With my new laptop up and running, I am happily playing several Steam-based games:
Dust (I am pretty impressed by this. It is a platformer, side-scrolling game with really nice visuals, voice-acting and insane combo options)
Dungeon Defenders (yet to start this under Steam, but played it extensively under Android)
Dota (downloading)
Wakfu (played on my old 32-bit box, but Steam refuses to start the game if you are running 32-bit arch. With a 64-bit arch, it will start)
I also have some extra games that I’m not playing or stopped playing:
Bastion (tried it and it is interesting, but I’m finding it really difficult to get into
Dungeon Hearts (slow and laggy)
Ravensword: Shadowlands (an interesting 3D, but very little customisation options)
Toribash (Appeal wore off very quickly)
Although, I have them tied into the Steam framework so I can start them up via Steam and grab screenshots, etc.
I have also looked at Fraps and Kazam – two screen recorders (Fraps for Windows, Kazam for Linux) and both perform pretty well. Fraps performs great, I got smooth high-quality video out of WoW. Kazam, I am tweaking settings. It also generates good-quality video, but I need to play with the framerate and encoding settings. Look out for some uploads at some point in the future.
I was fortunate enough to play Dungeon Defenders I on Android via both Google Play (before Trendy took it down) and Humble Bundle, and loved it. I’m itching to try DDII when it becomes available. With my new higher-spec laptop currently happily playing both League of Legends and World of Warcraft, I’ve become more active on Steam, and found that DDII is now available as an Early Access on there. So if you’re keen for your DD fix, take a look there. Currently Windows-only, though. :(
Gotten into a new freemium game called Legion of Heroes. It’s a cross between a 3D MMORPG with a Final Fantasy Tactics style battle. There’s gorgeous graphics, decent cutscenes, and voice-acting that isn’t too cringe-worthy. Yes, it is freemium, and it does push selling items at you repeatedly, which is damn frustrating, but my only gripe so far.
It is a demanding game, and it shows by its lack of compatibility with older devices. Both my asus Transformer TF101 and my HTC Sensation Std are not compatible with this game,
You can have several heroes on your team, with one your main character. I picked the magic user, because I have a thing for magic users and Elves, and she was both. Surprising, it was a good choice - she’s a decent damage dealer, and doubles up as a healer, with her healing also giving a ATK+ bonus). Unfortunately, we can be either a damage dealer or a healer, and not both, as her mode is dictated by the weapon she wields (staff for damage, or tome for healing - she was wielding a staff in the picture below). Fortunately, as I progressed into the story, I met two healers (both on the back row of my team). One heals an entire row by a certain amount, and the other heals only one, but gives a regeneration bonus on that person so they auto-heal for two turns.
When a character performs a special move, such as healing, or casting a spell, you get a short cut like this. It is possible, when in auto-battle, to have several characters perform special moves one after the other. It’s quite amusing to watch four specials all targetted at one boss.
Specials are paid for by Fury, which is gathered during attacks by your characters, and by being attacked by opponent monsters. So it is possible to throw many specials during the course of a battle. Some moves are low-cost such as the single-person heal. Others, such as my main character’s special costs more, because it deals damage to more enemies.
After several months, I have upgraded my phone from an HTC Sensation to a Samsung Galaxy S5 and the first thing I did was root my G5, which surprisingly was VERY easy, just use ODIN and the ODIN tool. My HTC Wildfire S was super hard to root (had to use the XTC hardware tool), and now I have Titanium Back restoring my apps. I am considering flashing CFW, but I want to make sure I have a Nandroid-compatible recovery installed first.
I also have redownloaded Zombies, Run!, and I am going to try to catch up with the storyline from where I left off. My last mission was "Veronica" back in June (Mission 15), but I'm going to redo the entire Season 3 missions again to be sure.
Zombies, Run now supports (albeit at an experimental level) external media players (somewhat obsoleting my Google Music tutorial), but I haven’t tried this feature and it does note that by enabling this mode, ZR will not allow you to select music lists internally. Not that it matters to me right now, since I have loads of music stored locally on my device.
