terminal formatting

TrueType font rendering in terminals has been working for a while, but there were weird formatting problems. I finally tracked those down today, it turns out Bungie (Double Aught?) used tab characters in their terminals, and the old Mac OS font renderer happily rendered them as single spaces! So, translating '\t' into ' ' was enough to fix TrueType terminal formatting.

game info

In 0.20, it will be possible to see extended info about the game you're about to join (or not join) by clicking on the "Info" button, which brings up a dialog like this:


This should help you avoid joining terrible games like this guy's.

console font

When I added TrueType font rendering for themes, it wasn't much more work to add it for the console, overhead map, HUD, and terminals as well (although the last are still a little buggy). So, a few weeks back, I switched the default console font to this nice anti-aliased one. The old one is still available using MML, of course.

flac2m4a.py

Zune's new "gapless" (close enough) playback works better with AACs than it does with Lame-encoded mp3s. So, a quick hack script was in order to convert my collection of FLACs into AACs. But, I have four cores, so the script had to take advantage of those! Here's my flac2m4a Python script, that will convert a whole folder hierarchy into m4a files. It uses as many cores as you have available, and copies cover art so Zune can understand it. It's a bit rough, though.
You will need:

• Python
• Parallel Python
• FLAC
• Mutagen
• Nero's free (gratis) AAC Encoder

Here's the script:

import os
import shutil
import pp

job_server = pp.Server()
jobs = []

def quote(s):
   return s.replace('"', '\\"')

def convert_file(input,output):
   flac_mapping = {'title': '\xa9nam', 'artist': '\xa9ART', 'album': '\xa9alb', 'genre': '\xa9gen', 'description': '\xa9cmt', 'composer': '\xa9wrt', 'date': '\xa9day'}

   command = 'flac -d -c -s "' + quote(input) + '" | neroAacEnc -br 128000 -lc -if - -of "' + quote(output) + '" 2>/dev/null'
   os.system(command)
   tagsource = mutagen.flac.FLAC(input)
   tagdest = mutagen.mp4.MP4(output)
   for k, v in flac_mapping.iteritems():
       if tagsource.has_key(k):
           tagdest[v] = tagsource[k]
   if tagsource.has_key('tracknumber'):
       tagdest['trkn'] = [(int(tagsource['tracknumber'][0]), 0)]
   tagdest['pgap'] = True
   tagdest.save()
   return "processed " + os.path.basename(output)

def convert_directory(src, dst):
   os.mkdir(dst)
   srcnames = os.listdir(src)
   for name in srcnames:
       srcfname = os.path.join(src, name)
       dstfname = os.path.join(dst, name)
       if (os.path.isdir(srcfname)):
           convert_directory(srcfname, os.path.join(dst, name))
       elif (name.endswith('.flac')):
           newname = name[:-4] + "m4a"
           jobs.append(job_server.submit(convert_file, (srcfname, os.path.join(dst, newname)), (quote,), ("mutagen.flac", "mutagen.mp4", "os", "sys")))
       elif (name == "cover.jpg"):
           shutil.copyfile(srcfname, os.path.join(dst, "ZuneCustomAlbumArt.jpg"))

if __name__ == "__main__":
   import sys
   if len(sys.argv) == 3:
       print "Starting pp with", job_server.get_ncpus(), "workers"
       convert_directory(sys.argv[1], sys.argv[2])
       for i, job in enumerate(jobs):
           print job(), str(i+1) + "/" + str(len(jobs))
       job_server.print_stats()
   else:
       print "usage: flac2m4a <input> <output>"

tiny buttons

In order to make room for everything in the Locate Network Games dialog, it was necessary to make smaller buttons than appear in other dialogs. I call them tiny buttons.