Divinity 2 Stutter Fix

Apparently, Divinity 2 has some kind of stuttering going on, making things look much worse than the actual framerate. This is not part of the game like the poor choice to lock the main menu at 30fps (which then unlocks once you’re in game, just like Enemy Territory Quake Wars).

Luckily, there’s a simple fix. If you haven’t seen this posted around, what you do is go to the compatibility tab in the properties window of the game’s exe and check on ‘disable desktop composition‘. I don’t think ‘run as administrator’ is needed, but you can check that on in addition to the desktop composition toggle.

No idea how widespread this is, if it’s just for Windows 7/Vista, or if it includes Nvidia cards, or if it’s tied to specific generations or drivers.

Cities in Motion (and possibly other OpenGL games) Startup Crash Fix For ATI/AMD Cards

UPDATE: I was curious as to what this FAQ item was for Atom Zombie Smasher, so I tried the demo. Nothing appears, just the exe starts up. Seems the same atigktxx.dll trick does the job for this game as well, it loads up just fine now.

Looks like Cities in Motion is an OpenGL game with the exact same issue that The Polynomial had for a few months. On drivers after Catalyst 10.4, it appears crossfire is breaking the game from working, and there is no way to disable it on a 4870×2 like myself. Some single gpu cards may be affected, so you might as well try this, too.

The simple fix should be placing 10.4′s atigktxx.dll into the game folder. Here’s an alternative fix that may or may not work for you if you have tried this atigktxx trick.

Do note that the file is from the 64-bit Vista/7 drivers, I’m not sure what the effect will be on 32-bit, XP, or on the latest 6 series cards. If you have crashes or freezes that happen after the game menu has loaded, then you might have a different problem unrelated to this. The beta, demo, and final release all should act the same. If the demo worked before (on drivers after 10.4) while the final does not, then you probably have a different issue.

Games For Windows Live Stuck On “Signing In”?

Recently I was having trouble getting any GFWL game to work. The store client itself was always fine, but every game was unusable. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the latest client, and even installing an older one from the redist folder of Blacklight Tango Down. I know UPnP works on my router and this computer, so how can that be it, right?

I found this post that mentions resetting the TCP stack and Winsock. This method seems to be mentioned occasionally, but much less than the usual reset router, restart this, reinstall that.

So what you do is open a command prompt (as Administrator if needed), type ‘netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt‘ and the status of each item should say ‘OK’. That user post says to type in the winsock reset command, but I couldn’t do anything further in that window once it completed, so I opened up a second one and typed ‘netsh winsock reset‘.

Now I had 2 cmd windows open, they wouldn’t close, the restart button in the start menu didn’t work, and well, I hit the reset button on my case. Seemed a little sloppy, but my GFWL games are now loading fine! Don’t disable the Windows Live ID Sign-In Assistant service, it appears to be needed.

Fix For The Polynomial Startup Crash

FINAL UPDATE: This post is a mess… this should not be a problem anymore for anyone. You should be on drivers newer than 11.2 or older than 10.5. This used to affect the BIT.TRIP games, but those run fine now as well. What has not yet been fixed in updated drivers is Cities in Motion.

FINAL FIX: Turns out you just need atigktxx.dll in the game folder! No mess, not even the main atioglxx.dll. Download the 10.4 dll here, place it where polynomial.exe is, done! I also noticed after installing Catalyst 11.2, the dll might not be needed anymore.

FIX ATTEMPT: I tried a brute force method, I put every driver file of 10.4 into the game folder. You can do this while still having whatever newer Catalyst you have installed, just run the 10.4 installer, cancel it, open a cmd prompt at C:\ATI\Support\10-4_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\Packages\Drivers\ Display\W76A_INF\B_98282 or similar, then simply ‘expand -r *.* c:\pathtoyourgamefolder‘ and voila! I have not yet tried deleting any of the files 1 by 1 to see which ones are required to stop the BSOD so the game folder would look cleaner, but so far it works!

UPDATE2: mixed reports saying 10.12 is good, it’s almost a guarantee that it’s good for 5970 users that were stuttering, but it’s the same crash for me still on 10.12.

UPDATE: this might be affecting Bit.Trip Beat as well. Something to do with crossfire, but there are some reports of 5970s working fine.

So I finally attempted to try the demo of The Polynomial, but the driver is crashing on startup of the game (it’s in OpenGL). I’m trying this on a 4870×2, Catalyst 10.11 WHQL, latest CAP, Vista 64.

It might be something to do with crossfire, or at least in my case and this user. The developer is also active in that thread, and I’ll try to get some form of exposure to ATI/AMD, so we’ll see how this goes.

Workarounds

-The whole older driver package: refer to the working fix at the top of this page.

-Current iD Tech games (with this side effect! depends on the visualizer options): doom3.exe, etqw.exe, prey.exe, quake4.exe, wolf2mp.exe

-Riddick Butcher’s Bay profile looks like a bunch of detail is lost, and the bloom is lower resolution, yet the bright flashing lights are gone: sbzengine.exe

-An older atioglxx.dll: I tried 10.2 and 10.4, the game launched without glitches, but has a BSOD soon after. This must be because crossfire changed at 10.5, as mixing dx10/11 dlls older than 10.5 would also BSOD in Shattered Horizon and Bad Company 2. If you’re ok with not having the latest drivers (if you don’t need the fixes in there), you may be able to get away with installing 10.4 and just the latest CAP.

-RadeonPro recently added some OpenGL support, but the crossfire options are not functional just yet. I can’t think of any DX9 things to test if the ‘disable crossfire’ option is different from just disabling CatalystAI, but if it is, then this would end up a working solution once this app is updated.

