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1309 days ago
It's been a while since I last wrote an update to this space... Blame school :P Finally school seems to be done. I've got a few weeks of voluntary school left untill the exams, but I don't plan to attend those lessons unless the teachers have anything special planned (like little freshen-up courses ;)). So I'll have quite a bit of time now to work on SP :) Some of you may have read the article over at Fanatic Live, and had a look at the features I currently have at least somewhat done. If you haven't, you should... It's a quick outline of the feature that are already done so far. I haven't really added anything revolutionary new since that, but here's a quick list of what I did get done: Memory search caching: Instead of searching messenger memory each time StuffPlug is started (like SPNG used to do), StuffPlug 3 uses something called caching. The offsets of the found patterns are saved in the registry, and when messenger is loaded again it will first check those ...
1323 days ago
1351 days ago
0123 The Netherlands. Memory searching is finally done. That header above was supposed to look JAG (or any other military series/movie for that fact) like, however the time being 01:23AM now kinda spoils that since 0123 looks stupid :P Anyway, Reached another (what I'd call) milestone today. As some of you might know, most StuffPlug features are quite similar to patches. They look for certain byte-codes, and replace them. The only real difference being that patches do it on disk, and SP does it in-memory. There's a few more differences, but I'll spare you the details ;) To keep StuffPlug compatible with future release of messenger, I've been using a memory search module that I wrote way back somewhere in SP-NG or something. It used a syntax like this: {0x86,0xFF,0xB6,0x58,...} It's split up in bytes, and each byte is prefixed with 0x to indicate it's hex. Also the 0xFF was used as a "wildcard" that would match anything. This screwed up a few features in the past because ...
1355 days ago
Right, with "Taking shape" I don't necesarilly mean that it's almost ready for release. It's still very far from that. But I made some changes today that will load the installation path from registry and load the skin and language from the appropriate places, instead of the hard-coded one :) I've also fought with the image-loading for most of the day. I thought that GDI-plus (image library included with XP) could simply load an image and pass it on to my GUI, but gawd, was I wrong! It seemed right at first, however all alpha transparent images had a weird blue border around them. First I just thought that my images were wrong, however when Alex (someone helping me a bit with the design now Rolando is busy) sent me some new images it appeared that the blue border was not just something that I did wrong in copy pasting, but everything that was even slightly transparent got a blue blur :S It appeared GDIplus first blended the images over blue, and then passed them along to ...
