deekoo.net

Deekoo is a peripatetic and iconoclastic game programmer with a thing for tentacles and a deep and abiding mistrust of the creeping surveillance state.
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May 3, 2012:


Too many things! Too many things at once!

I *want* to write a semidecentralized encrypted instant messaging program. (Yeah, I've done it before, but this one's BETTER and ALL NEW and PYTHON and people might actually be willing to use it. Well, one person. But she's worth coding custom crypto for.

Instead, I have work (game almost done, it's awesome, buy it!) and work (game engine in progress) and work (A Secret Project that I won't tell you about. Ask Ceiling Cat if you want information.).

In news *completely unrelated* to the Secret Project, I have had the dubious joy of working with Windows and learning about C++. Apparently C++ does not have a standard ABI. Which means that C++ thingies (technical term, that) built with one compiler are probably incompatible with C++ thingies built with another compiler.

Unfortunately, while the ABIs are incompatible, apparently the compilers don't actually bother to TELL you that, so I think I just wasted three days pursuing weird bugs actually caused by 'development environment not the same as vendor's development environment'. I need like, fifteen drinks.

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April 27, 2012:


Oh look! The Republicans are trying to get rid of Obama/Gingrich/Romneycare again.
... and by 'get rid of' we mean remove one of the bits that should directly benefit people, while keeping the individual mandate that they claim to hate so much in place.

Slightly earlier than I expected. But not actually surprising.

Prediction: they'll ram through a piecemeal repeal; by the time they're done, the individual mandate will remain, but most of the pesky restrictions on insurer behaviour will be gone.

Further predictions: Obama will pass part of the piecemeal repeal and claim that the Republicans are forcing his hand and that the only way to save the rest of the regulation will be to reelect him. (Won't work - once reelected, he won't have to worry about tacking to the left to gain votes.) And within a decade or two, we'll come upon strong evidence that the corporate leaders planned it this way all along.

(Paranoid much, moi? Yes. I'm writing it down so I can check to see if my paranoia is ACCURATE in a few years, since memory is notorious for adjusting itself to be what you believe it to be.)

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April 19, 2011:


How I fixed the dread 'AWC.dll load failed.' error.

So, today I installed Dragon Age II. It went reasonably straightforwardly; I took the obligatory cheap shot at the file extensions; I looked confusedly at eulas in tiny boxes, then blinked in slight surprise at seeing the LGPL in there. Good, I can cite that as precedent if anyone's ever complaining that they don't want to distribute LGPL-containing games.

Then came the moment of truth, to see if the box I cobbled together is actually good enough or if I need to run out and buy video cards (or build a whole new box). With trepidation, I entered the regcode and clicked The Button...

A window popped up: Exe Loader: AWC.dll load failed.

(Note: There is an answer at the end of the maundering!)

So, I searched the Internet. And the Internet gave me many solutions. Unfortunately, most of these were for Mass Effect 2, and (unsurprisingly), none of them worked on Dragon Age 2. One commenter observed that eir friend's pirate copy (I think e was talking about DA2) worked fine, but eir legal copy was useless. While I wouldn't feel guilty about warezing a usable copy to replace a useless legal copy, the notion of downloading a DVD and then having to spend a few days reverse-engineering the hacks to make sure that the only security they broke was EA's does not really appeal to me.

So, internet unhelpful. Hm. Well, this is a virgin XP install... so I installed a pile of updates. No luck; however, the service packs did make the configuration utility crash (just like Origins' configuration utility crashed.).

Much arghing later, I remembered something. The event viewer. It's Windows' version of syslog, and IT IS YOUR FRIEND. Control Panel (assuming classic view): Administrative Tools: Event Viewer.

Event Viewer told me that there were errors loading an assembly. Microsoft.VC80.CRT, to be specific. So I searched the Internet again, but installing the relevant runtimes also didn't help.

But searching my computer for the files DID help.

DONE MAUNDERING, NOW TO FIX IT:

In Dragon Age 2\bin_ship\Core\imageformats\, there are a handful of DLLs and a manifest. After copying those into the bin_ship\core\ (not overwriting anything that was already there), the game now gets as far as asking me to sign in to my EA account.

... of course, this isn't MY computer I'm working on, and it being well after dawn Greenwich time, the accountholder is now asleep.

(postscript: ... on the bright side, I don't feel quite so worried about the possibility that I might wind up burning a run of installers that don't actually work right anymore.)

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