If you are like me and have a Solid State Drive and a lot of Steam games, you might be wondering how to put most of your games on a typical hard drive while still having a few of your most played games on your SSD. Steam does not officially support installing games on different drives, but it is possible to “trick” it in a way to think games are installed in its drive when they are actually on a different one.

If you know your way around the NTFS file system you could always just set up junction points or symbolic links. For the rest of you, there is a nice utility called “SteamTool Library Manager” that will configure all of that for you. Of course there is always a chance that something could go wrong, so be sure to read up on all the instructions posted at the program’s website.

Hopefully installing games to different drives will be a supported Steam feature in the future, but for now this is a pretty easy way to make it work.

We are starting out with a basic Teamspeak 3 server, and are watching to see how it goes. If it turns out that we need more slots, the server can be upgraded pretty easily.

You can connect to the server at: ts.neutralx2.com:9999

Alternatively, you can grab the IP below:

They are already testing a beta build of the client that supports in-game rendering for DirectX 10 and 11. This means that Xfire will start working with modern games, allowing you to chat, take screenshots, record video, and broadcast live gameplay all from the Xfire overlay that appears on-top of the game. They are currently testing with World of Warcraft (DX11), The Lord of The Rings Online (DX10/DX11), Dungeons & Dragons (DX10/DX11), and Battlefield 3 (DX10/DX11). If all goes well, expect to see a lot more newer games supporting XIG.

They are also focusing on fixing some of the social network features. Xfire has a network manager feature that allows you to chat on other networks such as AIM, MSN, and Twitter. However since it was first implemented, some of the protocols have changed, creating issues with the Xfire client. Fixes are promised, as well as support for additional networks.

Overall, it seems like it is a good time to be an Xfire user, and they want your feedback. If you currently use Xfire, take a few minutes to complete this survey and let them know how you feel about it.

Now to go download that beta client so I can get Xfire working in Battlefield 3.

I tend to build a lot of computers for friends and relatives. Anyone that does so often can tell you that the most time consuming part of building someone a new pc is not the hardware installation. If you know what you are doing it usually takes less then an hour to go from unboxing to booting. The real time waster is installing all of the apps that the user will need on a new computer. That is where Ninite comes in.

Ninite is a free web service that builds you hands-free installers for many of the applications you would typically install on a new computer. The website lists various programs under categories such as messaging and web browsers. You simply check off the ones that you would like, and Ninite will provide you with an installer that will automatically download and install all of the applications you selected with a single click. It is incredibly simple. Assuming you know what programs you want installed, anyone should be able to use the service.

You can take advantage of the service at http://ninite.com.

My signature:

This is still very much a work in progress. There are a number of things I would like to add, and I am waiting on Bungie to release a graphics library they have promised. However so far things are going well. There is no web interface yet, and I have not determined if this is something I would even want to open to the public or not. That being said, if this is something that interests you, post your Gamertag and I will add it to the list of sigs to generate. I could use a few more to test with at this point. I make no promises on how often I will have the update though. Eventually I would like to get these updating at least once a day.

All suggestions on how to improve the signatures are welcome. Just keep in mind that at this point I am more concerned with pulling the stats and rendering the images them I am with how pretty they look. Things like random background images are totally possible, but not a priority at the moment.

Some other signatures I have generated:

Watch http://reach.neutralx2.com/ for more.

Still, I was able to throw something simple together in about an hour and a half. Currently, the program pulls some basic stats about a player, their armor image, and the list of recent games. The API allows me to pull all kinds of data, so cool graphs showing obscure things would not be out of the question. What sort of features would you like to see in a stats application? Anything that the current bungie.net site doesnt do that you wish it would? I am open to all ideas.

Early Work In Progress

]]> http://neutralx2.com/2010/09/30/halo-reach-api-opened/feed 0 http://neutralx2.com/2010/07/20/programming-stuff?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=programming-stuff http://neutralx2.com/2010/07/20/programming-stuff#comments Tue, 20 Jul 2010 18:30:32 +0000 NeutralX2 http://neutralx2.com/?p=2212 So I have been getting questions about what software I have been working on. I normally don’t post anything about work, but I might as well share some images of the latest projects I have been working on.

The first program, called AM Plat, is something that I wrote myself from scratch. The program takes data about arrays of AM radio towers and draws a sketch of them to scale. This image can then be printed, or exported to be used as a map overlay in software such as Google Earth. The towers are described in such a way that they are related to each other. For example, Tower #2 is X feet away at Y degrees from Tower #1. Of course the data isn’t actually in feet but electrical degrees, so some conversions have to be done there before anything can be drawn. To get the data needed, program can connect to a SQL database, can import files from other software, or the data can be manually typed in if the array does not already exist in the database. Of course the program also can save and load projects in its own file format, which is XML-like. The program also has a number of other features such as recalculating the values based on new tower references.

The second program that I am working on is maintaining a rather large FCC Database search program. The program allows the user to search for FM, AM, and TV data from the FCC database. The results are displayed using Crystal Reports. The program also has a number of other features, such as the ability to view the antenna pattern for any tower in the database. I have added a number of new options to customize search queries, and I have rewritten much of the antenna pattern viewer from scratch as the original code was buggy.

Ubuntu has just released the newest version of its Linux distribution, 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”.  Lots of new features this time around. Some highlights include:

• A new “Me Menu” that directly incorporates Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and other services into the user interface
• New music player with Ubuntu One Music Store integrated.
• Ubuntu Software Centre 2.0 – a library for browsing, downloading and installing software
• GNOME 2.30 desktop system
• Uses Linux 2.6.32 kernel
• More features here.

Overall this is one of the biggest changes in Ubuntu in years. I have been using it for a few days and so far its great. Absolutely worth upgrading.