Corsix.org

If you've gone online with CoH in the past two days, you'll have been required to download the new 2.300 patch.

The good news: lots of balance fixes, team automatch, hopefully better RO server, other niceties
The bad news: "-dev" mode no longer works, making it difficult to develop and run mods and custom maps

Apparently, Relic are working on a fix for this, but in the meantime I have a temporary solution:
Download http://www.corsix.org/misc/COH2300dev.rar and extract it to your Company of Heroes folder (probably something like C:\Program Files\THQ\Company of Heroes). RelicCOH.exe has -dev permanently turned off in 2.300, and the RelicCOHUnblocked.exe you just placed in your folder has -dev permanently turned on. Set your shortcuts to use the unblocked EXE if you want dev mode. For convenience, the included batch file can be used to swap the two files over - simply double click RelicCOHSwap(.bat) to swap -dev mode between permanently off and permanently on. Before applying any future patches, remember to swap things back to how they were originally and then delete the custom EXE.

If you're interested in how the altered EXE is different, and why it works then read on. Otherwise be glad that there is a workaround for CoH 2.300. As always, donations via paypal are always appreciated:

Above: Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts running with a prototype overlay rendered on top.
Download video of the overlay in action.

The Europe in Ruins mod for Company of Heroes always presents interesting challenges. At the moment, I'm prototyping an in-game UI for the mod, as administering your army inside the game should be alot more user friendly than doing it on a website. If you're interested in how it's done then carry on reading, otherwise be happy that EiR might one day use an in-game UI.

I've been chosen as Drupal's grand prize winner for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. So on top of the $500 I get for completing 15 tasks, I also receive an all-expenses paid trip to the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA for myself and a parent. When I spotted an announcement for GHOP on slashdot back in November, the grand prize looked extremely nice but at the same time, out of reach. I want to say thankyou to the Drupal GHOP admins, mentors and members of the community who helped me from zero Drupal knowledge up to where I am now. Although I'm in the limelight, the real winner here is Drupal itself, with exactly 130 tasks completed by students, all of whom are now more involved in open source.

For the last few months, I've been participating in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, performing programming and documentation related tasks for the Drupal project. Now that the work is done, let's take a look at the tasks I've done: (links provided to the Google page and the Drupal page for each task)

If you're a regular visitor, you'll have noticed a bit of a change. The site backend has changed from a poor little CMS I wrote for IT coursework, to the wonderful Drupal CMS. The site theme has also changed from a Dark Crusade styled theme, to a blue Drupal theme.

Blog posts and their associated comments have been converted to the new system, however information pages and their comments have not been converted yet. Spam comments (of which there were some 23 thousand) were deleted rather than converted.

The Opposing Fronts expansion for Relic's WW2 RTS "Company of Heroes" contains a secret donkey unit:

"Harvest" is a cool little RTS game developed by the swedish indie company Oxeye.
Download and play now from http://www.oxeyegames.com/harvest/




What level can you get to?

After fighting with GoDaddy and domain transfers, corsix.org is back up and running.
Rejoice!

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0

Fight the power.

[Ed: They might make good lottery numbers, or they might decrypt DVDs. Who knows?]

Slow_Runner has compiled a detailed DPS (Damage Per Second per unit) table for Dawn of War : Dark Crusade patch 1.2, with the help of my tools.
Check it out