EA is fast in that crowd-pleasing sort of way. It announced that Command & Conquer 4 would arrive in 2010, and less than a year after we first heard the news, we can already play the demo. The LA studio seems to have a real soft spot for Japanese flavor — after Red Alert 3 they only got more hooked, and even Kane in the C&C4 pre-order promo art is done up as an Imperial warrior. 《命令与征服4》multiplayer demo Note: This demo requires a genuine Red Alert 3 Special Edition serial number (CD-key) to activate before you can get into the game.

Yesterday I ran into a memory leak. After digging all the way down, I found it was caused by the bitmap captured for the reflection in an external .swf that had been loaded not being cleared. My guess is that although loader.unloadAndStop() closes the stream, it doesn’t release the BitmapData created inside the loaded program. Keep this in mind: aside from purely media-playback objects, if the external program you load has listeners, callbacks, or has created BitmapData, then that external program needs to clean up after itself before it’s unloaded. Otherwise, no matter how much you gc, it’ll still be eating memory.

This morning, by sheer chance, a portal dropped me into “Adoogen - Connecting Game Lovers Everywhere“. A few minutes of scanning the whole site told me what I needed to know — this is exactly the kind of game community site I’d been hoping for.

The day before yesterday I installed win7 on the N80vn. The machine got restored N times, then I formatted the recovery partition too, and after it finally installed, the problems never stopped. Yesterday: N blue screens plus N crashes, and my RP (luck) hit rock bottom. Today it crashed once, and after a reboot it wouldn’t start at all — the hardware self-test failed. Frozen forever at checking nvram… The one bit of luck in all this misfortune: before reinstalling I’d backed up the few projects I had on hand to the desktop, so I switched over to the desktop for the time being — at least its win7 is perfectly stable. I heard about Allods, which is all the rage lately. They say it’s the next WoW, so I’ve got to play it when I have time. But the laptop has to go in for repairs first…

U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum on the 16th. In answering a question about Internet openness, Obama said that the freer the flow of information, the stronger society becomes, because that way citizens around the world can hold their governments accountable. [Obama] Well, I’d now like to call on my ambassador, Huntsman. A netizen has submitted a question through our embassy website. [Jon Huntsman] First, in a country with so many Internet users, with 60 million bloggers, do you know about the firewall? Second, should we be free to use TWITTER?

After a long run of delays and slipped release dates, the fourth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons core rulebooks — the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, and the D&D Starter Set — which shipped on the 13th of this month, landed in my hands this morning. Here are three photos:

Just saw a friend share this — it’s episode one. A high-def version will be available for download soon, and the author keeps updating it. These cute characters look familiar… heh, now I remember — the official site once ran a series of “When We Were Young” comics. I really like all of them, and the 3D treatment looks great. This animation takes us right back to when WOW was young~

This afternoon halley summoned me over for a few rounds of Red Alert 3, and my craving for StarCraft 2 shot straight through the roof… Finally there’s some solid word: Q2 next year. Well, sooner than I can mentally handle, hehe.

On the 4th of this month, gskinner.com released version 2 of GTween. This version is more compact (3.5k) than the previous one, runs more efficiently, and introduces a new plugin model for greater ...

The soundtrack to the Japanese film 《坂の上の云》 will be released on November 18, 2009. It’s produced by Japanese score master Joe Hisaishi, and the theme song Stand Alone will be sung by Sarah Brightman in Japanese.

Flash SwitcherLets Firefox switch between different versions of the Flashplayer plugin, for compatibility debugging. This extension allows you to easily switch from one flash player plugin version to another, or also to remove or save the currently installed plugin (maybe for testing the express install). Once installed you will find the “flash switcher” icon in the Firefox statusbar at bottom right (and also in the Tools Firefox menu). Click on it and a list of available options will appear.

After updating the old FDT to 3.5beta, you have to crack it all over again. Thanks to halley for sending me the crack patch — sharing it here with anyone else who needs it. Click to download the FD...

During the long wait for Diablo 3, we’re no longer lonely — because now we have Torchlight. Here’s some info (download links at the bottom):

The new site went into design and development on July 27 this year, mostly in my spare time. And now the construction is finally done — it’s shipped. http://www.mousebomb.org/ the homepage now redirects to the new version — go take a look. The new version really did drag on. Since the 2007 version I hadn’t updated my personal site for ages. In fact, before building this one I designed two other versions — one during Spring Festival 2008, and another in late September 2008. One of them was going to have a star-travel theme. On the first visit a login box would pop up saying “Commander, welcome back” (just like Tiberium Wars). Once inside, you’d see a galaxy where visitors piloted a spaceship to explore planets, could send out cosmic radio waves to chat, and so on.

I happened to come across the CNC4 promotional animation — I wonder if it’ll be the intro for next year’s full release?