Facebook Photo Size Limit: Larger than 2048px?

It has always been officially stated that the maximum size of uploaded Facebook pictures is 2048x2048 px, but this doesn't seem to be the case in this picture from a friend uploaded today, as this photo has a size of 3327 x 1259 pixels.

I can't tell whether the 2048px is a limitation within uploading directly from Facebook or the maximum size was silently increased, but it's proof that there are ways of bypassing the dimension limit for pictures on FB.

Despite this, the compression on this image is quite high; I can't tell whether or not this caused by a Facebook script compressing it down, but if this is the case it should never substitute for a site that stores images in higher quality like flickr / imgur. I attempted to use this as a background image for my laptop and couldn't stand the highly visible compression artifacts both on the ground and the sky.

Americana Dawn: Battle System + Mockup

Foster's team taking out a soldier in a microbattle, 3d mockup.

Americana Dawn is after all a Suikoden-inspired game (with the battle system) so it should be fair that battles be in 3d. However this requires a lot more work and sprites so it's a stretch goal instead. But the main points of the battle system are:

• A cooldown system will replace the ATB system found in RPG games, and is based on weapon or skill used. Although the game is turn-based, how soon a character can make another move is based on equipment, skills, and buffs (or debuffs!).
• One weapon and three accessories per character. Weapons are divided into eight different types each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Both weapons and accessories are random loot drops to some extent.
• 15 levels of mastery for each weapon type, the higher your mastery the more effectively you can use it, as well as being able to learn new weapon-related skills. There is no other form of 'leveling up' in this game.
• You can switch weapons during a battle.
• When heroes (and some enemies) run out of HP, they are briefly incapacitated and will get up after a while at full health, however they will suffer fatigue penalties (temporary reduction to max HP). Units heal to full after a battle is over, but you will need to rest somewhere to remove fatigue.

3D Battle System unlock conditions: Raise over $120k on the second Americana Dawn Kickstarter.

Review: Boyelu USB 3.0 Hub (with Independent Power Controls)

Or AGPtek, or whatever. Anything with this specific packaging. But there's more problems than with just that.

I normally don't review small products like this, but the potential problems of buying generic brand items for cheaper prices forces me to give a fair warning about these.

Overview

The manufacturer from Newegg reads AGPtek (and there are three different products in the market, though they are sold by different companies, and one of them is marked as First From Asia). But a few problems:

• AGPtek does not manufacture or sell USB Hubs
• Their support website does not show anything about them.
• There is no 'direct' manufacturing website on its product (nor does it have the company name on the product itself).

Those are just generic problems, and I didn't cover the product problems. They are:

• No AC Adapter present in the box (that means I have to find my own, which could take a while).
• Power for the hub is 500mA (it's on the back of the box, but the product overview doesn't tell you that, particularly since the product images do not show the back of the box. Nothing on the box says the adapter is present either.
• Recognized as two USB 2.0 Ports and two USB 3.0 ports in Device Manager upon plugin. Does that mean I can only get four ports worth of usb hubs? Don't know yet, but will test soon.

There is an upside, however, and that is the power for USB devices for the hub are controlled via buttons, which means that you don't have repeatedly plug and unplug something for whatever reason (usually due to delays in booting up Win7 when multiple external hard drives are plugged in).

Two options remain, either return it to test it out. Considering I can't return or exchange it as there's parts missing when it arrived and the hub's not defective, and there's really no reviews for this, there's only one option left. (I do not want to waste $30 on this one)

Results: The USB 3.0 hub was tested with a card reader and five hard drives attached to it. Without an (optional) power supply, only three drives and a card reader were operational, anything else was not recognized by Windows. The number of devices recognized could be less if those devices used up more power. However, all of the ports appear to have USB 3.0 like speeds.

Stockton Free Boat Cruises

What is better than a free cruise? Nothing else. However, its range is quite limited since the tour only lasts for two hours (it turns around before reaching the Sailing Club marina), but you can't beat free right? (Compared to around $100 normally)

The opportunity for free tours was first available sometime in June, but I didn't see it until reading the newspaper article about it. By that time all of the free cruises that were available (up to end of July) were sold out, that's how popular it is. But not to worry - they're doing more cruises for September starting in a couple of weeks.

