I’m not going to explain the DEEP and complex story of Italy’s Union.
This is Gioventù Ribelle (Google translate says: Rebellious Youth): the fully Italian FPS that Napolitano himself (Italian President) presented yesterday, and sponsored by the Italian Government.

President-kun is amazed!

As the Government says, «this game imposted itself as a true Multimedial Interactive Opera» and that «enables the user to take part to the action and be moved and get excited». «With this project, Italy’s objective is to impose itself in the wordwide videogame market».

Here’s the footage of this piece of fine Italian coding.

You might say there’s no much history involved. Well, you’re a moron if you think that. When you shoot people to death there’s no Italian history, just ragdoll, voices in your head saying “FIRST BLOOD”, “KILLING SPREE” in perfect monster English, while laser beam powered 1849 shotguns make your headphones go ZOOOOOM.
Still, the part that excited me the most was the texture the towels, drying in the open.

You can download this game for free.

Requirements:

1. A last generation computer
2. 7.200 RPM hard disk
3. 4GB RAM
4. Graphic card g-force GTX 560 or better

By the way, this is a GeForce GTX560, coming for just 240 euro:

As we can see from the video, this game makes full use of DirectX11 filters, and certainly needs such a graphics card to be played with Ultra settings.

I hope it imposes itself in the worldwide market as much as that other great game.

Project Diva 2nd and Accessory Pack

I never understood why they gave me both decals and a silicon case.  If I use the case, I can’t see my decals :s.  Also that other rectangular object is actually a cloth meant for scrubbing the psp.

So what is Project Diva?  Well that’s just Hatsune Miku’s dedicated rhythm game!  See here for my take on the first game.  Before I get into project diva 2nd, did you guys know there was a Project Diva Arcade?  And that there is one next to my house?

Project Diva Arcade hell's ya!

I bet you did.  Project Diva Arcade is kind of like Project Diva 1.5.  It has more tracks, Miku in her PS3 rendered glory, introduces the extreme difficulty mode, and arcade mode exclusive features like combination button presses and combination holds.  Also, the difficult for the arcade version is easily harder than the hardest song of Project Diva 2nd’s extreme mode, so ya… plenty of depth here.  Also, the module system works the same except you gain maybe 1-5 points per song and these are saved to a server on the internet.  Your account is linked to you by your RFID card that stores your unique user code.

You get 2 song per 100 yen, so that’s 10 points per 100 yen.  And the cheapest modules (the base ones) are 50 points each.  The most expensive ones are around 3000 points.  So ya, that’s going to be a lot of 100 yen coins from me…

Onwards to Project Diva 2nd!

The game is the mostly the same as the first, but with a large number of small changes.  I’ll just go with a change list, some are obvious, some are less obvious.

1.  The game no longer lags.  It is totally smooth even with duets where more than 1 vocaloid is on the screen.  As much as I loved Project Diva, lag in a rhythm game is totally unacceptable and Project Diva was a shitfest of lag.  Project Diva 2nd fixes all of that.

2. The way the beats are synced to the music has been changed.  Project Diva was consistently late on the sync (most likely to compensate for the lag).  Project Diva 2nd is now mostly in time, but since the button presses are more ambitious, there seems to be more cases of weird button chart design rather than poor sync.  However, that also means that people who whored Project Diva (aka me) will have a hard time adjusting to the new Project Diva.

3.  Tons of new modules, this time Luka, Rin, Ren are all included.   Even the unofficial ones like Neru and Haku have a bunch of costumes.  More variety is always great.  Also, you unlock based on the in game miku points.  No more of the stupid conditional unlocks for modules and percentage based unlocks for Miku room items.  I’ve played Project Diva for more than 100 hours and there are still 3 items that I am missing, and no it’s not fun to try and get them anymore.

4.  Miku Room has been upgraded.  Tons more items around, but the customization is still pretty limited.  It’s mostly the same as Project Diva, except Miku also has more actions now.  Oh and you can use the Miku Room to turn your PSp into an alarm clock.

5. Track list has been overhauled.  The picks are far better than what they went with with Project Diva.  There are still some glaring omissions, like where is Black Rock shooter?  Still they imported a ton of tracks from the old game, and even with upgraded button charts, that feels a bit cheap to me.  Also, Yellow is officially my new favoritest Hatsune Miku Song ever.

