The search was on! After an hour so of google searches I found very little on the net about free programs that I wanted to use.. Most of them looked sketchy (like they would have spy ware and such embedded in them) I was soon to come across this gem named WebcamMax. From the initial look at the screen shots from their site, I was a little iffy, but I thought I would give it a try.

After downloading the 7.5MB file, I was ready to install, The setup went quickly and was a Simple point and click next installation (something even your mother can do). Now that the program was installed, it was time to load it up.

The initial layout seemed very professionally laid out and might I say, almost beautiful. The brushed aluminum look that is put on by default was not to my general taste, but I was completely surprised and happy to find the 14 other skins that came pre-installed with this program. You can change the skins by going to View > Change Skin > And select one of the 15 pre-installed themes. (My favorite happens to be the “Simple Dark” theme)

Again after speaking of the interface, I must point out the small other factors I almost instantly noticed with this program, The menu’s actually had animations, the buttons themselves had smooth fading and clicking animations that made it aesthetically pleasing to go through when changing options. Another note was the neat effect of the window itself “Sticking” to the sides of the screen when you moved the window close to the side (I am a big big fan of this and I thank the makes of this program for putting it in!)

Using the program itself was as simple and straightforward as it looks! It took me a grand total of probably 25 seconds to get the Picture in Picture feature working. The even cooler this about this is that you can move, resize, stretch and do all sorts of things to the screen in real time! Here is a screen shot of the program running after the initial setup and 25 seconds of fiddling around..

As you can see, the program is working flawlessly with my Video Capture card and Web cam together with the PiP (Picture In Picture) Very impressive if I must say so myself!

There are so many uses and applications that this program could be used for that would just take too long to explain here! You may as well go try it out yourself here:  http://www.webcammax.com

And if you’re like me (weary about spending a lot of money on a program, you can try out thier different tiers of the program From 6 months all the way up to a lifetime of license support (for ~$49 this is not that bad! Think of how much the last game you bought was!) 

Overall I would Highly reccommend this to anyone who is looking to have a little fun with thier webcamming experiance! The pricetag is not that bad at all for all of the features and ease of use. My only dislike so far is that I cannot figure out how to save presets (so the picture and picture defaults back everytime) but once you know how to set it up, it takes no more than 15 seconds to get things working again.

Again, I hightly reccommend this product to anyone looking for a Picture in Picture effect with a webcam and or multiple video devices or inputs.  Check it out for yourself http://www.webcammax.com

Anyway a quick look at it is to the right

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Coming Soon!

(Return to main) ]]> http://sircraigs.net/2008/11/block/feed 0 http://sircraigs.net/2008/11/railgun http://sircraigs.net/2008/11/railgun#comments Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:55:28 +0000 Craig http://sircraigs.net/?p=718 The railgun. The sniper’s sniper. It is easily the main sniping weapon, and the only exclusive sniper offering. There may be other guns that offer similar qualities, but none quite to this caliber. With only half-charge, this weapon is capable of single-shotting even the hardiest of players. I personally suggest this gun in only a few scenarios, and very rarely in a Death Match. Locations of best sniping include: Tunnel, Station 2, OldSchool, Neden 2. You can apply this weapon anywhere, but the above mentioned provide great sniping vantage points, and plenty of places to hide.

Body Shots: Easy shots to muster, but fairly weak. Particularly when uncharged. This is a good shot to take when a TouchDown striker is nearing your goal. Rather than risk missing, or getting killed, simply knock them down with a quick body shot. Uncharged damage ranges from 32-34 damage. Fully charged body shots deal exactly 120 damage. If you have a fully charged shot, knowing which have +30 hp is very useful. If a striker is dashing your way, the fully charged shot should be more than enough to take them out.

Head Shots:  It’s a sniping weapon, of course you’re going to get the most mileage out of a headshot! In this case, it is the only weapon that can one-hit absolutely, regardless of what your opponent tries. A completely uncharged headshot deals from 78 to 82 damage, and can be used to finish off an injured player. If the railgun is charged for any longer than a single second, then it will 1 hit players with +30 hp. The numbers change slightly with special clothing, so charging it longer than 1.5 seconds is recommended. An interesting number to note: If the railgun is charged for exactly one second (exactly), then it deals exactly 129 damage towards a non-defended player. We found it somewhat frustrating in tests, but it was funny anyways! 

Target leading: The railgun has around 0.75 – 1 second of delay between trigger release and firing. It’s crucial to account for this while aiming, and not aim where your target is now, but instead where you consider it’ll be a second from now.

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To start off, there are a few required things that you will need to do this.. The converting program can be downloaded –> Here <–   And of course, you will need a collection of music to convert.. (And a little time to let the comptuer convert over the files)

Converting: 

1. Open up the converter program
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2. Browse to your music directory and highlight all of the files you would like to convert over.
    
3. Drag the files you highlighted into the program; it will look somewhat like below..
   
   
4.  Click in the export format dropdown and verify that it is selected on the OGG file format
   
   
5.  Click on convert, a dialog box will ask you where you would like the files to be saved, either leave it to the default (the files will appear in the same place as your mp3′s) Or you can choose to empty them into another location.. the choice is yours.
   
6. The program will begin to convert the files.. This will probably take a good deal of time..
   
7. Now that the program has converted our files, we will browse to our installed directory (By default this is  C:\Program Files\alaplaya\S4League\BGM ) But if you are not sure, I will show you how to..
8. Lets clear the screen of all the windows, minimise to your desktop and right click on your S4 League shortcut on the desktop and go to Properties
   
9. Once the properties window has opened, click on the button labeled “Find Target”
   
10. This will take you to your S4 League Installation folder, look for the folder labeled BGM and open it
    
11. Now, open up the window that has the converted OGG files and drag and drop them into the BGM folder that we just opened up�
     
12. Open up S4 and go into the Options > Sound > Jukebox. Scroll down the buttons and you will find your newly added songs! To add these to a map (to be played in game) simply click the down arrow button as shown below..
    
13. Press Apply and enjoy your music ingame!