After a lot of fighting, I got my first Rainbowmon loot. This monster is unique in that it is not designed to be used to fight with, it is meant to be sacrificed to give EXP to other monsters. Find these monsters, and you can fast-track the levels on your team.
I’ve been introduced to a new Android game. Summoner’s War. It’s a free-to-play game, with optional IAP. Freemium, I guess.
You are a summoner and you take monsters into battle, following a storyline, with rare monsters available if you hunt for them. It’s a generally good time-waster.
Yes, you can pay money for speeding up the levelling, but you don’t have to, and there’s little push for it. You can have many monsters on your team, and include some from your friends.
There is also an Arena (this is the core of the game) where you can battle other players in PvP - but the players are not “live”. The players setup a defending team and when you battle them, that is the team that you face.
I’ve also just discovered the dungeons feature, where you can search for parts to Awaken monsters, where you upgrade your monster, causing it to change appearance and name, and gain better stats and a new skill. Another feature is Evolving monsters, where you increase your monster’s number of stars, resetting them to level 1 and return them to base stats, but their base stats are more powerful that the previous star level. I haven’t evolved any of my characters yet, although I do now have one eligible for it (my Vagabond, at L15) - not in any of these pictures. Evolution requires several monsters of the same star level to be sacrified. So, for example, my Vagabond is 2 stars, so I need 2x 2 star monsters. A three star monster need 3x 3 star monsters instead.
This is a Google Developers episode detailing how best to avoid releasing broken or defective games on Google Play. It speaks of three release stages: Alpha, Beta, and Canary/Staged Rollout. Alpha and Beta, almost all people are aware of. But Canary/Staged Rollout is a new term for me, but makes a lot of sense.
If you develop and/or release software, this is probably worth a watch.
I am not impressed. After flashing and restoring my applications, the phone seems extra sluggish and seems to have locked me out of recovery mode. When I tried to set my alarm for weekdays, I was fighting the phone to click the days of the week. I was pressing Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then the phone took several seconds before showing up the change, then unticking them, and ticking them back on again.
I reflashed my recovery from 4EXT, since I could still get into the main OS, and now I’m reflashing from my image back to my albinoman build. This Flemmard build is going on my “do not use” list.
Reflashing my phone again. Using Cyanogenmod again, this time, a different build. This build is V4.4.4 instead of V4.4.2 which is the one on the albinoman build. The build is also later than albinoman’s one, so might contain some fixes to problems encountered in V4.4.2.
So, I have been using the albinoman build of Cyanogenmod for a while now, and reflashing has fixed a few quirks, but I still get what appears to be a memory problem and the system interface restarts. So I’m going to later try reflashing a different build.
First flash is an unofficial version of Cyanogenmod 11. This is the version I currently have, but I’m doing a full reflash due to the problems I currently have, which I wonder if it is down to the fact I didn’t do a superwipe when switching between ROM variants.
Generally, you should wipe or superwipe your phone if you are moving from one ROM variant to another, and not wipe if you’re flashing an update to the currently installed ROM.
My experience of Carbon ROM has been short and a mixture of good and bad. Good in that there were some very nice features, but bad, in that the whole ROM seemed to not be too responsive. Less of a problem with Carbon ROM compared to the last one I tried, but, still, definitely noticeable.
I’ve taken a quick look at XDA and found a couple of other ROMs available, so I’m going to download them and give each one a go. 4Ext really helps with the backups.
My HTC Sensation KitKat ROM has been very quirky, with some weird behaviour with some apps, most notably with Nike+ Running. I’ve decided to try flashing a different ROM. I tried UnoRom again, but that seemed sooo sluggish - it took a few seconds to even come out of sleep each time I wanted to unlock my phone. So this time, I’ve tried Carbon Rom. So far, so good, I’m restoring my Titanium Backups.
