Wild ducklings in the heart of capital of Kazakh Republic

Good evening (morning), my dear readers.

I was planning to make a useless post about how I struggled for saving some bandwidth by not redownloading music and prerequisites by fiddling with game files and Steam download mechanics, but it's not a topic people would be as agitated as myself about, so I'll change the direction drastically and write about an adventure our family had today :)

We're currently guests at the house of my mother-in-law in Astana, Kazakh capital. We have a private lot with two small-ish houses and all the beuties of post-soviet rural life like having conveniences in the kitchengarden and manual water delivery from water pump down the street. Well, it's not as bad as it seems - we're all got already used to it and it feels pretty comfortable now :) But that's not the point of my post.

Imagine my amasement when I felt strange agitation in the street after awakening at noon (I was resting after being preparing the last article 'till 5 AM). Our nephew and neece have found a whole brood of wild dicklings in open sewage trench by the street road (how did they get there?), so we had to catch them one by one and place them in plastic bathtub covered with thin perforated metal sheet or they'd certainly die of hunger or being eaten by street animals or crows. It was decided to build them a pen from spare scrap metal we had in abundance in our lot after our cat Murka has stolen one of them to teach its kitten to hunt. I might post a photo of the construction we made some later.

As for now I'll just post a photo of ducklings in the cardboard box we placed them 'till morning. Only one duckling is visible, while four more are bunched up under the veil. They feel warmer that way :)

I might post some updates about the wild life in our rural metropolitan home some days later. As for now the next game I plan to review is Organ Trail: Director's Cut, so stay tuned. Feel free to post a comment or two if you have anything to ask or to say. Bye!

P.S. Don't pay any attention to the timestamp on the photo - camera's clock was upset. Sorry for the inconvenience :(

Some additional info about Shattered Haven game folder's entrails

Good day (night) my dear readers :)

During the last post I stated the Screenshot Hunt, and, you know, the Hunt was successful. I've managed to get some photos no one (yet) posted over the internet. The way I did this was simple - tackling with some game code. Well, I *did* played the game for some hours, but solving the puzzles *again* was so painful that I decided it won't worth the efforts to beat the game anew for the sake of picture or two. And just before hitting the Quit button I noticed that Shattered Haven has an embedded editor. Yay, maybe I can find a way to play cinemas in under 15 minutes?

After reading some manual and digging through game folder in my Steamapps diretory I've managed to get all the list of game cut-scenes encrypted into base script of the first level. It didn't work properly though (it was playing the last file from the list) so I had to play scenes one by one and pick as much shots as it was required to please my aesthetic feelings. All the cut-scene files can be found at Steam\steamapps\common\Shattered Haven\RuntimeData\Scenes folder. You may encode playing scene by editing any cut-scene script by changing StartCunscene (paste-the-name-of-the-scene-here) command and then pressing one of the Test buttons just as I did.

Another good news is the music can be taken from the game RuntimeData\Music folder wothout any additional ripping. Feel free to listen it when you feel like it (just the same way as AI Wars: Fleet Command and many other Arcen Games games, excuse me for pun). You might also draw And if you're an ace of pixel-art you might want to create additional alternative visual content by following the instruction at RuntimeData\TexturePacks folder. In short you'll need to create your folder and place there some edited pictures with the same names and paths as of the original files at the Images folder and - voila! - your art is in the game :)

That's all I've managed to get you for some hours exploring the game entrails and bowels. Feel free to post a comment or two if you'll find something interesting.

Have fun! :)

Shattered Heaven - Screenshot hunt declaration

After having some months playing everything I could reach (like Skyrim, Left 4 Dead and Organ Trail), reading more info about zombie apocalypse-stuff (like Russian forum ozomby.ru and Walking Dead comix series), earning some spare bucks of pin money and getting completely bored with posting no new info on my blog, I decided to make an update. I declare a Hunt for good screenshots for my previous post. You know, it's much easier and appealing to read something with pictures, doesn't it? Well, I tink just the same way as you do, so I devote some next hours to picture-hunting playing Shattered Haven on my netbook with squeezed screen (1024x600, which is slightly less then the game supports). Wish me luck and wait for some updates in the future :)