Setting the Hardware Acceleration at the middle setting (the third from the left out of 6)

Thanks for the help

That said, I believe you can recruit Zhuge Liang if you were in Xin Ye by the appropriate time. I think he’s in the 194 scenario, the 200 scenario, and, of course, the 207 scenario. However, I have not personally tested this, as I’ve never played from 194 — this is just something I’ve seen from forum posts. If it is possible, I strongly recommend you try to get him — otherwise, one of the AIs will have him, and an INT 100 officer with his special ability is very annoying to deal with. Zhuge Liang appears in game around 200s, so try to own all the Jinzhou cities — he appears around the area and moves to Xin Ye. Otherwise there is a chance the one of the AIs will successfully recruit him with one of his friends or family members.

I’m pretty sure the actual “Three Visits” event only trigger in the 207 scenario, though.

Definitely an easier fix than using a virtual machine.

Not sure if everyone was just using Vista, but the problem happens on Win 7 as well, and the DLL fix works.

Again, much obliged!

So, is by any chance possible to change The Edge of Night audio from Axe –> Long sword?

I don’t know if I was clear enough, English is not my first language. If you’re still active on this blog, I would appreciate if you can respond to this, as I can’t load up my copy of the game ATM to check for myself.

Thanks.

I play yuri’s revenge (red alert 2 sequel) on Vista 32 bit… I have a nvidea 8600m GS and i got lag when playing this 2d game.

I used to have xp, which allows to disable directdraw with dxdiag.

Now my vista doesn’t allow that so I tried to disable it as you explained here, but when I start Yuri’s Revenge with Direct Draw hardware acceleration off, the game starts, but my screen is black. I’m able to start a game on skirmish, and i recognize it runs on full speed as it should by listening to the sound. (don’t ask)

How can I get the black screen away and play this awesome game on full speed? I’m 100% the lag is caused by directdraw 3d acceleration…

The points on a GUI is, again, a lovely attempt at a red herring. We’re discussing the user expectations of command line interfaces, which still require design consideration, since there are norms and expectations in such interfaces. Snide insinuations about how users who somehow can’t hack a command-line should go look for a nice safe GUI is unnecessary and unproductive. I built a horizontally scalable, distributed video transcoding system complete with a RESTful web API while working for Yahoo, under the guidance of an experienced team lead who is now a director at another venture-funded video startup. Allow me to say that I know exactly what goes on under the hood here.

I’m glad you’re friends with developers of this package. They do excellent work — that has *never* been in question. If I didn’t care or understand the ffmpeg package, I wouldn’t give two cents about their software issues — I have neither the free time nor the inclination for that. I enjoy working with ffmpeg, make no mistake. The developers have simply neglected a key consideration, which is fine given their disinclination or lack of expertise in design issues; I have now raised as a critique for improvement. I don’t think they need you to defend their expertise (nor is such a defense required).

On the other hand, I certainly do not need another dose of “Free Software is awesome; to hell with the user” propaganda, or for that matter, amateur social criticism either. Fundamentally I believe in user-centered design, and it seems that you do not.

A blog comment thread is not an appropriate place for extended debate (we’ve already hit the thread nesting limit ). Please contact me by email (you can find my email over at the bottom of UC Berkeley web page) if you genuinely want to discuss the various merits of HCI principles as applied to CLI.

I personally want the guy who writes FFmpeg to focus on what he is good at and ignore graphical user interface issues. Somebody else can work on that in parallel with Fabrice Bellard and friends continuing to make a more functional / flexible CLI tool and handling new containers and data streams. FFmpeg itself is a super powerful CLI tool as it stands. No GUI designed for it could ever capture all of its flexibilty at the command-line. However, being an important piece of software, FFmpeg has had several GUIs made for it addressing various common workflows and usage.

Maybe you should investigate using one of those.

I am not surprised that even those with a Computer Science PhD background have to learn a few new tricks when dealing with Audio and Video streams processing. I know I did. One user I heard of was piping the output of ffmpeg directly into speexenc. Ingenious! Every new area of knowledge requires learning. Be open to it. The standard university way is to put such info into a man page (instead of making you read the source code). Nobody reads the whole man page everytime. And finding the information you want is a life skill. However, End Users such as yourself are not the only users of FFmpeg and similar CLI tools. Scripts use FFmpeg also. So the CLI has to service the needs of CLI people and those that want to automate the process or those that want to create a GUI for it. Why spend the time creating the GUI portion of a program that doesn’t work or a software system that nobody uses or wants to use?

That’s what you are advocating. Cart before horse.

Which is more important: the quality inside or the outside veneer? Our society already puts too much emphasis on the glitz. As I said previously, important software like FFmpeg causes software developers to embed it in scripts which make it easier to use and very important CLI utilities get several Graphical User Interfaces like FFmpeg has.

Maybe you should use the software that Sansa supplies with e2xx players for video processing .avi files into the unit’s proprietary video format. Its got a nice interface! No thinking required. No unexpected surprises.

I agree that a CLI is a user interface. One where the explanation of behaviors is documented concisely or in a form that you unfortunately can’t speed read. FFmpeg is not a system. (Quoting from your response: “intuitively designed system…”) It is a component — a part of a system. If you need a system, maybe you should investigate using an ffmpeg GUI.

The beauty of FFmpeg is that it is simple enough for you to begin using and to be quickly rewarded with fantastic results. You were hooked by the power of FFmpeg — as am I. It is worthy of our discussion. The unexpected surprise with FFmpeg is how versatile and capable a command line interface can be reusing the same switches multiple times for different purposes. Truly it is the swiss-army knife of audio/video processing. Be glad these Linux utilities and libraries are now available on Windows. And that OSS developers have the freedom to work on what they deem most important.

Being open source does not excuse bad user interface design. Actively confusing interfaces — interfaces that function contrary to user expectations — creates errors where none needed to exist. If you check the About page here for my background, you’ll find that my “cred” on software and technology issues to be significant (Berkeley PhD work, startup founder, engineer, etc.). Nevertheless, I made this error, because my expectations on how a CLI should behave — drawn from years of experience — is violated in idiosyncratic and largely needless ways. Ironically, had I *not* been a regular CLI user, I might not have formed this particular expectation. Nevertheless, the key target audience of a tool like ffmpeg is precisely an experienced CLI user.

The man page is a red herring. The need to refer to or post signage is practically *already admitting* that you have made an design error, or at least made some incomprehensible design choices in the eyes of your typical user. An intuitively designed system does not require warnings, because of the affordances of such systems naturally guides user into making correct choices or decisions. I won’t even get into the matter of requiring the reading of an entire document vs simple signage, which at least has the possibility of being effective at educating a user.

I highly recommend Don Norman’s book “The Design of Everyday Things” (and its companion, Emotional Design: Why We Love Or Hate Everyday Things). This is a book that every would-be software engineer should read before they start taking on any sort of software design or architect role. Every HCI designer already starts with it as the introductory text, and I think every engineer should have to read this as well. It explains in an extremely lucid and well-reasoned way why certain designs succeed and others fail. It certainly changed my views (similar to your own, once) on how human-facing interfaces should be designed, and where the responsibility for user errors lies.

And yes, I will reiterate: even CLIs are user interfaces.

The difference between Propaganda and Education is that Propaganda tells you what to think and Education (and Open Source) teaches you how to think.

In fact, the standard implies that if you want to determine whether a port is already mapped, you must send another map request. For example, you previously mapped private port 60000 to public port 50000, but lost state. Now you want to know what public port the server assigned previously for private port 60000. In this case, if you send a request to map private port 60000 to arbitrary port N, then you will receive a response containing the current public port mapping for that port, namely, 50000. If it wasn’t mapped, you’d receive the actual mapping you requested, namely N. After that, you can destroy the mapping by sending a request with lifetime 0 and external port 0.

If you want to know what the server’s *public* port 50000 is mapped to, then it doesn’t look like there is an operation for that query in the protocol. If you find a way in the RFC, I’m happy to add a method or take a patch.

If i have a application which will add NAT-PMP port automatically, i want to check whether this port is added or not? How i can do this?