Cursing Caroline

I'm confused, COD4 was the best game I had played in a long whlie, and I was eagerly awaiting COD:MW2 when I heard a rumour. I didn't believe that it could be true!? 

It was confirmed by Infinity Ward themselves. The game will have no dedicated servers... What does this mean?

Well for a lot of people, probably not much, if you just go and play casually on the first server you come to, I  don't see it becoming a problem, the ranked matches will be fairer. I remember joining games of over 50 players and just spawn killing. Very fun, and quick to level your character through the game but slightly unfair to have you get best weapons with little work while some players are chipping away playing search and destroy!! So for fairness of ranked games I fully support this idea.

The interesting part is that there is no option for a dedicated server. Now how is a game going to become popular with clans if they cant have a dedicated piece of hardware with a fast connection running their game so that they can be SURE that their games are properly managed. Now add to that that they have no control over games, no ability to kick a player in a private game they set up... IW say that if someone is saying things which is against the clan policy then mute them.... Sounds a bit dubious to me!

 To add to this strangeness IW have announced that there is no lean ability in the game ( apparently not balanced for lean ), an addition which has been there since the beginning with COD and adds so much to the multiplayer fun! 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUCU7SJVQao 

Coupled with the fact there is no record facililty so clans have no ability to watch over the game properly and the console has been nuked and pretty much is useless :S Sounds to me like they have ruined a game I was looking forward to for months. Maybe I will buy it later for a single player game, and play a couple of multiplayer matches... but i can't see myself logged on for nights at a time going to random servers hosted by people miles away, only to have them quit and a 5 second delay to be put on my carefully aimed sniper shot....

No thanks IW 

Studio Post Effect is a tool for creating full screen post processing effects.  This tool is competing in a pretty full market, both RenderMonkey and FXComposer are great products for creating complex effects, I have to say though that I was very impressed with this tool.

The interface is very simple allowing you to make a composition of effects very quickly, I have used this program to create a couple of pixel shaders and it was so quick and easy to do. The creator of the software has also been great enough to put up some simple tutorials of how to use the interface and some example shaders for use in the program.

There was one issue with this program and that is it does not initially work on any x64 based systems. I have a Windows 7 x64 test machine and was keen to get this program working on it, as my other system is a laptop with a.... well lets say rubbish graphics chipset!! I did some research and found an article about .NET 2.5 programs and how 64 bit Windows systems handle them. It seems that unless the program is "flagged" as x86, a 64 bit version of Windows will try to run the executable in the 64 bit version of the .NET framework which causes a crash. Now Microsoft have released a nice tool entitled Corflags.exe which we can use to alter the flags accosiated with our application. The flag we are interested in is /32bit+.

To get the application working you need to download corflags.exe which is available in the .NET SDK. Once downloaded run:

Corflags.exe c:\StudioPostEffect\Studioposteffect.exe /32bit+ ( Or wherever you extacted the install )

This will add the 32bit flag into the program and a 64 bit OS will correctly run the program using WOW64. :D SIMPLES!

Anyhow I would highly suggest you download this tool and give it a go for yourself. Make sure you get a chance to watch the tutorial videos on Youtube to see what this program is capable of. 

Download files below:

Studio Post Effect