After tolerating the instability of ZR3 for a long time, I have finally decided to quit using the app. It has become unusable, crashing EVERY use at least once and causing other apps to force close as Android tries to frantically free up memory for the black hole that is ZR3. Six to Start have not even addressed this issue, even though they acknowledge it is a memory hog.
The resources I have made – the Google Music tutorial page, and the Bitbucket respository, will remain up for now, but will not be updated further. If someone wants to pick them up and continue with them, by all means, do so, and let me know, so I can add a redirect or link to your site.
It looks like having Injustice on my phone causes my phone to become VERY unstable. Apps start misbehaving and being terminated by the Android OS as it attempts to free-up memory, even when Injustice is not running. I’ve had to remove it off my phone just to get it to behave properly, so now I’m playing it on my tablet instead. I lost around 1 day’s worth of play, but that’s tolerable since I’ve just started it.
Progress is slow, since I can only use the app when I’m at home. But still, I’ve managed to gain some more levels and characters. I’ve even promoted Nightwing and Catwoman.
I found out how to get my game state back, and got all my characters back, plus had Green Lantern added to it, albeit later than normal (GL is meant to have been unlocked when you register for a WBID)
A colleague at work has introduced me to Injustice: Gods Among Us. I’ve spent a couple of days playing it on my tablet, but it seems a little buggy on there (not sure whether it’s my ROM or the app, or both). It’s taken me a couple of attempts, but I’ve got it running on my phone. Unfortunately, even if you have a WBID, your progress does not seem to carry across devices, so I had most of my characters at Level 10 on my tablet, but when I start on my phone, they are all Level 1. I had Nightwing, Sinestro and Lex Luthor on my tablet as starting characters. This time, I have Green Arrow, Harley Quinn and Sinestro, with Green Lantern as my (immediate) first unlock.
A Californian woman has filed a class action against Apple after switching to an Android phone and finding that text messages sent by friends with iPhones didn't reach her.
If you are like me and regularly copy music files to your device, you’ll know that some applications only work with playlists, especially fitness apps like Zombies, Run! and miCoach. But these apps use the media storage playlists, so you need to create the playlists in a certain way. I’ve generate a script below. It searches for any files ending in flac or mp3 (common audio formats), and then generates them into an m3u playlist. It prefixes the output with /sdcard/Music (which is commonly where music files go), but this can be changed.
Copy your music to /sdcard/Music/
Copy the script to the same folder.
Change directory into the folder.
Run this script using the line:
playlistmaker.sh .
And you will get a file ALL.m3u
if [ -f “$1.m3u” ]; then
echo Removing $1.m3u
rm “$1.m3u”
fi
OUTPLS="$1.m3u"
if [[ “$1” = “.” ]]; then
OUTPLS=ALL.m3u
fi
echo Building “$OUTPLS”
find “$1” | grep -E “.flac$|.mp3$” | sort | sed -r “s/^(./)//sdcard/Music//” >"$OUTPLS"
SONGS=wc -l “$OUTPLS” | awk ‘{print $1}'
if [[ $SONGS -eq 0 ]]; then
echo “$OUTPLS: ($SONGS songs), not keeping playlist”
rm “$OUTPLS”
else
echo “$OUTPLS: ($SONGS songs)”
fi
This script can also be tied together with a tree walker like so:
find -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec ./findMusicFiles.sh {} ;
The script at the start of this post will generate one playlist - ALL.m3u containing all the media in the current directory and below.
Using the second line of code will walk the directories in the current folder and generate one playlist per directory.
After a lot of tinkering and configuring, I’ve got my HTC Sensation onto Android 4.4.2 (KitKat). The ROM is not registering updates so I’ll manually have to keep checking on the XDA forums.
I like the new interface changes, the sliding notification ribbon, and the way the whole thing seems to run quicker than Jelly Bean. Made some backups of the new versions of the apps, and installed the newer version of TWRP. I was right, and that I was behind by several releases.
The only thing that’s gone funny right now, is my local profile that is displayed on the interface is corrupted. Here’s my build screen:
