This site is a showcase for projects, research, philosophy/rants and gripes by Dennis Robinson and sometimes others. Be sure to check out the Blog section for posts, news, feedback etc. and the Projects page for a synopsis of Menasoft software projects. Please contact us at contact@menasoft.com with any questions or comments. My RSS feed can be found at http://www.menasoft.com/rss.xml

General philosophy of this site

I’ve decided to create this site in hopes of giving back a little bit to all that I get from the Internet. Whenever I want to learn about some odd new technical issue I just Google it up and oddly very often someone has written something about it in a blog somewhere. Sometimes no one has written about it. I’m going to try to keep a log of some of the odd technical research I do, hoping someone somewhere might benefit from it. Maybe I’ll gain some karma points, who knows.

I couldn’t help but want to make a page dedicated to my fellow software colleagues. I for one love what I do and have a need to make the world of software development a better place. I hope someday to actually find that perfect development team. I’ve come close a few times. So I’m going to rant and rave about the bad and good things I’ve seen and what I did and didn’t like about them. And of course the world will be a better place as a result. Most of my posts will likely be left completely unfinished and some topics are really just an outline and maybe some vague thoughts that came off the top of my head. Consider this to be a draft of a work in progress.

In general if you find some point I write about to be interesting, just ping me (email) for more information and I may continue working on any given topic.

http://www.menasoft.com/blog/?feed=rss

Taksi is a desktop video recorder/screenshot capture application for most versions of Windows. It can be hooked to most applications/games (via GDI,OpenGL,DirectX8 or 9) to record as an AVI video all that you are doing. It is based on the VFW API’s and can use any of the installed video codecs to encode in real time (if your CPU can handle it). This is an open source project that can also be found on sourceforge.net.

This is a FREE open source (BSD licensed) project that can be found on sourceforge.net and on its alternate web page here.

News Post:

http://www.menasoft.com/blog/?p=19

Features:

• Uses any VFW video record codec. Such as XVid, DivX, MSMpeg4, etc.
• Can record video as compressed or uncompressed AVI-files (no audio (yet)).
• Video compression occurs in background thread for use in multi processor (hyperthread) machines.
• Very simple user interface for hooking applications to be recorded.
• Very small footprint (~300k). Written in C++, and does NOT use MFC.
• Can capture video frames from applications using DirectX 8 or 9, OpenGL, or GDI
• Has visual feedback while recording even in full screen games.
• Runs on Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP.
• Hooks keyboard or uses DirectInput for hotkeys to control recording.
• Captures still frames in BMP or PNG format.

Download:

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The Shareware Pad.xml file can be found here and the sample web page here.

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Irth Online is a modern Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game built from the ground up on the latest technologies. It creates a virtual reality environment rich in detail and interaction.
Please check out the screen shots section chronicling the early to late development of Irth.

The Irth Engine was built by Magic Hat Software for both Irth Online and licensing to 3rd parties.
Some of the technical specs for the engine are:

Server:

• Multi Server, Multi Processor, Multi Threaded, cluster of Windows PC’s
• Configured via ODBC connected database. (tested on Microsoft SQL and MySQL)
• Optional configuration of world objects via database, registry and/or scripts.
• Scripting and world event handling via DLL plugins, COM, Grayscript, Javascript, and LUA.
• Dynamic geographic load balancing across nodes in the cluster.
• Networking via TCP and UDP using a proprietary SOAP like object protocol.
• Compressed/Encrypted(via RC4) data channel with challenge/shared secret login
• Object/method/property granularity of security (per role) on all objects.

Client:

• Cascaded level of detail for truly HUGE seamless worlds. 1024KM x 1024KM
• Seeded/compressed or randomly created detail for organic world content.
• DirectX9 with shader 1.1 and 2.0 plugins for special effects such as water reflection, volumetric fog, etc.
• Scene optimization via loose octree and integrated hardware based occlusion.
• Skinnable in-game user interface.
• All GUI dialogs built using the Windows Dialog resource editor.
• DirectSound 3d audio support.
• Uses both Cal3d and EmotionFX character animation systems.
• IDV SpeedTree tree rendering
• In-client world editor for ‘instant play testing’ of world changes.

Tools:

• Property browser application connects to the client or server. All world objects may be interrogated for properties and methods.
• Microsoft Access Database forms library for configuration of all world systems.
• Integrated Subversion (version control) management of scripts and system resources.

External Libraries Used:

• OpenJPEG for loading and saving of JPeg2000 files
• Javascript – Spidermonkey javascript scripting
• Lua v5.1 (with easyLua) – Scripting.
• ZLib – File compression
• BZip2 – Data compression
• ODE – Physics system
• Cal3d – Characters
• EmotionFX – Characters
• IDV SpeedTree – Rendered trees
• Subversion – For version control of scripts/resources among multiple developers/world builders.
• Microsoft Libraries – Win32, DirectX9, COM/ATL, etc.

Comparable (mostly) Game Engines:

• Shark3d – very flexible tools, server and client.
• BigWorld Engine – both server and client. Very impressive feature list.
• Emergent Games Engine – just a client (Gamebryo), server engine in development. (details are sketchy)
• Irrlicht – open source client
• Darkstar – Open source java based engine. Not really very comparable, but interesting.

SPHERE is a persistent gaming world Role Playing Game server that anyone can setup and run with up to 500 concurrent players online. The opportunity for adventure is limitless, and even small connection home users may host persistent games of up to 30 players with little to no game lag. Menasoft has discontinued work on this but it does live on. Go to www.sphereserver.com for more.

