots of Team Fortress 2 has been played. I thought since it went free, there’d be plenty of noobs to beat up. Sadly all the kids playing games these days are not noobs ;). I’m also really enjoying playing an online FPS on PC once more, still something I haven’t done to any degree since UT3 fizzled (did it ever really get going at all, though?).

Out of Eve downloads

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 11:57:18 +0000

This is just a small update on the status of OOE. As the SVN server previously hosting the OOE source died, and many people have been looking for the source, a Google Code project has been started to facilitate future development.

The source is available as both a regular download and via Subversion.

It’s unlikely I will be doing any development on the project myself, however contributors are welcome.

Out of Eve 1.1 Released

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:10:26 +0000

Hah. Only 3 months late.

Out of Eve has been fully updated to Quantum Rise spec, the promised journal feeds, API key security, and a number of other tweaks. OutofEve.com has been updated to the latest available version, and the source is available for download.

Please leave any feedback in the comments of this post. I’ll set up a proper OOE page on this site at some point, with download links and more detailed information.

Out Of Eve 1.1

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:27:30 +0000

As mentioned previously, I just wanted to outline a few plans for a new Out Of Eve version, mostly for my own reference, as I’m finding it much easier to work toward goals which are actually written down/typed up (lol?).

Obviously first order of business is Empyrean Age compatibility. A number of table and field names have changed and require some code updates. Lots of icons have been added and updated, so I would also like to make use of those. Unfortunately a number of images are actually missing in the EA icon dump (drones, rookie ships), so a simple drop-in replacement doesn’t works so well.