I can’t tell whether I am disappointed in the musical aspect of Mass Effect 2 or not. Unfortunately, some of the ‘best’ music tracks aren’t included on the Official Sound Track – reason being? They aren’t made by EA, but are instead “real life” (but undiscovered) songs used in-game. Examples include the music from Aria’s Club on Omega — instead of gaining a place on the official soundtrack, it was substituted with some “generic battle music”.

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For such a great game, the ambient background music by itself doesn’t quite deliver quite the same effect as the game itself.

The music in Mass Effect was unfortunately not as ‘significant’ as I would have liked it to be. The tracks all seemed to lack the “ability” to be listened to outside of the game. A lot of the tracks were required to be coupled alongside game play in order to make their effect more prominent. This rendered the official soundtrack regrettably “forgettable”.

However, with every batch of not-so-great game music, or there are some stand out tracks from Mass Effect that provided that “Zelda-music like” connection to the game.

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Since publishing the post containing some of my favourite game music; I have been keeping and ear and eye out for any other games which I may have missed. The original post was already quite full of various game music, so I felt it was probably best to start splitting the music up into individual game posts

Sonic the Hedgehog! Only after finding a quiz on Sporcle related to the game music did the memories of the classic Green Hill Zone and super trendy Chemical Plant Zone music come flooding back. Below is the collection of my favourite Sonic themes.

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I was recently enlightened to a page as a result of a Google search for the ‘Greatest Game Music Ever’. The ‘Billboard’ website, listed 25 of the ‘Best Video Game Songs Ever’. In one of the biggest insults to real game music, the list comprised of real world songs, by real world artists, that had been used in games like GTA and Guitar Hero. C’mon Guitar Hero!? Best video game songs!? /sigh

While it may be dependant on the game in question, I’m not having a ‘go’ at the game itself, but the people and consequent websites who believe the GTA and Guitar Hero music is proper video game music.

On a final note, this page may be quite memory consuming with all the embedded files — but hey, it’s worth it

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So you’re wondering what on earth Shadow Productions could do to help with your cleaning routine? Well, not much really — however I can at least appreciate the difficulty of cleaning a keyboard and mouse, especially that of a gamer…

The odd situation is, that I tend to clean my keyboard while having the computer on — while voice chatting or waiting for a new game to install, I subconsciously clean the keyboard, but also tend to write an essay of jargon at the same time from accidental key presses.

This application, “Keyboard and Mouse Disabler” has only one known purpose so far, and that is to make cleaning your keyboard and mouse peripherals easy. With a few clicks, your mouse and keyboard will be temporarily disabled, preventing accidental key presses and mouse clicks — then it’s cleaning time

There is no install required, it runs straight from the download. While this may seem to be a rather trivial application to release, I thought why not. If someone finds a use for it — great

Download Keyboard and Mouse Disabler!

I was browsing the Internet and some local pictures and found some interesting Team Fortress 2 comics and included them below. I can’t remember the sources, nor authors for all of them. Let me know if you’re the creator

Click the image to make it bigger, if it’s still not big enough, Right click then “Open in new tab/window” or similar.

As I have learnt over the years, at a certain stage of application development logging becomes critical. It is imperative during testing (especially with multiple, external testers) that they can report any problems or issues in the most efficient manner; this usually entails sending  a log file which the developer can use to locate and debug the bug.

VB.NET comes with its own ‘logging’ sub-system integrated into the language. It allows the developer to place entries into the log file at specified points in the code. These entry points are usually placed at strategic points, such as in the catch statement of a Try… Catch or at the end of a long process to indicate completion.

The logging sub-system of VB.NET resides under the My.Application.Log namespace. Under this namespace are several functions and concepts, that I will detail below, which will let you start logging in your own applications.

Several functions under this namespace allow you to write events to the log file. An ‘entry’ essentially, is composed of a string Message, a Severity Level and an Event ID.

The Message is a string that the developer specifies to appear in the log file. It should generally detail a stage in the code (e.g. “Starting update…”).

The Severity Level is used to determine how ‘critical’ the entry or exception is. This level is only used to help filter out critical events from the less critical ones. For example, an event of a failed update, “Update failed” should be classes at a error level, while an event such as “Starting update” should only be classed as an information level.

Other levels, such as a ‘critical’, are usually reserved for an error that causes the application to cease functioning.

The Event ID attribute is a way help index and identify the errors that may occur for correlation purposes. It is optional attribute when writing an event. It is usually reserved for error events as opposed to verbose events.

