First, history. The original Zafehouse lacked many elements one normally expects from a game. Graphics, a proper tutorial. Sound. These are slowly being rectified in the sequel. Graphics are being taken care of handily, and a tutorial will be implemented once, well, the game is.

Sound… sound was an interesting one. There are many ways to play sounds in Windows and .NET. You can use the basic, in-built functionality in My.Computer. Or you can venture into the slighly more complex world of System.Media.SoundPlayer.

Both, sadly, are kind of garbage if you’re trying to make a game. That is, a game with more than one or two sounds playing at once. There’s also the problem of being limited to PCM as an audio file format. Hey, if I was willing to have Z2 weigh in at a couple of hundred megabytes, then PCM would be fine. Hilariously so.

But I think my download server (and everyone downloading from said server) would be upset. So upset they might convert from downloadees to “I-hate-you-Logan-for-wasting-my-download”…. ees.

So I started investigating Managed DirectX. MDX is a wrapper around the standard DirectX libraries so you can use them in C# and VB .NET, among other languages. DirectSound under MDX didn’t look too foreboding, and I went ahead and implemented a basic audio engine capable of playing multiple sounds and background music.

Now MDX will play anything that resembles a RIFF. Well, anything that resembles a RIFF and contains a PCM or ADPCM stream. Anything else and it will spit at you like a pretentious hydra being served broiled heads instead of boiled ones. Because hydras like boiled heads.

ADPCM isn’t really a compressed stream. It’s just PCM reduced from 16 to 4-bits. Other stuff happens to maintain sound quality, but essentially you end up with something many times smaller than the original PCM. The only problem is, to (barely) match the compression ratio of MP3, Vorbis or WMA, you have to cut out a channel.

Stereo to mono. Which ain’t so bad. Truly, it’s not. And, in some cases, ADPCM can produce audio that sounds better than what a psychoacoustic codec can crank out. As long as you don’t mind a bit of hissing.

But I wasn’t satisifed. I knew I could do better. I was particularly certain of this betterness when I read that Microsoft was encouraging developers to move from MDX to XNA. It gently encouraged this by flipping the bird to MDX.

Yes, I had just written an audio engine in an API no longer supported by MS. Sweet, I thought, and began searching for alternatives.

There are a bunch of free audio engines that work in .NET, but if you ever want to commercialise your product, then you have to fork out megabucks. And I didn’t want to lock myself into that sort of situation. The idea of using a pre-packaged solution didn’t tickle me the right way either.

I fiddled around with Vorbis, but had trouble tracking down a native implementation in VB .NET or C#. I did find one in the Mono repository, and even got it working. Problem was it was slow (Vorbis-to-PCM conversion, specifically), and it still relied on MDX.

Sucky? You bet. Extra sucky because I know squat about the inner workings of Vorbis and had no idea how to optimise. I didn’t really want to spend time doing it. I have a game to finish, after all.

XNA appeared my only option. After getting the libraries loaded, I realised it was too high level. Which means it didn’t give me enough control over what it was doing. Much sighing occurred.

Then… I found XAudio2. Its documentation was hidden away in MSDN, but there it was. XAudio2 is Microsoft’s replacement for DirectSound, and it’s the underlying tech for XNA’s audio stuff. XAudio2 is nifty. It would have been even more nifty if all the documentation wasn’t as verbose as a mute sports announcer. Oh, the documentation is for C++ only, so make that a mute sports announcer who only speaks Esperanto.

But XAudio2 supports xWMA out of the box. xWMA is a stripped-down version of WMA encased in a RIFF container. Yay! It was exactly what I was after. I grabbed SlimDX, which allows you to access XAudio2 (and other multimedia-related libraries) via a managed wrapper, and buried myself to the armpits in code for a weekend.

Eventually, I came up with something – dare I say it – sound. An audio engine blindingly superior to what I’d previously concocted. It plays up to 64 xWMA-encoded sounds flawlessly and with only a minor hit to memory consumption (much less than the MDX monster I was working with).

Only now I need to include SlimDX with Zafehouse 2. I went from a 9MB audio package encoded in ADPCM, to a 7MB xWMA one with a 3MB DLL. To be fair, the new audio is all stereo (which makes the music sound that much better), but I still feel like I’ve run in a giant circle.

The circle does crack out some fine dual-speaker tunes, though.

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But, I’ve been thinking over the last few days that the supply model could be folded into the item system. The result would be that supplies would no longer be counters with maximums, but discrete items, just like guns and furniture. In this way, a survivor could load themselves up with barricades, at the expensive of ammo, medicine and alcohol.

What makes me strongly in favour of this system is that it opens up more choices for a stronghold. If you think the hospital is your best chance at survival, you can now literally drop everything and cart barricades over from other buildings to fortify it, rather than a couple at a time.

The main interface would still keep track of how many of each supply type you have so the information is available at a glance, but the trade window would recognise them as singular items. The system would probably necessitate a weight system, and items like bullets and medicine would need a stacking mechanism… because I can’t see anyone staying sane with the prospect of moving 50 bullets from one inventory to another.