Yellow – Hatsune Miku

[smg id=1547 type=av]

6.  Improvement of the core game through addition of holds and directional buttons.  The new holds add a new challenge to the game and the directional buttons don’t really change much except give you 4 more symbols that you have to be ready for.  It’s also really weird that you have to press the arrow on the dpad as well as the psp button of the matching color to get it register but fine.

7. Upped Difficulty Level.  Normal is the new hard, and Extreme is just out there.  It took me far too many tries to get a perfect on Yellow and it wasn’t even supposed to be hard :(.

That's about twice the number of Fines I get in Project Diva, sigh

Things I still hate about Project Diva.

1. The holds.  Why does pressing it down count as 1 beat, and then lifting your finger up count as a 2nd?  It unnatural that you’ve been trained that 1 button press = 1 beat, but now 1 press = 2 on the holds.  It really messes things up when things get hectic.

2.  The contrived difficulty.  I don’t mind actual hard songs, but Project Diva 2nd tries a few tricks to make it harder for you.  Regardless of the actual BPM of the song, the distance between 2 button symbols doesn’t change.  Other than the confusing clock hands, there is no real notation that there is a BPM change, leading to needless misses.  Also, in high BPM songs the buttons become so close together that they become very very hard to see on extreme, especially when it comes to 16th notes.  “Let’s Be Friends” is particularly guilty of this, and so was the old Llevan Polka in Project Diva.  Thus, it becomes rote memorization and this isn’t particularly fine.

3. Scoring is still inane.  Arbitrary combo bonuses mean that, a person who gets 400 Cools and 100 Fines will outscore a person who gets 499 Cools and 1 Safe.

Anyway that’s enough for now.  Until next time, leave me your comments!

Dollars Chat

What does it have to do with me? Well, I made the cool avatars that you’re already (if you’re not, get moving) using. But this wasn’t enough, so we though we’re going to give you even more.
*APPLAUSE*

We are going to make more (yes, more) cool avatars and you are going to choose what’s next. Your favorite anime waifu? The most badass video game character? The dog-belonging-to-the-secondary-character-that-was-in-one-chapter-

of-that-one-manga-you-don’t-remember-the-name-of-but-probably-dealt-with-high-school-students? Just post your suggestions in the comments and we will check them and see if they’re viable to become Durarara-like avatars. Please note that the subject must not be too complex (not because I’m too lazy, but because the graphic style isn’t suitable for complex designs). Also note that the chat is still in sort-of-beta, so there may be bugs or or traits to be improved. Enough chitchatting (did you get the pun? :D), we want you to comments, so post feedback about the chat (what is missing and what could be improved), suggestions about the next avatars to come and your opinion on this project. Thanks for the attention.

Disclaimer: FoOlRulez is in no way affiliated with Ryohgo Narita, Dengeki Bunko, ASCII Media Works, Brain’s Base, Dullahans and/or Vending Machine companies. It is indeed affiliated with me, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this post, you dummy. Also, we won’t  really do any avatar about that dog-that-was-in-[...]. That was a lie.

Here are the avatars.

http://foolrulez.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/tanaka-taro.png

http://foolrulez.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/setton.png

http://foolrulez.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/kanra.png

Don’t worry, Saika will be coming soon.

Some people might argue that GIMP as an open source alternative is just as good, but most people who have had in-depth experience with Photoshop know otherwise. It’s the usability and lots of small yet crucial features that makes Photoshop the favorite among scanlators. Some groups even go as far as requiring their editors to use Photoshop. While GIMP certainly will get the job done, it will do so by consuming a lot more time, and time is a precious good when a single manga chapter averages out at 30 pages and involves a lot of routine tasks to be carried out.

CS4, the currently latest version of Photoshop, already brought a few great features. The support for hardware acceleration based on the graphics card not only improved the performance, but also allowed better preview scaling and most important of all (at least for scanlators), preview when using clone stamp right on the drawing cursor. While content-aware scaling is a cool feature, I personally almost never use it.
So what’s so special about CS5 that I dedicate an entire blog post to it? Watch and be amazed…

What does this mean for scanlators? You might already know that FoOlRulez puts a lot effort into editing, not only translating the text in the bubbles, but also replacing sound effects, however large it might be, with understandable English equivalent. That requires something we call redrawing: large chunks of what was japanese sound effect text have to be replaced by what we think might have been the original picture behind the sound effect. That, sometimes, takes a lot of time, depending on the size and the content to redraw.

See what my point is? Exactly, this time-consuming part of editing might be shortened a lot, if the feature shown on the demo video works as perfectly as we all are hoping it would.