You can write events to the log by calling a function under the My.Application.Log namespace. The following code write an example event to the log;

My.Application.Log.WriteEntry("Starting to process function XYZ", TraceEventType.Verbose)

As noted above, the Event ID attribute is optional; it may be considered in-effective to index verbose level messages; reserving the event ID’s for error and critical level events.

When writing Errors to the log a slightly different and specialized function may be used. The WriteError function will write details of an ‘exception’ caught during a Try… Catch statement. It is invoked similar to the code example below;

Try
    Throw New Exception("A sample error exception")
Catch ex As Exception
     My.Application.Log.WriteException(ex, TraceEventType.Error, "Additional information or details")
End Try

Once the error exception is raised within the Try block, the WriteException event will write the exception details (ex) to the log. The same severity level option can be applied, as well as some additional notes to make debugging easier.

When the application closes, and the log file has been flushed to disk the file can be retrieved for analysis. By default it is placed in the user’s Roaming profile under a subdirectory relevant to your application name. To save some time, you can find out the direct path, and for example, show it in a message box, while running the program by executing the following line of code;

MsgBox(My.Application.Log.DefaultFileLogWriter.FullLogFileName)

As with any logging sub-system, some performance overhead (while extremely minimal) may be invoked. To help reduce this, it is possible to only log events that may be considered more relevant than others.

As discussed above the Severity Level can help rank events on a scale of severity, from Verbose to Critical. Similarly we can choose to only log events that we deem important on a release application, for example only events higher than the Informational level. We can choose programmatically as to which events should be included and which should not. The code below sets this level to log events only Information and above.

My.Application.Log.TraceSource.Switch.Level = SourceLevels.Information

The hierarchy of severity levels can be determined using the table below (source).

Logging becomes essential in larger, more complex programs with several testers. Hopefully the outline of the logging system above will make it simple to implement basic logging capabilities into your own application.

When developing certain types of programs, different methods of debugging may be required in order to effectively and efficiently debug.

For example, programs with a timer iterative functions with a small interval, programs intercepting Window (WndProc) messages, or even programs with multiple hooks to the keyboard or mouse. All these type of programs have something in common…. it’s a major pain in the backside to ‘step-through’ (by default F10 in Visual Studio) without it jumping to areas non-related to the area of interest.

It’s not until recently that I discovered the DebuggerStepThrough attribute as a question answer on Stack Overflow.

Essentially, the DebuggerStepThrough attribute belongs to the Systems.Diagnostics namespace, and can be placed before almost any block of code to indicate to the debugger that it should pass/skip the block in question.

Decleration of DebuggerStepThrough in C#;

[DebuggerStepThrough()]
private void AnExampleSub()
{
    // Annoying iterative code
}

Decleration of DebuggerStepThrough in VB.NET;

[DebuggerStepThrough()] _
Private Sub AnExampleSub()
      ' Annoying iterative code
End Sub()

During debugging step through, the debugger will not visit anywhere within the subs in the examples above.

Possibly one of the worst kept ‘launch’ secrets, Google announced the Nexus One back at the start of January, specifically the 5th.

Launched within the US, UK, Singapore and Hong Kong, customers were able to purchase a Nexus One. However, that left Australia and a plethora of other countries without access to the latest Google gadget.

More recently, there have been reports of a “2010 release date” for the Nexus One in Australia. Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) (Vodafone and Three networks) have said “Details relating to Vodafone’s Australian launch of Google Nexus One will be announced in due course.”

This due course may be confirmed by some photos taken during a ‘dissection’ of the Nexus One…

The picture may not seem to reveal much at first, however in the lower left corner appears the ‘A-tick’, a certification of ACMA’s “Telecommunications/Radiocommunications Labelling”.

Being certified by ACMA hopefully indicates and confirms future sales in Australia.

In the mean-time the temptation to import grows, with numerous sites now offering the phone along with warranty with a slightly inflated price…

Steam has opened Bioshock 2 for pre-order, to be released in just under three weeks.

BioShock 2 Pre-Purchase Now

JANUARY 19, 2010, 1:59 PM – VALVE – GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENT

BioShock 2 is now available for pre-purchase on Steam! Save 10% and earn an extra copy of BioShock free! If you already own BioShock then gift it to any of your friends!
Want to play with a few of your friends? The BioShock 2 Four Pack gives you four copies of BioShock 2 and four free copies of BioShock to give out to your friends!

However, the price for Australia in Steam appears to be substantially higher, $27 USD higher… Using the two links below show two different prices, and unfortunately unless you have a US billing address, you wont be able to use the US store page.

AUD Bioshock Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/8859/?cc=au
USD Bioshock Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/8859/?cc=us

Suggestions for getting the lower price range from illegal to legal, however probably the easiest legal method is to just get it gifted from someone in America then pay them back via PayPal.