The risk is that trading and collecting supplies might end up with a Diablo-like inventory mini-game, but I believe this can be avoided.

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As I mentioned in a previous update, the original combat implementation was ground into a fine, code-tasting dust and packed away, replaced by an infinitely deeper (and juicier) solution that uses firing arcs.

Entering into combat hasn’t changed – you still click on the event in the event window – and the representation of the room is similar too. The difference is that zombies are no longer shown as one large group, they’re now broken up into individual flesh-eating nasties. Weapons have also evolved, the far/close/melee profiles exchanged for variable firing arcs and shot modes. For example, the shotgun has a wide firing arc and shoots pellets in a spread, but it can only fire once per turn and has a short range. A submachine gun on the other hand has a medium firing arc and range, but you can shoot up to six bullets at one or multiple targets. Keep in mind that each bullet fired in the same turn reduces the accuracy of the shot that follows it.

Hit the jump for an additional screenshot which show projectiles in flight. Yes, I said projectiles.

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* Fixed video hitching and crashes related to single core machines.

* Single core users may experience short periods of black screen that may last up a few seconds between level loads, cinematic transitions or movies.

* In rare cases, some single core users may notice dialog lines in certain conversations may be delayed up to a few seconds.

* Fixed an issue where it appears ammunition can be picked up, but can’t.

* Fixed an issue where all Codex entries were marked as ‘viewed’, even if the player chose not to view them.

* Fixed an issue where weapon icons are re-organized after downloadable content is used.

* Fixed an issue where pressing F9 after the mission completion screen reset Shepard to Level 1.

* Fixed an issue where remapping the right mouse button blocks camera control in the command HUD.

* Fixed an issue where remapping the ‘use’ command affects the decryption minigame.

* Fixed an issue where users were not prompted to restart when logging in to a different EA Online account.

* Fixed an issue where movies do not play in DLC.

* It is recommended that players reset their keyboard mapping to default values to ensure proper vehicle control.

* Added useful messaging during the ME1 save game import.

* Weapon icon for henchmen never changes from Collector Assault Rifle.

* Czech language – Issues with Czech localization (subtitles) were amended, all text was corrected and improved.

* Fixed an issue where the Mass Effect 2 launcher was being associated with files that have no extension.

* Fixed an issue where uninstalling the game under Windows Vista or Windows 7 might uninstall Mass Effect 1.

I’ve emphasised the fixes that relate to CPUs. While none of them explicitly state that the slow dual-core loading times (that MassAffinity nicely addresses) have been rectified, it’s not entirely insane to think one of the aforementioned singe-core tweaks may have done the trick.

Sadly, I haven’t found any conclusive evidence to suggest this is true. So far, I’ve only found this thread on BioWare’s Social Network, which seems to indicate that the slow load times are still present. It’d be great if any ME2 players out there could confirm whether they’re still encountering the problem, so I can update the original MassAffinity post.

On an unrelated note, I found the following bug hilarious:

Fixed an issue where uninstalling the game under Windows Vista or Windows 7 might uninstall Mass Effect 1

According to ME2 Technical Director Derek French, Windows itself is to blame for this nasty blighter:

That is actually a bug that Microsoft introduced in Vista and 7. We keep our uninstallers in a common location and if you don’t encase the full path to the Uninstaller in double-quotes, Windows will just pick another random executable from that directory and run it, instead of the executable the you explicitly entered. It is pretty crazy when you tell Windows to run ‘Uninstall Mass Effect 2.exe’ and Windows decides to run ‘Uninstall Mass Effect.exe’

Best. Feature. Ever.

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Several requests for improvements prompted me to update the app to v0.2. Here’s a list of what’s new:

• Allows you to use an executable name other than the default (for those who have renamed MassEffect2.exe to enable anti-aliasing);
• Automatically detects your ME2 path via the registry;
• Shuts down immediately if ME2 is closed before MassAffinity can apply the fix (previously it would wait ten seconds);
• Added some graphics. Okay… one graphic;
• Added a “Help” button.

That’s it! The functionality remains unchanged, so no need to update if it’s working peachy already. No harm though if you do download it.

Download MassAffinity v0.2

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If you do, well, download the program and give it a try! Pressing Ctrl+~ will cause a Command Prompt window to slide down from the top of the screen. To hide it, just press Ctrl+~ again.

It’s basically a text box that sends commands to a hidden instance of CMD.exe, monitors it for output, and sends anything it spits out back to the text box. The usual DOS commands work – copy, del, mkdir, rmdir and so on – but not everything is supported. It won’t run programs, but it will happily process stuff like ping and netstats.

Definitely needs a lot of work, and is more a proof of concept than anything else. If you’re interested in seeing the source, drop me an email or comment and I’ll fire it your way.

Note that it needs the .NET 2.0 Framework.

Download Conslide

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