Friday, October 24, 2008

Random Developments


A couple of things to mention that don't really warrant their own posts.

Today I got bored of Vampire Castle and took a short break to do some poor box art for the game. The game itself is coming along nicely, as per last post, in addition the game trail is now working and the reels spinning randomly - I'll later amend it so that it runs on a weighted probability e.g. "70% payout".

I also learnt about the "heart beat" function in Windows Vista that may be unnecessarily keeping your hard drive active when it could be idle and turning off/saving notebook battery. Have a look at this Microsoft forum for more info. I've set the value to zero as per the instructions to disable the registry setting and according to Task Manger -> Performance -> Resource Monitor -> Disk Vista is no longer writing a "lastalive" file every few seconds to the hard drive. Whether this will help battery life on a Vista notebook I don't know, but there's been no adverse affects so far.

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