Minousoft Software » shutdown

Rating system broken, new game screenshot, and three new songs

oakwhiz — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:18:54 +0000

After trying to upgrade the rating system, I noticed that it broke the layout of the site and does not record some ratings correctly. The rating system has been taken offline until further notice. Sorry folks, but it looks like you have to comment on the articles if you want to tell us what you think of them.

I have been developing a new game, mostly to test some interesting game design ideas. The game revolves around the player being as stealthy as possible – one of the key elements is to leave no evidence that you were sneaking around corridors. (Screenshot after the jump!) Another element is the fact that you are unable to see what lies ahead if it is too far away to hear or see. If you do not have line-of-sight to an object, it becomes much less visible on the screen. This has the interesting side effect of enabling the game to completely ignore unneeded objects that are far away from the player. I’m currently trying to add a dynamic artificial intelligence system to the game – because of the complex network of rooms, doors, and hallways, it is difficult to get an AI to properly navigate the game. I’ve decided to go with a node-based approach rather than an A* algorithm approach, as nodes allow the AI to act more intelligent. Nodes are placed at every possible place the AI can walk, and the AI can only move to a node that it has direct line-of-sight to. This allows diagonal movement. The AI decides what its long-term movement goal is based on what it is doing, i.e. if the AI is supposed to be patrolling an area, it will select the nodes of the rooms it wants to go to, and use the nodes in between to go there. If the AI encounters evidence that the player is nearby, it will deviate from its instructions and try to go to the node closest to where it thinks the player is.

Lastly, three new remixes have been added to the Media Player by request:

Geisha Dreams (Ringtone)
Moonlight Sonata
Fullmetal Alchemist – Melissa

Enjoy, and make sure to follow us on Twitter!

Minousoft File Hosting attacked by hackers

oakwhiz — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:25:59 +0000

We’re sorry, everyone.

Due to an overflow vulnerability in the hosting script, the hosting page has been taken down, thanks to some so-called ‘terrorists.’ NO USER DATA IS OR WAS AT STAKE, HOWEVER ALL DOWNLOADS HAVE BEEN REMOVED. The only thing that happened was the loss of hours of code. I REALLY hope that the evil people who did this die in a fire. All we were trying to do was give people free file hosting, and these idiots ruined it for everyone.

I would like to thank everyone for trying out Minousoft File Upload while it lasted. It was a good run, and we were happy to serve 25 files at 70MB before the incident. Stay tuned; someday we may create a new file upload system from scratch. Next time I will only use my own code; we were using a modified version of another script.

If you know anything about the attacks, please notify us so that we may pursue legal proceedings, and block the attackers from bothering us again.

NtSetSystemPowerState Documented

hxhl95 — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:18:44 +0000

Deep inside the Windows kernel, there crawls many, many undocumented functions. With Microsoft’s secrecy, developers have only been able to document most of them, but not all.

There is one function, however, that has been known to exist but is not documented anywhere (or at least not in any source I’ve seen). That function is NtSetSystemPowerState. It’s known that NtShutdownSystem calls NtSetSystemPowerState at the very last stages of the Windows shutdown process after flushing all Registry hives, clearing the disc cache, etc. NtSetSystemPowerState is then responsible for turning off all plug-and-pray devices and either telling the system to poweroff, reboot, sleep, or hibernate.

The formal definition of NtSetSystemPowerState is the following:
Code»

Note that on systems with NT4.0 or earlier, NtSetSystemPowerState does nothing, and only returns a STATUS_NOT_IMPLEMENTED message.

Both POWER_ACTION and SYSTEM_POWER_STATE are documented on msdn, while flags is simply the reason for shutdown, also documented on msdn.

To read more on how to call this function by using NTDLL.DLL, visit my article on CodeProject:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/winsdk/Windows_Shutdown.aspx

NTSYSAPI

NTSTATUS

NTAPI

NtSetSystemPowerState(

IN POWER_ACTION SystemAction,

IN SYSTEM_POWER_STATE MinSystemState,

IN ULONG Flags);