Kai Witte's Blog

This mod doubles the time for all research in Warzone 2100.

Download Slow Research Mod Version 1.0 alpha 3

System requirements

Warzone 2100 Version 2.3 beta 10 (MIGHT work with other versions).

Installation

See the reference on the official project website.

Tactical motivation

Experienced players have optimised their research in such a way that many technologies are outdated a few minutes after they have been researched. The lifespan of some weapons is very short in games with experienced players. For example ripple rockets are available in less than 19 minutes (T1, no starting bases), which makes mortars pretty much useless. When someone tries to use mortar or bombard pits, the opponent can simply build a few bunkers and wait for CB tower and ripple rockets. Even a huge field of mortar pits can only destroy a few bunkers before it gets smashed by ripple rockets.
With this mod, ripple rockets will be available around game minute 37, which makes mortars more attractive.

It does not slow down the entire game! Production speed and unit movement speed as well as power income are unchanged. So relative to the research, these elements are twice as fast now. For example in the previously short time span from when twin mg gets researched until the research of heavy MG (or a different superior counter weapon like mini pod), a player can build twice as many tanks with twin MG and move twice as far with them as before.

Hallo Teilnehmer,

für die Codeschnipsel, die ich in der Präsentation gezeigt habe, habe ich ein kleines Java EE-Projekt angelegt, das Ihr hier herunterladen könnt:

javaee-vortrag.zip

Erwartet bitte nicht zu viel. Es macht nichts Sinnvolles, sondern enthält nur die gezeigten Programmteile. Allerdings funktioniert es, und Ihr könnt darauf zum Testen aufbauen. Ich helfe gern bei der Installation, falls die Anweisungen unter “Dokumentation” im zip nicht reichen sollten. Projektdateien für Intellij Idea und Eclipse (ungetestet) sind dabei.

Als komplettes Beispiel für eine Java EE 5 Applikation bietet sich ansonsten die Pet Store Demo von Sun an.

Wer den Stand der Technik mit Schwerpunkt Webfrontend durch Java EE-basierte Frameworks sehen will, für den bietet sich das Booking-Example von Seam an oder auch die Demos von JBoss RichFaces.

Fragen und Diskussion zum Vortrag oder zu Java EE gern hier in den Kommentaren, oder kontaktiert mich direkt.

Gruß

Kai

I recently came across a trojan, which is detected by common virus scanners, but not much documented. So I analysed it just a little.

Like many others it is located in the Windows directory (for example c:\winnt) and named svchost.exe (the real svchost.exe belongs to system32). It is set up to start with Windows.

These are its names according to jotti.org:

A-Squared  	
Found Win32.SuspectCrc!IK
AntiVir 	
Found TR/Downloader.Gen
ArcaVir 	
Found Trojan.Agent.Wo
Avast 	
Found Win32:Trojan-gen {Other}
AVG Antivirus 	
Found BackDoor.Agent.MEA
BitDefender 	
Found Backdoor.Agent.WO
ClamAV 	
Found Trojan.Agent-8319
CPsecure 	
Found nothing
Dr.Web 	
Found BackDoor.IRC.Spreader
F-Prot Antivirus 	
Found W32/IRCBot-based!Maximus (probable variant)
F-Secure Anti-Virus 	
Found Backdoor.Win32.Agent.wo
G DATA 	
Found Win32:Trojan-gen
Ikarus 	
Found Win32.SuspectCrc
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 	
Found Backdoor.Win32.Agent.wo
NOD32 	
Found probably unknown NewHeur_PE (probable variant)
Norman Virus Control 	
Found W32/Agent.CWBV
Panda Antivirus 	
Found Trj/Downloader.MDW
Sophos Antivirus 	
Found Mal/Generic-A
VirusBuster 	
Found nothing
VBA32 	
Found Backdoor.Win32.Agent.wo

The size is 86.016 bytes, MD5: 5ec89f1f189fc5af94aa9306d7df4b8b

What it does is this: It tries to connect to IRC.BENDOVER.BE (that server is no longer operational), then joins #spreader.crew (password: spreadmaster). In my case it used the name!id: oppqrrstc!oppqrrstc (probably generated individually). Then it stayed in the channel and did nothing more. It probably waited for a bot or real person to contact it with further instructions.

Any hints about this trojan or the creators (former owner of bendover.be? "spreader.crew"?) are appreciated.

In Heroes of Might and Magic IV (aka Heroes of Might and Magic 4, HOMM 4, HOMM IV) this error occurs when the name of the executable used to launch the program differs:

multiplayer_msg_general_failure

The content of the executable does not matter, it is the name. So both must use for example h4tour351.exe, even though in Equilibris 3.51 it has the same content as h4mod.exe.

How to fix UnsatisfiedLinkError in JNI

I have never had problems with JNI. In the few situations when I needed it, it just worked. But last week someone asked me for help with his problem. When I tried to reproduce it, I found out that it had spread even to my old JNI programs which worked until 2006!

When running a program that uses a native function the following error occured:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: Test.dll: Can't find dependent libraries

It’s obviously a linker problem related to the generation of the .dll file. I have no idea why it occurs now and didn’t occur in the past. Different OS, compiler version, something like that? For some reason both the linker of Visual Studio and the linker of GCC started to think that is was a good idea to replace all method names by some arbitrary name which then cannot be found at runtime.

Fix for GCC

To fix that with GCC, the linker opion --add-stdcall-alias can be used.

gcc -Wl,--add-stdcall-alias -mno-cygwin -shared -I/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_05/include -I/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_05/include/win32 -o HelloWorld.dll HelloWorld.c

Fix for Visual C

For Microsoft Visual C Compiler it should theoretically be possible with a linker option as well.

Find out the correct linker option

First compile and link in the usual way that didn’t work. This will create the .dll file which results in the error we are talking about. Then use the dumpbin tool to list the procedure names:

dumpbin HelloWorld.dll /EXPORTS

You will find your procedure name, something like _Java_HelloWorld_print@8. Now try to guess what the name should be. My guess in this case would be Java_HelloWorld_print. This would result in the linker option /EXPORT:Java_HelloWorld_print=_Java_HelloWorld_print@8

Supply the linker option

1. Use a #pragma comment in the source file:

   #pragma comment(linker, "/EXPORT:Java_HelloWorld_print=_Java_HelloWorld_print@8")

   OR

2. Split into linking and compiling and provide the option to the linker in the command line, OR
3. Supply it to the compiler at the end using /link:

   cl -I"C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_05\include" -I"c:\Program Files\java\jdk1.6.0_05\include\win32" -MD -LD HelloWorld.c -FeHelloWorld.dll /link /EXPORT:Java_HelloWorld_print=_Java_HelloWorld_print@8

Edit: According to user comments, the -MD option above is wrong and causes the problem described below. Do not use -MD! See MSDN for further information about the -MD option.

Option 3 is probably the easiest. After that dumpbin will show that now there is an additional procedure with the correct name:

dumpbin HelloWorld.dll /EXPORTS

I even compared it with the working .dll I created with GCC (see above), and it looks the same! But it doesn’t work, still getting the same error!