Hectic year
So it was 1 year without news, let me tell you the hectic year that was for me.
A few days after I released 5.7.0 Beta, I got a call from my boss telling me as of 1st of May I will be leaving Belgium for ever. In less than 15 days we found an appartment in Thionville/France and we moved there in hurry. The expectation was to work in Luxembourg after a month in Paris.
Work and life in Paris is awful, I don't like it and it went from 1 month at the hotel to 2 and to 3... I couldn't stand it anymore.
Working in Luxembourg was not an option (we lost the contract there). But my boss proposed a job in Montreal/Canada. I did the job interview, sold almost everything we had and kept the bare minimum.
A few days before the go (we had the work permits ready) it was not possible anymore... The contract was lost again... We were still in a hotel in Paris, with our small belongings left at my mom's house.
We decided with my wife to change lifes. I quit my job and I took a job offering as a tourism agency manager in Costa Rica. We flew there with our belongings early october. We are there since then.
Hacking of ElberethZone v3
In parallel, the website got infected by some script kiddies by exploiting Joomla vulnerabilities. I had no time to fix it so I removed it altogether, thinking I will have time to fix it soon enough... Well, after almost a year of "temporary offline", here is the website back online.
This time there is no online PHP at all, good luck exploiting this. Everything is custom made and generated offline as static html/css/js files.
I hope you enjoy the new website, it should feel much more modern than before.
The translations are not done yet. It takes time and I wanted the webpage back online asap.
Cryptocurrencies
End of 2013, I got interested in cryptocurrencies. I started to mine Litecoin, buying some Bitcoin and using faucets to get Dogecoins.
A few months after that, I friend told me about a privacy-centric altcoin starting (Xcoin/Darkcoin). I got hooked since them (the name of the coin is now Dash if you want to check it out).
I am invested a lot in the community around Dash: I created a french and english wiki, an IRC bot for the official chan, a monitoring website for the Dash network (Dash Ninja), etc..
This essentially means there was no time left for Dragon UnPACKer. Who knows when I will have time again.
Time for a long due version of Dragon UnPACKer (an "unstable" one but nonetheless): 5.7.0 Beta !
So what's new?
- Bug fixes, LOTS of memory leaks fixed...
- Performance enhancements everywhere
- New theme feature (currently ugly...)
- Added support for Aliens vs. Predator (2010) .ASR file format.
- Added support for Star Wars Starfighter .PAK file format.
- Added support for The 7th Guest .GJD file format.
- Added Ghostbusters: The Video Game conversion ability for .TEX to .DDS/.BMP/.PNG/.TGA
Look at the change log to know the details about what is new!
To download this new version, head to the Dragon UnPACKer > Downloads section.
For those of you following the SVN commits and the nightly download page, you saw there was a lot of activity the past month. I am actually quite pleased with the current state of Dragon UnPACKer (minus the new icons) and I would like to release an official 5.7.0 Beta in the coming couple of weeks.
I fixed a LOT of memory leaks, revamped the logging system, reworked the internals to be less complex (and actually faster), changed from the .dulk look files to folder/file based Themes (supporting PNG, JPG & BMP images) and added chained conversion (plugins + internal Vampyre Imaging Library) among other things.
There are some more behind the scenes changes that will (hopefully) appear in later betas that means for the moment there is a new DUDI version for Drivers (so drivers for this version are not compatible with previous Dragon UnPACKers). I will for sure need to do not backward-compatible changes again during the beta.
Since last post I have been working on making internal/behind the scenes modifications to Dragon UnPACKer code for an easier maintenance and to add new features I have been thinking about. On the surface nothing much as changed, but the new theme engine which is lacking some icons...
On the Lazarus side, I was able to convert the project to it and have it compile (yeah!), run without crashing (double yeah!) and actually extract stuff from files (triple yeah!). But... There is a persistant SIGSEGV error when closing the program (and this is actualy linked to the main form). I spend hours trying to find out what was causing this to no avail... So I am back to Delphi 7 refactoring the program so that the conversion to Lazarus is even easier next time.
I will try to release a 5.7.0 Beta soon with all fixes & changes so it can be tested before I start with even bigger changes.
So... After one year, I must say Delphi XE2 Starter was a big disappointment. A lot of the features I use in Delphi 7 Personal are missing (like the command line compiler). The result is I could not motivate myself enough to use it even after paying 149€ for it. The missing features are available in the expensive Professionnal version (1069€), come on!
I re-installed Delphi 7 and rolled back the changes I tried to introduce to make Dragon UnPACKer working with XE2.
The result is I will try to focus on Lazarus. Hopefully I can make Dragon UnPACKer compatible with the version 1.0 that finally came out last year.
I will try to fix the pending bugs and release a 5.6.3 soon with the external convertion tools which is long overdue (sorry Paul).