Stay tuned and just maybe, FoOlRulez might be able to churn out fresh scanlations at an even faster pace, at the same high quality standard.

EDIT: If you need a fix for Opera crashing, follow this link.

What’s happening is the classical OS changeversion problem: the software is not compatible anymore and needs to get updated. Of course, there’s no update when the OS was released just 5 days ago. Surely there will be one for each software pretty soon, but now this is just making my computer a bit too sensible.

The problem: 64bit. There’s software working only on 32bit, such as MultiClutch and PlugSuit, two very important pieces of software for Mac users. Multiclutch has also an extra problem, as it seems the libraries that it uses are not available in 64bit, which means it will take a bit before…

Wait a second, Safari is having problems: the page hangs, all links/buttons become unusuable at times. Writing this post is really becoming hell.

As I was saying, MultiClutch’s author is in troubles because he doesn’t have an easy fix for that piece of software.

This is all for today from the war zone, and I recommend you: wait a month after an OS is released, so the software can get updated first to match the new requirements. Else you’ll have a brick like I have now.

…the publish button is not working. What the…

…Alright, now I am on Firefox… trying to push on publish…

I keep having this problem, and it’s a double sided knife.

• You can’t wait for the package and you’d like to do something else to kill the time
• You can’t do anything because if you leave home and the delivery arrives… you’ll rage.

It’s far too bitter to wait without doing anything.

Right now I am waiting my copy of Snow Leopard to arrive. You know, the new version of the Mac OS. There should be some heavy improvement, and of course I can’t wait to install that on my MacBook. The shipping of Snow Leopard really became a mass phenomenon, everybody is blogging about it. Most likely because the OS costs only 30 euro for everyone and just 9 euro for who bought their Mac this summer (just like me).

It’s debateable if it’s a good thing that Apple sells this kind of software: many say it’s just an update like Windows Service Packs, other say that it’s incredible that Apple is going to sell an OS for just 30 euro (don’t forget, for Apple 30euro=30bucks). Even who’s still on Tiger can, in fact, update to Snow Leopard, as it seems. Ah, only Intel users. It’s still the feeling we’re just getting an update. Apple says that the costs are just for shipping as well.

It’s a half way that doesn’t let anyone foulmouth Apple without the question if Snow Leopard is really an OS for 30 euro, but after what they did with the iPod Touch and iPhone software version 3.0 (pay for updating to the new version with near to no interesting updates), I think Apple should give Snow Leopard to EVERYONE for 9 euro.

But, they know that if the user pays, he feels he’ll get more care, and that at the price is so low everyone will upgrade, Mac haters with a Mac excluded. Double reverse thinking. Good job Apple.

Well, honestly I am a megalomaniac, and all the most famous websites have an URL shortening service for their own service. Since (one day) FoOlRulez will be the biggest website evar, I thought… why not adding the short URL service early? Doing it was far harder than thinking of it.

You know, we aren’t using a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) server, but an Nginx powered server (LNMP sounds weird tho). This means most of the software needs some fix to work correctly, though it will work much faster. This means YOURLS, the software I intended to use, needed some fix as well.

For this fix, I had to find a solution, and I have found it here: 使用 Yourls 强化你的短网址系统 – Showfom’s Blog.
I have no idea what that URL says… but hey, I found the fix to make YOURLS work!

if (!-f $request_filename){
set $rule_0 1$rule_0;
}
if (!-d $request_filename){
set $rule_0 2$rule_0;
}
if ($rule_0 = "21"){
rewrite ^/([0-9a-z]+)/?$ /yourls-go.php?id=$1 last;
}

Gibberish? No this is the code you need to make it work in your Nginx installation! Paste it where you need it. If you don’t know how comment here and I’ll explain a bit further.

Anyway, this made everything work… a bit of styling of the homepage et voilà!

http://foolz.us

It works! I can’t believe it myself!

Let’s go a bit more indeep with YOURLS. This is a very complete script to make your own URL shortener, by:

• Lester Chan / @GamerZ on Twitter
• Ozh RICHARD / @Ozh on Twitter

I think they’re the same who made a few of the plugins I use in this WordPress blog (yeah they are). Anyway, this script is powerful enough to not leave you dry mouthed: you get an API to use the URL shortening service on your server from anywhere, the admin menu lets you control the tidbits you need (ok, most of the controls are via code, but it’s easily done with the explanations), the code has explanation for most of the lines – I in fact edited it to fit my needs better.