Sphere has undergone a number of name changes and a very large amount of development since its beginning in 1997. It has been called Grayworld, TUS (The Ultimate Server), and finally Sphere.

SphereFTP is a small, simple and secure FTP server for Windows XP, and Windows CE platforms. Not to be confused with the Sphere (game) Server. It is very light weight and can run as an application or as an NT service. It is configured via the registry editor.

Check out the filezilla server as well.

The development of SphereFTP began with the need to access some of the files on my home computer from the Internet. I could find no simple and secure FTP servers to do the job. The FTP server service with windows does not allow fine control over access of files without major complexity. It does not show in a simple concise way which users are allowed to which files. The Windows security model is very unwieldy for simple tasks.

I looked over the internet for FTP servers. WarFTP seemed the most feature full. I got burned very badly by it’s security holes. With many features comes many bugs. A security bug in my version of WarFTP allowed anonymous users to LIST any file on my system. Not cool. Time to write my own.

Features:

• This program (at least this version 1.4) is Freeware. Feel free to use it however you like.
• Compliant with RFC 765 return codes and features.
• A single thread finite state machine architecture that has been tested to handle hundreds of simultaneous connections.
• Acts as an NT service by simply running it at a Command Line prompt with the arguments of -Install or -Uninstall.
• 2 Log files of High and Low details are kept. They are renamed daily. Lookup and log of client host names.
• Resumes broken downloads and uploads.
• Limits the total number of connections. Limits the number of connections and non-logged in connections per IP to prevent Dos attacks. Checks for, logs and blocks password attacks.
• A simple list of users and group accesses. All user information is stored in the registry. Assuming no-one has access to your computers registry, the users, passwords and access restrictions are completely secure. Very simple. Users can be created with a password and assigned to a group which will be that users root. The groups have access to a directory and have read, write, create permissions. Groups may have any number of subgroups which appear as subdirectories to that group. Use REGEDIT to edit the \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Menasoft\SphereFTP registry sub-tree. This allow multiple users to have multiple overlapping access to the file system in a fairly simple way.
• SphereFTP has been ported to Windows CE 3.0 as well. If anyone is interested in a CE build of SphereFTP for X86, ARM, MIPS, or PowerPC please send me email. I’ve found ActiveSync can be very unreliable and complex and did not work satisfactorily in almost any configuration.

Requested Features:

• NT event log support
• Restrict account to IP or host name.
• Block IP ranges? leave this to a router?
• Pretty dialogs for configuring users, groups, and options.
• Nice real time display of current clients and log of activities.

Links to Compairable Products: (We try to be fair)

• FTP Serv-U
• WarFTP
• Microsoft FTP Service
• Titan FTP Server
• PeerFTP

Download:

Sound Pad is a full featured sound wave editor for all versions of Windows (XP, 2000, 95, NT and 3.1). It is a bit out of date compared to open source programs like Audacity, but it still has some useful features.

Sound Pad has been an on going project since ~1992. It began its life as a piece of test code for other audio projects. The wave manipulation capabilities of SOUNDPAD are useful to a range of other Menasoft projects.

Its a bit out of date and hasnt been updated lately. So programs like Audacity (sourceforge) might be a better option, but it still has some useful features.

Features:

• Full multi level undo and redo of changes to the sound
• Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and NT versions available.
• Import files of type: Apple Mac (AIFF), Sound Blaster (VOC), Sun/NeXT(AU), RAW header-less
• Live display of a recording wave image.
• Windows 95 Audio Compression Manager (ACM) compatible.
• Convert from one compression format to another easily.
• Windows 95 install / un-install registered.
• Pasting and mixing effects automatically take advantage of ACM and format conversion.
• Allows full editing of compressed sound formats.
• Allows separate editing of stereo channels.
• Adjustable mixing of sounds.
• Extensive help for all dialogs.
• Full keyboard navigation (no mouse required)
• Active Spectrogram display of the current play position.
• OLE1 Server with configurable object view. (16 bit version)
• Effects: Amplify, Fade, Pitch, Echo
• Effects: Remove Background, Tone, Fill, Silence,Low Pass Filter, Reverse, Noise, Measure
• Internationalized and all application text is resource ready for translation to other languages

Download:

RIFFPad is a viewer (some day to have editing capabilities) for RIFF formatted files. It is a bit rough but I’ve found it to be very useful when working with RIFF files. Common RIFF files are things like WAV, AVI, DirectX resources as well as many Mac file formats.

The RIFF format is a very useful standard binary file format that has been around for a long time and has undergone very little change. In general a RIFF file is a file that is internally made up of ‘chunks’ that have a chunk id, a length and a blob of data. The chunk id is 4 letters encoded into 32 bits. The chunk id types are typically unique to the file type if lower case and globally standardized if upper case.

I’ve run into RIFF files in a number of places that needed decoding. This is a generic utility for viewing the contents of these files.

Users of RIFF file format:

• AIF format, used to store audio on Apple platforms is based on a (little endian) variation of RIFF (*.aif,*.aiff)
• Several Microsoft formats are based on RIFF. (*.wav,*.avi)
• Electronic Arts resource files used in some games. (*.enu) (ie. Ultima Online)
• PNG format image files (*.png and *.mng)
• Color Palette files (*.pal)
• DirectX Media Files (*.cdm;*.dls;*.ffe;*.sgt;*.sty;*.tpl)
• Real Media Files (*rm)

Download:

Links:

FourCC – A good site for general ‘chunk’ format files.