Puzzle Quest mods

It looks like making changes to the PC version of Puzzle Quest really is easy. Basically you get an Assets.zip full of xml and lua files to be tinkered with to your heart's content.

Infinite Interactive made some balance changes for the PC, Xbox 360, and all future versions. However, I prefer to use the Warrior's Deathbringer spells from the older PSP/DS versions of PQ.

Here's how to put the classic Deathbringer back in the game:

1. Open up your Puzzle Quest folder (probably C:\Program Files\Puzzle Quest)
2. Make a backup copy of Assets.zip
3. Inside of the zip, edit Assets\Spells\SDBR.xml and change:

<Data cooldown="3" />

into

<Data cooldown="0" />

4. Next edit Assets\Spells\SDBR.lua and change:

if (amt > 10) then
amt = 10;
end

into

if (amt > 64) then
amt = 64;
end

You could probably just delete those three lines.. But it is probably best to set the upper bounds to no more than the actual number of gems on the board. :)

5. Overwrite the files in Assets.zip with your new copies and you're done.

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Liquid Rescale plug-in for The GIMP

Ever since the Content-Aware Image Resizing presentation at SIGGRAPH 2007, there has been excitement around finally getting to play with the underlying software. Some developers have gone so far as to implement their own version of the techniques described in the paper by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.

Yesterday, I saw a a post on Digg about to one such implementation: the Liquid Rescale GIMP plugin by Carlo Baldassi.

So I've installed The GIMP (open source image editing software similar to Photoshop) and tried out Liquid Rescale on a some images from Flickr:

Original (Photo by Chuq Von Rospach)



80% width



50% width



45% width, 80% height



The plugin is in early stages, so there is currently no way to select areas of importance. That means people sometimes get mangled:

Original (Photo by Boltronic)



80% width



Even though they've hired Shai Avidan, Adobe hasn't confirmed that the technique will make its way into Photoshop. However, it will be interesting to see third-party implementations grow and become more optimized.

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