Supreme Commander 2 strategies against normal difficulty computer

This last weekend I was trying some different Surpreme Commander 2 skirmish games in 1vs1 maps against normal difficulty opponents and DLC units enabled and no restrictions.

Noticeably the different AI opponents tend to have different preferences from my findings.

What commonly happens at the start is that the AI is going to send up to three vehicles and then some more. It helps to have at least two cannons ready early on to survive. Some AI players send airplanes, so having at least one anti-air is good if there are planes. Some AI players do not seem to use planes at all. This also seems to depend on the map as well.

My most effective strategy to stay alive against huge waves of attacking units was lots of cannons. To get them, I had to hold out until I could research mass converters. The important step here was to have the energy ready which meant lagging behind due to building lots of power generators at a safe remote location right from the very start. This obviously slowed down everything else because the power generators are so cheap and research stations are expensive. Once the first three mass converters are running, then production really started going which also meant more research, more cannons, shields, artillery, more planes and more ships if water map. This strategy should also work in cooperative multiplayer with a player team against a computer player team.

Getting MySQL, PHP and Apache to run on Windows 7

Two days I spent on getting PHP, Apache and MySQL running on a Windows 7 PC. The biggest problem was getting PHP to recognise MySQL. php_inf() was just not showing MYSQL at all, only MYSQLND which was of no use. The point of the exercise was to also get my local setup as clsoe to the live one where my website is hosted.

After many attempts following tutorials and forums, I eventually I tried a different web server (nginx) with the exact same result. This confirmed that it was not the web server or PHP settings since I made sure the libraries can be found and folders were also set in the environment paths.

Somebody recommended copying the libmysql.dll file into the C:\Windows\System32 folder, but that failed since the file never stayed there and no error message. PHP also did not recognise this file as a valid extension and registering the DLL with Windows did also not help.

Somehow the DLL file ended up mysteriously in the C:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder since my installation of Windows 7 is 64 bit and the same with MySQL. I suppose this is a useful Windows feature to keep some order.

In the end it came down to what none of the forums or tutorials said which is setting things like socket, port, etc. in the "my.ini" file which I had based on the medium example file. Running mysqld or as a service made no difference.

Possibly dumping JQuery for smaller solutions

The last couple of days I managed to briefly spend some time to investigate different JavaScript frameworks similar to JQuery. So far nothing practical, just checking what is available and what could be of use. The idea is to reduce downloading time and improve performance especially on older computers and mobile devices which have memory limits.

Knockout.js and Backbone.js look promising according to the following discussion:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5112899/knockout-js-vs-backbone-js-vs

Either of them in their minified form have a roughly 4KB file size. as opposed to other like JQuery for example which are in the double or triple digits. For low-end mobile phones this becomes a problem. I have seen some nasty error messages on mobile phones due to out of memory when loading some websites as well as serious slowdown.

What has been showing up lately a lot as well is Node.js which is server-side and cannot just simply run on every website. Node.js also uses V8 JavaScript which might not be supported yet by all browsers on all hardware.

Obviously some of these frameworks are for specific purposes only, but might prove to be useful once I have had some serious experimentation time.

Defragmentation tips using MyDefrag

Lately I have been experimenting with custom defragmentation scripts which can be created based on script examples that come with MyDefrag. What is a good idea is to shove bootup files, folders, EXE and DLL files to the outside of a drive and everything else following. Each of these areas is referred to as a zone in MyDefrag and as many as needed can be defined.

There is this weird thing when pushing files older than a certain date to the end of the drive where a gap right at the end is being created during defragmenting. To resolve this, simply do not have any sort order at all for the files. This also works from other areas.

Like with many defragmenting tools is that things only settle down after a few full runs including shorter defragmentation time. When no sort order is involved then the process takes less time, hence rather set more zones in MyDefrag and gaps as usual.

World of WarCraft utility

My latest experiment includes a utility that I wrote using C# to give me a list of which installed World of WarCraft addons are an old version. So far it is still very much under construction hence I do not yet want to publish it. The application can be made better.

The application needs interface changes as well as testing in 32 bit Windows since I am developing on 64 bit where the game location is stored in a different location in memory.