Category Archives: TeamFortress2

VMware Fusion 2.0 Upgrade, Windows Workstation 2008

VMware Fusion 2.0 was released yesterday and I was anxious to upgrade. Rather than feel the full pain myself, I let brewbie go first. He got it setup and installed and said all was good, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

I was in a VM working on some new code that I had neither saved to disk nor commited to Subversion. I figured I’d live on the edge and just suspend the VM so I could upgrade Fusion. Once Fusion had exited, I downloaded the update and fired up the installer. Less than a minute later version 2.0 was installed and ready to go (no reboot required). I clicked the icon for my 2003 Server VM and it fired up just a few seconds, picking up right where I left off. Needless to say, I was very impressed.

The release notes said that previous VMs should update the VMware Tools to take advantage of the new features available in 2.0 so I went ahead and restarted Windows 2003 (1st time). Once it was back up, the new tools package installed and prompted for another reboot (2nd time). The reboots were amazingly quick and I was back up and running in no time.

Since it was all up and running, I started to configure the new features in Fusion 2.0. There is a new keyboard mapping feature so you can map certain key combinations to work within your VM. It works pretty slick, making it possible finally map a key for INSERT. There is also a new feature to make it so that clicking mailto links in the VM opens the Compose Mail window in Mac Mail. VERY COOL! I was less impressed with the browser linking since it changed my default browser to EverNote (WTF?). I changed it back to Safari and then disabled the feature.

After the short interruption, I felt that it was time to create a new VM for Windows Server 2008. I was following the guide on the Windows 2008 Workstation site to build a workstation-grade installation of Server 2008. Since VMware 2.0 supports things like Shader Model 2.0 with 3D graphics, I wanted to see it work. It took a couple of hours to get everything setup and configured, but the end result was a clean install of 2008 server configured for a workstation environment.

I then installed Steam, and downloaded a fresh copy of TeamFortress 2. I fired it up and it failed. It turns out that the tools by default only enable a certain level of hardware acceleration. I went to the advanced troubleshooting tab and cranked up the acceleration. I could now run everything, including Microsoft PhotoSynth and TeamFortress 2. The frame rate was pretty amazing considering it was running in a VM — seriously impressive actually. I experienced a lot of sound breakup when IO was being performed, so there is still some tweaking to do there I suppose.

Once play time was over, I installed Visual Studio 2008, TortoiseSVN, VisualSVN, Resharper, and updated. I pulled down the latest trunk of MassTransit and built it. The build took 16 seconds, compared to 21 seconds on my 2003 VM. However, when I ran the load test I was surprised to see that MSMQ performance was about half of what it was with 2003 Server. I ran the test a couple of times with the same result. I’m not sure what is at work here, but it seems like MSMQ4 has some different performance numbers than MSMQ3. I’ll do some additional tests and post more on this later. Maybe MSMQ was slowed down to make WCF look better (joking, of course).

In the end, the upgrade to 2.0 was painless – completely painless infact. I highly recommend it to take advantage of all the new features.

Steam, TeamFortress2 and Me

So far, the game is a blast. I’ve only played a couple of evenings (well, three, for a total of eight hours or so) but the game play is pretty darn good. I’m still working on getting some experience with more of the classes, but I’m liking what I see so far. It’s a shame there is hardly any team play on public servers, hopefully once the release happens there will be some team leagues starting or something to get some organized action.

Friday Ramble

Wow, today is going to be a long one. Last night, I went to see EOTO play. EOTO is a spin-off of the now defunct String Cheese Incident. It was a solid 2-hour techno show, but not the hard house or trance that I’ve heard so much about. It was more trip-hop or something like that, very cool stuff. The drummer played for two hours straight without a break — pretty wild.

The MacBook Pro continues to evolve. Post Fusion install I’ve gotten all my development tools installed, including Resharper, TestDriven.NET, TortoiseSVN, and NAnt. So far everything seems to be working great. I’ve yet to install PowerShell (so I can have my NIX command-line goodness for the Windows box). I pulled down the trunk of Castle and got it to build as well. I had to create the Test & Test2 databases on my local instance of SQL Server 2005 in order for all the tests to complete.

It looks like I’ll be giving a presentation on MonoRail at the TulsaTechFest 2007. It will be an introduction to building a web site using MonoRail and Brail. MonoRail is part of the Castle Project and provides a MVC (model-view-controller) framework within ASP.NET. MVC is a solid pattern for building web applications that is a significant improvement over the page-based WebForms model. MonoRail embraces web standards allows applications to be built based on controller logic and helps facilitate the separation of concerns. It’s good stuff, I can’t wait ot talk about it.

Did I mention that I’m old and staying out until 2 AM at a live show is painful the next day? Where is the Tylenol again? Strange that I can stay up until 3 AM playing with a new computer and not feel fried the next day but this was… different.

Oh yeah, Peggle Extreme is part of the pre-order package for TeamFortress2 on Steam. I highly recommend it as a fun diversion! Speaking of TF2, I’m all set for the beta that starts on Monday. I can’t wait to play the game, I hope for some cool in-game video recording (with FRAPS or otherwise) next week. I wonder if voice-chat is built into the game? Things I don’t know — they are plentiful today it seems.

I got my iPhone store credit, $100, fast and easy from Apple. I guess this means a trip to the Apple store is coming soon.

Oh, and today’s post is an experiment in link diarrhea to see how long it takes this post to go up!

Team Fortress 2 Beta Sept. 17th with Steam Pre-Order

I popped into Steam today to check out a few things and was shocked to see a special offer. Pre-order Half Life 2: The Orange Box on Steam and play Team Fortress 2 Beta on September 17th! I was stoked, cancelled my Amazon pre-order and picked up The Orange Box on Steam. About 6 GB later (and a few hours, seems that a lot of people saw the Pre-load option when they got home) I had a bunch of new files in my game folder. Looks like a lot of shared Half Life 2 assets, along with the Team Fortress 2 assets.

Quite a find, I’m glad I logged in to check it out. They also included a really fun peg game that’s great for wasting away idle time waiting for the beta to start. And if you already have Half Life 2 registered on your account, once released you’ll get gift passes to give to friends so they can play your extra copies of the game you got with the Orange Box. Very cool.

I can’t wait for Monday night, anybody want to work on a recreation of the original QW Canal Zone map?