Best part of all, it comes with a WordPress plugin, that hooks to the shortening service and makes a short url for every post: even this one post has a shortening url. Then you get automatic submission of the post to Twitter after publishing. The button to submit to twitter on the top is my creation by using the functions (wordpress hooks) that YOURL for WordPress provides.

The need: showing two posts on the same level from two different categories and divide one of the two categories in its sub-categories.

The result: a homepage that shows all the latest posts from any category without the need to reload (AJAX used) and two features, simmetrical.

I wanted to make the editing of this theme as easy as possible, which means I have created a (kind of big) theme options page so anyone can fix the theme at own need. Hide the title, display ads a bit everywhere, change the captions: you can do all of that through the theme options.

I suggest to use with this theme WP-Pagenavi and Get-the-image plugins. Even though it’s not absolutely necessary, they make this theme look way better.

The features:

• SEO ready
• Options page
• ADs/HTML spaces via options
• Switches for showing or hiding parts of the website
• All the captions can be edited via control panel
• AJAX for loading categories
• jQuery for moving effects in home page
• Threaded comments
• Two functional tabs in home (they’re sidebars, use the white spaces with useful widgets as applications!)
• Search (yes, it’s a feature)
• Sidebar in posts/pages
• Control panel button in the footer
• An extremely cool diamond whenever something is being loaded via AJAX!

Missing:

• Archives
• The top white bar: that’s not part of the theme, it’s our website framework. ¬.¬

Demo you say? There’s no demo as for now, it would take many hours to create a decent one. You can see this very website, but ignore the top white bar (that’s not part of the theme). I’ll add here pics of the not active features:

Big options page, but with explanations.

Hide the tabs you don't need.

Up to 9 categories listed

Show the title/subtitle/ad or all of them together!

The theme still doesn’t have a whole help manual – you shouldn’t need it. Please, post here suggestions and bugs, so I will be able to fix them and release the (epic) version 1.o.

As for now, here’s version 0.8.2:

Not available for download.

-Release notes:

0.8.2
Fixed a bug making the middle tabs not work if the categories selected weren’t exactly 8.
Added page browsing links in case WP-Pagenavi is not available.
Added a system to fetch images also without Get-the-images.
Added a system that shortens excerpts that are too long. It still needs to be refined on the numbers. Useless when the excerpt has new lines in it. It elegantly deactivates if the user added his own excerpt.
0.8.1:
There was a bug in the “features/paged.php” file, an extra “endif” making the theme not work.

Features (as for now):

1. Display of two category groups.
2. Automatic image insertion.
3. Threaded comments.
4. Javascript dropdown categories for the two main groups.
5. Sidebar on the bottom, hidden sidebar on the top, left side on single posts.
6. Ad space… somewhere.
7. Compatible up to WordPress 2.9 beta.
8. More stuff I can’t recall.

Will I release this? Maybe, but first I have to create an options page in order to make it practical, as as for now it’s useful only for FoOlRulez. It’s a very atipical theme, and I am not sure many can use it.

I’m sorry for Internet Explorer users, but I couldn’t try the theme on IE because I am at the moment on a Mac. I know about one issue with the comment numbers per each post, and I’ll fix it soon.

Please, enjoy it’s speed and use. Comment and tell me the issues.

FoOlMatik is the name, and the reason for the name is simple: it does absolutely everything automatically, as long as it doesn’t fuck up. There’s not much to automate, but that little, helps a lot.

Honestly, I am always much in a hurry, and I applied the theme to FoOlRulez without too much betatesting, which means you’ll see this theme change day by day in order to get to completition. There are quite few tweaks I have to apply, I want it even more automatized (there’s even a thing I have to edit MANUALLY THROUGH CODE which is not really adapt for such theme).

First highlight of the theme: releases are divided from posts. Which means that if someone starts posting a lot, the releases will still have their place in their corner, and by clicking the MORE RELEASES button, you’ll get a COOL dropdown function that will show you many more releases. The normal posts get more highlighting, it’s obvious, we want you to read them.

On the top you get the usual menu, but there’s also a new one: for now you see Twitter there, with a dropdown too, but really soon I’ll add FaceBook functionalities (in a darker blue button!) and integrate FoOlz.us. You’ll be able to twit from there, as well as add us to your facebook fanclubs and so on, that kind of social network stuff.

There’s a new comment system, completely revamped.

The sidebar is not on the side anymore, as it’s on the bottom. This way I can save a lot of space and show much more info on the home page of the website.

And much more! You’ll see wonders in these days. Slowly you’ll notice.