Live For Speed InSim API 0.01a
I've been playing Racing Simulations for a while. I have an Act Labs Force RS, a wheel I truly enjoy, even though Act Labs has decided to get out of that market. My true love was Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed. I think it was the best NFS game of the series. A good balance between Arcade and Simulator. However it is also the one that did the worst commercially and now NFS is pretty much a Console arcade racing franchise. Oh well.
I've spent some time with TOCA: Race Driver 2, a beautiful engine, but i never liked the feel of the cars. Grand Prix Legends, is of course the reigning champion among Simulation junkies, so much so that the 10 year(?) old game has been lovingly kept up to date by a devoted fanbase. But talk about hard to drive, and I am really more of a GT racing kind of guy.
While I've known about Live For Speed for a while and played the demo, it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago that I finally broke down and bought the full game. And man, it's shaping up to be my favorite simulator. S1 is already incredible, and graphically good enough. The driving is fun and challenging and extend to which you can tweak your car setup is incredible. And what's been posted of S2 pretty much puts at the top of the genre, if you ask me.
And then there is InSim, a UDP protocol for communicating with either the individual game or a game server to control many aspects, or syphon racing statistics from it. Being a geek, I was drawn to this protocol almost as much as to the racing itself and so I've been busy building an Object/Event model to encapsulate the protocol in C#. Finally all the playing with binary serialization has paid off. The first version of the lib with a VS.NET winforms tester solution can be found here, the full NDoc generate docs are here. Right now this is a binary release of the Lib itself, but once i lock down the Model, i'll release the full source, most likely under the General Public License.
This initial release understands all InSim packets, but I have not built objects around them, so really the only capabilities exposed are:
- Connect to an LFS instance, and if so configured, automatically respond to keep alive packets
- Access the LFS version information
- Send and receive messages
- Request and subscribe to Status packets.
It'll probably take me a month to flesh out the rest, at my current pace.
C style strings into C#
I've been spending some time building an Object Model around an binary wire protocol. It uses traditional C style strings which are null terminated. C# strings have no problem '\0', so i was getting some funny text messages, as well no way to see an empty string. I was hoping that there was something in BitConverter or Encoding that would truncate the byte array magically, but i wasn't able to find it. So, pending a a better solution, i convert the whole thing to a string, then use IndexOf() to find the first '\0' and then copy the substring up to the null into another string. Ugly, IMHO, but it works.
System.Windows.Forms.ListBox bug with BeginUpdate()/EndUpdate()
Came across an annoying bug with ListBox. If you use BeginUpdate() and EndUpdate() and only add a single item to a cleared Item collection, then that Item does not show up on Refresh. However if you leave the BeginUpdate()/EndUpdate() out, it works fine, resulting in a need for code like this:
listBox.Items.Clear();
if( itemList.Count > 1 )
{
//only use the Begin/End cycle if we have more than one item
itemList.BeginUpdate();
}
foreach( object item in itemList )
{
listBox.Items.Add(item);
}
if( group.Strings.Count > 1 )
{
//only use the Begin/End cycle if we have more than one item
mStrings.EndUpdate();
}
listBox.Refresh();
Image Clipping and Alignment with CSS
The clip attribute in CSS is not what I would call the simplest to understand. Never mind that the rect() function uses a space separated list instead of a comma separated one, but that some browsers still understand comma separated. But the ordering of the clip rect of top right bottom left is just bizarre. Finally to understand what clipping does, it's important to realize that the clip rect defines a rectangle of what will be shown, defined from the origin, but it does not affect positioning of the image, which still starts at the origin, clipped areas not withstanding.
Since i've done this too much over the last week by trial and error, i decided to just put together a quick page illustrating clip usage.
log4net filepaths and how to get at Appenders at runtime
Just a note of something simple and silly enough that I shouldn't forget it again: Filepaths in log4net configurations still have to escape the DOS separator backslash. I know it should be obvious, you use \ in a text file, you escape it.
Well, i was too used to the @"c:\foo\bar.txt" syntax from C# that when i took the path out of the code and into the log4net XML config, i left it in the c:\foo\bar.txt format. I wasn't able to wrap a debugger around the deployed code and couldn't figure out why my logger wasn't writing. I figured out how to get to the currently available appenders at runtime and wrote that to the web page trace and seeing that there was no filename for the RollingFile appender, smacked me in the head with the "escape the backslash, stupid".
The silly part out of the way, this did give me some useful insight into log4net internals. So to get at the configured appenders you can do this:
// Just grabbing the first logger, since we want to use it to grab it's parent,
// the root logger
log4net.Repository.Hierarchy.Logger logger
= (log4net.Repository.Hierarchy.Logger)log.Logger.Repository.GetCurrentLoggers()[0];
Console.WriteLine("Logger: {0}",logger.Name);
//
foreach( log4net.Appender.IAppender appender in logger.Parent.Appenders )
{
Console.WriteLine(" Appender: {0}",appender.Name);
// just checking for RollingFile here, but could just as well check for all other appenders
if(appender.GetType() == typeof(log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender))
{
log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender rolling
= (log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender)appender;
Console.WriteLine(" Rolling File: {0}",rolling.File);
}
Mind you this is just a place to get started from. It does make a number of assumptions you shouldn't make in production code. It is good enough though to help you debug log4net behavior.
IE compatibility
Quirksmode is a very useful site regarding javascript and css compatibility across browsers. Using the snippet regarding mouse coordinates, both of the pages mentioned in the last two posts now work in IE as well.
More fun with Javascript and CSS
Working on a little example of panning images with javascript. So far it doesn't do image boundary detection. It also just pans one large image, not a tiled and continously loading set, like Google Maps.
