Eternal Silence is a Kick Ass HL2 Mod

Eternal Silence is a kick ass mod.

It's a space and shipboard combat game.

Each match starts out with both teams boarding ships to go bomb the other side's defensive corvettes, and defending their own corvettes. When one team succeeds in blowing up all three of the other team's corvettes, then the game mode changes, and the successful attackers invade the enemy capship and attempt to capture all the subsystems on the enemy's capship. This phase is timed, and when the timer runs out, new corvettes spawn in and the capship attack phase is over until all the corvettes are gone again. The timer can be stopped, though, if the attackers capture one of the capships subsystems. As long as the invaders hold one of the subsystems, the timer is stopped, and they can spawn there in that subsystem room on the enemy capship. They can also fly a multiseat gunship into the enemy capship hangar and spawn in the gunship, then jump out into the enemy capship's hangar area.

There are several different classes of ships and classes of soldiers, as you would expect.

I had some problems with frame rate, and locked up movement with echoing sound when I first started playing, but I cranked my video settings down a notch and I haven't had any freezing, echoing or lagging since. The game has crashed out to windows (Vista) a couple of times on me. (but it was way past my bedtime anyhow...)

I have had a lot of fun playing this game, and in the few days that I have played it, I have been on teams that used communication and teamwork about 50% of the time, which I think is an awesome ratio for a pub game.

It would be a great game if it had resource gathering, an upgrade system and a commander mode. But it's still fun with the simple gameplay it has now. It still offers a lot of possible tactical gambits, and strategies. Games can go back and forth for awhile, generating considerable drama and impassioned combat, although the continual bombardment of the capships does bring the match to an inexorable end. It is more than fun enough to keep me up late, flying the unfriendly skies.

Chinese Character Problems in Zen Cart

I needed to put some links with Chinese, Thai and Japanese characters in a header on a Zen Cart home page. I had a hard time finding the place in the templates and php files where I needed to specify the utf-8 character encoding.

Eventually I stumbled on the /includes/languages/your-template/english.php file which is where the magic happens.

// charset for web pages and emails
define('CHARSET', 'utf-8');

is the way you need to make it. If you don't, then your character set will be wrong, since Zen Cart installs with iso-8859-1 by default, and you'll get nonsense characters instead of Chinese.

I don't know why I couldn't find this file...it's the obvious place to look. I guess I had the wrong english.php file open...

I also ran into a great forum post on the Zen Cart forums. A user named Incouto provides a good explanation of character sets, collation in mysql and in the php query controller.