All posts by OneDollar

Let’s Play Home

My friend OzzyJ88 and I recently recorded our first (blind) let’s play. We picked Home, which is a horror adventure game done in a 2D pixely side-scrolling style. It has an interesting gameplay mechanic in which it keeps asking you yes or no questions and uses your choices to create the backstory. Anyway, you can watch our play-through below:

Windows 7 Wacom tablet splash fix

I got my Wacom graphics tablet back when I was running Windows XP, and apart from the driver occasionally announcing it’s not going to work without a restart it’s been great. When I switched to Windows 7 I found that there are a lot more built in pen and tablet ‘features’, for example a little ‘splash’ animation every time you press the pen down and a ring that appears when you right-click. When you mainly use the tablet for drawing this gets annoying very quickly.

Apparently Vista used to let you turn these features off, but the options are mysteriously missing in Windows 7*. With a little Google searching I figured out how to turn these features off, but every half a year or so they seem to resurface which is enough time for me to have forgotten how I did it. So I figured I’d document for future reference and for anyone else having the same issue.

To stop Windows treating a long press of the pen as a right-click:

  • Search for a control panel option called Pen and Touch (TabletPC Input in Vista) and use it to disable Press and Hold.

You can also stop all of Windows’ tablet features (if you have the Wacom drivers installed you can safely do this and the pressure sensitivity, zoom ring etc will still work).

  • Open the Services window (search Services on the start menu) and find the Tablet PC Input Service. Right-click it and choose Properties. Click the Stop button, then change the Startup type to Disabled.
  • Open up Device Manager (again search from the start menu) and expand the Human Interface Devices menu. Right-click Wacom Virtual Hid Driver and click Disable.
  • Restart your PC.

*I think on business versions you can use the local policy editor to turn them off, but that won’t work if you’re using a Windows Home Premium like me.

More Minecraft Movies

Despite starting work on our next Minecraft video 7 months ago (and promising it within the week 3 months ago) we only just finished it. Hopefully it was worth the wait, and you even get to hear what my voice sounds like. So without further ado: Nether Again

So far we’ve got nowhere near the number of views we got for The Yawning Dark, though it’s 100% liked. I guess we need to get it noticed up by some big website.

I’ve created a section for our Minecraft videos over on the Movies page.

Minecraft Movies

Following my grand tradition of posting about things months after they were relevant, some friends and I made a couple of movies using Minecraft.

Our main piece was called “The Yawning Dark: A Minecraft Tale” and turned out to be fairly popular (over 13,000 views at time of writing).

And here’s the ‘pilot’ we made first to see if Minecraft videos were feasible.

If you like us, subscribe to japanesetreadmillcat on Youtube. We’re working on another movie at the moment.

Also I have another game almost nearly finished. That means I think it’ll be done in a week or two, but it’ll probably end up being done in a month or two. Anyway, stay tuned.

***

I really have to figure out how to make this blog wider. Can’t even fit Youtube videos in it.

Edit:
Updated my theme to something a bit wider. Still playing around with the colours, but it looks a lot better already.