Get a reservation via this link.

Protip: They make available 3 cruises per Saturday, 10am, 1pm, 4pm, for 50 passengers for September starting on August 5 at 8am. If you were unable to get a reservation or can't wait that long, you can always wait in the standby line. Arrive around 45-60 minutes early for an almost guaranteed first priority on standby (if someone fails to attend, and it is almost bound to happen, you can go). If that doesn't work, you can call them up to (most likely) get higher up the priority line for the next cruise.

Peppermill: Background TV Displays

Back at the Peppermill again, this time to learn more about the various outdoor scenery that is playing on the TVs around the casino (there's a huge backstory about this, and yes, it is possible to get a behind the scenes tour).

What TV, you ask? Like this one, these TVs in the background are scattered all across the casino, sometimes in pairs of three, one large one at a bar, and others as single screen or two lined up vertically. There's also a channel in the hotel room that displays these backdrops (the tv there is usually flipped to this channel upon first entering). I'm guessing they're too ambient, not a lot of people who review this place mention this at all.

After learning that there were thousands of possible backgrounds that could be played and them being shot on Red One cameras (justifiable since they needed the high resolution to fill up to three 1080p screens), I'll probably be watching them more on future trips... never knew that the background videos had so much behind it.

Desert Oasis Division, Perler Bead Version (Rework)

The second of the CNH Division Logo series (9 total).

There's some ambiguity as to what the most recent logo actually looks like, so I'm using this version found in the CNH Sunburst in August 2012, with minor modifications (usually due to the limit of colors that I have on hand).

I know that the Las Vegas temperatures during the trip weeks ago was hot, but didn't know Central California (and Capital Division) was also equally so with the temperatures hitting the three-digit range, almost at 110 degrees, at least in June anyways.

The bottom actually looks a bit plain compared to the reference image, so there will be a few more details added to the mountains and cactus before it is released on FB.

Note: I don't have active contact with anyone in other divisions other than Capital, so I don't expect the popularity for the CNH Logo Perler Bead series to be high. I'm simply just a completionist, that's all. And I really don't want to deconstruct the Capital Division logo completely if I had other projects I wanted to do involving CKI since at least 50% of that logo can be reused. It will get a soft (non newsfeed) release on FB but that's about it.

A Brief History of Message Boxes (in Americana Dawn)

The dialogue box appearance in Americana Dawn has changed over the years, and a bit more dramatically in the months after I came in and built a custom engine.

First two panels: The first one was used as a custom message box displayed in the RPGMaker Engine (The Long Goodbye). The other one was probably a photoshopped mockup, but I don't know for sure. (I didn't receive a copy of a build that displayed message boxes)

Panels three and four: First one was the photoshopped mockup that I needed to implement in-game. The closest I could do was in the panel below (this includes recreating the drop shadows, quality reduced since it need to redraw the shadow in realtime up to 60 times per second)

Panels five and six: Panel five is the photoshop mockup version. I recreated it and added a bit of additional features in the next panel. Said colored text are not the exact rgb values in yet another mockup, but I manually adjusted it for readability purposes. Drop shadows are part of the bitmap font. Said font is not monospaced so there were a few tweaks made with letter placement in the bitmap to improve performance while keeping uniform spacing between letters and such.

Complications: The pixel font was implemented as a bitmap since the AddFontResourceEx call fails when trying to read the ttf version of the font (as in it causes the program to hang after the function is called, and I can't stop the program for debugging).

The 'reading Japanese Characters from a file' might prove to be a challenge at this point since I'll have to deal with reading UTF-8 and interpreting the multi-byte input into a character (I cannot use such characters as test strings in the cpp files since they are encoded in ANSI).

I have still a few other pages to implement, but I'll cover the battle screen related stuff next, since people want action related shots and I'm overdue a few months on a functional demo.