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Programs and Demos I'm a software developer by career, and by passion. Most of my work is always for my company, but now and then something slips out that's unrelated. |
A friend asked me for a way to track a history in Windows Media Player.
He likes to trip down nostalgia way and remember his playlists. He wanted a tool that could build a playlist from every media file he went through in a session. Or maybe log it to a text file on disk.
So this does both. You drop this DLL file in your Windows Media Player directory, go into Tools / Plug-ins / Options..., and Add this DLL. The configuration should be pretty simple. It will create new playlists as you play media files, log to XML files on disk, or both.
Note that the XML file is built in a way that you must close Media Player before the closing XML tag gets written. In other words, "Close Media Player before trying to open the XML output files in Internet Explorer."I once took an extension college course sequence in game development.
Most of the class work was individual -- learning architecture and techniques for a Win32 DirectX game engine. And admittedly, the quality of instruction varied from excellent to abysmal. From the excellent James Thrush of Super X Studios, to, well, I won't name the bad ones. ;)
The final project was a small group effort, to retrofit an earlier project into a multiplayer networked experience. My two project partners and myself leapt on this and made a nice little demo game called Warcan.
The name comes from (A) being a 2D-ish space shooter, and (B) the initials of each of us.When you start it asks for username and password, go ahead and type anything you want for them. Unless the game can connect to my database server (which it won't be able to since I didn't give you the ODBC driver for it) it doesn't track usernames or high scores.
You can play LAN or WAN at your discretion, though LAN will probably work a little smoother. You can play individually, or you can play with your friends. Instructions on game play are built in and are available as soon as an actual game starts. Just hold down F1 once you see your space ship.
Have fun! :)
Are you a Win32 developer? Have you ever heard of "Layered Windows?"
Most Win32 developers haven't. Layered Windows are a pretty spiff feature of the Win32 API introduced with Windows 2000. They allow you to take any window and render it on the screen in fully alpha-blended 32 bits-per-pixel glory. Yet the window is still a window -- it has Z-order, it processes messages, and so forth.
These are a couple of demos I made to show what Layered Windows can do.
WindowLight is just an empty app window with a semi-transparent background. You can move it and resize it, and that's it. (Ultimately I was going to turn this into a replacement for the console window, but I never got back to the project.)
Avatar was triggered by a desire to render 3D content "outside of a window." You know, using DirectX or equivelant. I asked around and was told the project was impossible -- which is often the nudge I need to sit down and do something. There is a design flaw in DirectX that makes this potentially incompatible with your machine. Incompatible as in it may crash when you run it.
I also make no promises of render speed -- layered windows are notoriously slow. I tend to get over 60 frames per second on my dev machine, but I've also seen results vary tremendously.
By the way, to quit the demo, press Escape when the Avatar app has focus.