Goodbye Steam Link Filter!

So, if you are like me, you are probably incredibly annoyed by Steam’s new feature, the Link Filter.

I mean, sure, I can install some browser plugin to ‘bypass’ Steam’s landing page, but I still have to wait for like 5 seconds for Steam to perform it’s own checks.
That’s why I decided to make a tool to completely disable link filtering, and make Steam work in the way it used to.

So here it is folks!

This little tool will patch Steam (in-memory) in order to disable the link filter (this also means that you have to run it every time you run Steam).
It’s pretty easy to use. Simply launch it, read through the disclaimer, and let it patch Steam.
It shouldn’t take more than 10 seconds.

This should be completely safe (banning-wise), however until someone from Valve can confirm it, use at your own risk.

Full source code and documentation  is included for the curious folk (or if you don’t trust binary releases)!

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

July 22, 2014 Randomness, Research, Reverse Engineering

Need for Speed: Rivals – Unlocked FPS Attempt

So NFS: Rivals is locked to 30 ticks per second.
This also limits the FPS to 30, even if your machine is capable of outperforming that.

Some people have discovered that you can remove the FPS limit, however that will result in speeding up your game by a severe margin (depending on the FPS you get).

I’ve been looking into a workaround, and even though I’ve managed to unlock visual FPS, there are still a few bugs.

If you notice, when I start driving in third person, my driver model starts clipping out of the car. That’s because physics simulation is still lagging behind at 30 ticks per second.

This is also visible when I collide with various items, as there is a slight delay between my collision and their reaction.

Moreover, there seem to be a few sound bugs when in first-person view (didn’t encounter them in 3rd person), as well as jittering on the UI.

If you want to try this out for yourself, you can launch your game with the following parameters:

-Client.VisualFrameInterpolation true -GameTime.MaxVariableFps 200 -GameTime.ClampTicks 2
-GameTime.MaxInactiveVariableFps 10 -GameTime.ForceSimRate 30 -GameTime.ForceDeltaTickCount 1 
-Ant.AllowVariableTickLength true -Ant.MaxInterpolationTicks 200

I’m still looking into a way to fix physics simulation issues, but from what it seems it might be hardcoded.

November 25, 2013 Randomness, Research

Oh look! A blog!

Well, I’ve been wanting to make myself a blog for quite some while now but apparently I never got around with it.

I just wanted a place where I can drop some random thoughts (mostly) about /technology/ related stuff as well as my projects.

Hopefully, I will also be posting little tutorials from time to time for various things (which include – but are not limited to – programming related stuff, design related stuff, etc.) as well as other things I might discover in the way.

The blog is still under ‘development’ so it will be undergoing some changes in the near future.

So, yeah…
Welcome, it’s safer here!

February 4, 2013 Randomness