Dark Athena, older Quakes, Unigine, FurMark, and a couple other profiles I attempted to launch act like the original game’s driver crash.

I will update this post if there’s a workaround better than the iD one, if there’s some combination of settings to try, or if either the drivers or game manage to fix it.

Mastering Tip: Don’t Clip

I should get back to posting content, so here’s a quick tip if you’re making music, working on a voice track, or pretty much any audio you’re dealing with.

Digital audio has all kinds of fixed limits, one of which is amplitude or volume. If a sound is too loud, the wave will become ‘clipped‘, causing an obvious change in the sound that most people would identify as distortion.

The first thing I would do when I start a blank music or audio project is add a basic compressor to eliminate clipping as much as possible. As an example, this is what I stick on the master FX channel in FL Studio. It’s pretty much the default preset, but the attack and release are all the way down, and the ratio is up. When listening to any sound, quiet or loud, it seems to do the least modification while protecting from clipping. Any compressor should have about the same knobs or settings available for tweaking.

Later on if I’m going for a specific final sound, I could use a more powerful chain of compressors, equalizers, etc, but always have some kind of a compressor on the final master output. Let’s take a look at the difference this makes:

Here is a kick sample where I increased the volume way beyond the original. If left alone, you can see how it is clipping when the limits are hit. It almost looks like a square wave, which is quite a different sound from the original sine. With the compressor enabled, the wave does still change a bit, but it’s not as harsh and won’t be as obvious to the listener’s ears.

Now you may want to have a distorted sound like the drum track or a voice that sounds like it’s on a walkie-talkie. I would stick the distortion chain on a separate FX channel and still have a light compressor on the master channel. This leaves room for other sounds that need to be untouched.

Formatting Twitter’s Date/Time With PHP

This should save you a little googling. When you look at the XML that the Twitter API gives you, each tweet has a ‘created_at‘ timestamp.

It looks like this: Wed Aug 18 18:22:29 +0000 2010. Not too friendly, but it’s really simple to convert it to a unix timestamp, then format it with PHP’s date function.

Step 1: Make the unix timestamp with strtotime(). Now it’s turned into 1282155749, which is just what we need even though it looks worse.

Step 2: Format with date(). ‘l M j \- g:ia‘ turns it into ‘Wednesday Aug 18 – 12:22pm‘. You have total control of how it looks thanks to that date() function of PHP.

I pretty much dumped it all into a single line on one of the things I was working on. This is after I retrieved the XML into a variable called $xml.

echo date("l M j \- g:ia",strtotime($xml->status[0]->created_at));

Disable WordPress’s Visual Editor On Specific Posts

Simple and quick tip for WordPress. You might run into this if you have code snippets or other things in the HTML view that get malformed once you enter the visual view of the editor.

This WP plugin covers the basic functionality. The minor issue is that you have to open the post’s edit view to input the custom field, instead of having a button in the list of posts section of the admin area. Maybe there is a plugin for editing custom fields ajax-style, or a richer version of this visual/html toggle that I may have missed.

Disable Auto-Eject On Empty Drives

Have you tried to double click on a hard drive in MyComputer, only to accidentally click your optical drive and have it eject? This gets annoying if you’re trying to be quiet at night, or if you have one of those cases with a door that covers up the drive bays. Luckily it’s a simple fix, but you won’t be able to use the built in Windows burning functionality. You should be able to still use third-party burning tools like ImgBurn just fine. (In fact I need my options and project files, so I’m never using built in OS stuff anyway)

In the registry, go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Add a DWORD called NoCDBurning and set it to 1.

That’s it. Log off and on again to make it work. This might be just a Vista and 7 feature, but try it on XP if it ejects as well.

Opening WordPress Comment Author URLs In A New Window

Here’s a short tip on how to add target=”_blank” to the HTML code generated by WordPress’s comment_author_link(). I can’t seem to get it to work as a filter inside comments.php, but I found a forum post that does what’s needed as a WP plugin. Apparently it needs WP2.5 and up. The simplest way would be modifying the core WP files, but that’s a bad idea due to any updates overwriting your changes, making you do them over again.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Edit Comment Author
Version: 0.1
Description: Automatically adds target="_blank" to comment author links
Author: Jay Gilford
Author URI: http://www.jaygilford.com/
Plugin URI: http://www.jaygilford.com/
*/
global $wp_version;
$exit_message = 'This plugin requires Wordpress 2.5 or newer. <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress">Please Update!</a>';
if(version_compare($wp_version, '2.5', '<')) {
	exit($exit_message);
}
 
add_filter('get_comment_author_link', 'comment_author_link_edit');
function comment_author_link_edit($content) {
    $content = str_replace('<a ', '<a target="_blank"', $content);
    return $content;
}
?>

Source

Save it as a PHP file, then upload to your WP plugins directory and enable the ‘Edit Comment Author’ plugin.

VERY Powerful Batch Rename Application

Here’s a real time-saver. If you ever needed to rename or enumerate a bunch of files, and have been manually doing it up till now, then this is the program just for you. Ant Renamer is full of common actions you might have run into when dealing with larger amounts of files, such as photos of a vacation or frames of an animation.

You can add characters, search and replace strings, use the file date for its name, use EXIF information, or even run a regular expression on your file list. It displays what the output will look like at the bottom as a preview. Finally, there’s an Undo button if you make a mistake.

Check it out next time you have some heavy renaming to do. It’s freeware and even includes source code or translation files if you’re inclined to start modifying it.