Halcyon | flow

Calm and peaceful; tranquil | Continuity and smoothness of appearance

American Heritage Dictionary 4th. Ed.

The PC demo of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was released today (yesterday?) and it seems like a quality game. I got an impression from the initial screenshots that the game was very similar to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but a quick run through the demo proved that Dark Messiah has a much more interesting approach to combat. I like the fact that you can defeat most enemies using various aspects of the game's nicely detailed environments, without ever swinging a weapon.

I recorded two videos of the demo and cut them into highlight reels showing some fun things from the tutorial level and the cavern level. You can download them on the Gallery page. See the Related Links below for mirrors to download the 1.38gb demo.

This time I've encoded the videos using x264, which seems to have a better filesize-to-quality ratio than XviD. You will need to have a recent version of ffdshow installed in order to play x264 videos. You can download ffdshow here. Choose a mirror for ffdshow under the decoder section; if you're not sure which to get, go with the sse version.

Related Links:
http://files.filefront.com/Dark+Messiah+of+Might+and+Magic+Demo+v10/;5370570;;/fileinfo.html
http://www.3ddownloads.com/Action/Dark%20Messiah%20of%20Might%20and%20Magic/Demo/Dark_Messiah_Demo.exe
http://www.fileplanet.com/166052/160000/fileinfo/Dark-Messiah-of-Might-&-Magic-Singleplayer-Demo

The entire website now renders properly in IE6. The last major problem - the wrecked Gallery page - was solved with two fixes. I discovered the first through trial and error: placing clear:both divs immediately before each image category. This corrected the layout, but the category divs were still not rendering.

After two days of failed attempts , webben of #web on irc.freenode.net hit on the cause of the second problem. Internet Explorer has a hasLayout boolean value that is true if a particular element is said to "have layout" in which case it renders normally. Apparently, when this value is false, strange things happen. webben linked me to this article, which describes the concept of "having layout" in IE in detail. The article lists CSS properties that force an element to have layout; display: inline-block is the one that fixed the remaining problem on the Gallery page. Huge thanks to webben for finding this for me.

At some point I'm going to do an in-depth writeup of the various tweaks and fixes I had to implement in order to get this website working in IE6. It's really amazing how much of this just works in Firefox and Opera, yet explodes in Microsoft's little browser.

However, my next step is to finish the About page and get a proper credits section in it. I have been aided by a number of useful websites and helpful people during the development of this website, and I'm going to see that they get recognition for it. Thanks!

IE6 compatibility has progressed now to the point that I can be satisified with the look of this website in Firefox and IE6. There is still some inconsistency in amounts of whitespace between IE6 and Firefox due to each browser's handling of floated elements, but it doesn't detract significantly from the design.

Right now only the Software page reflects these changes; I will be updating the other content pages tomorrow with the fixes. Following that, I'm going to complete the About page and see about getting some more interesting items on the content pages themselves.

Thanks to the generous help of some folks in #web on irc.freenode.net, I was able to correct the width and height problems with the website layout in IE6+. They also helped me get started on fixing the content box rendering problems on the Software, Game Mods, and Writing pages, although they're still a bit of a mess. Hopefully I can get everything rendering properly in IE soon.

I've completed the tutorial missions in the Company of Heroes beta and tried my hand at a multiplayer game, and I recorded some of the gameplay for your enjoyment. You can find 5 video clips of the game in action on the Gallery page. Four of these are small clips from the tutorial missions, and the fifth is an 8 minute highlight reel showing myself taking a sound beating from a large-scale infantry assault.

I have written a mini-review of this beta release to convey my first impression of the game. You can click below to read it or use the link on the Writing page. Company of Heroes is being developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ. You can visit the official website for more information about the game.

Click here to view the full article.

I haven't been impressed by many of the new PC game releases lately, but this one looks promising. It's a WWII real-time strategy game, which obviously isn't anything new, but it looks amazing. As long as it doesn't play like the dozens of Warcraft 3 clones that have been flooding the market, it has a chance of being a good game.

The multiplayer beta of Company of Heroes was opened to the public today. You can visit Fileplanet to get a beta key for the game and download the client, which is a hefty 1.61gb. You'll have to register with Fileplanet (for free) if you don't already have an account.

I'm currently downloading the client myself. I'll have some impressions of the gameplay posted later after I try it out.