Category Archives: Tech

Tech

New Home For My Blog

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Gosh, time flies! This blog had been quiet for 4 long years, and I thought I just updated it recently.

Finally I have migrated this blog to my own server at Digital Ocean (https://www.digitalocean.com/).

Digital Ocean is a really good and cost-effective cloud service to host our own websites for those who have the technical skills. In case you are interested, please use my referral link https://m.do.co/c/8ba855458a0c and you will get USD$ 100 in credit over 60 days.

I migrated this WordPress blog manually without using any migration tools. Hopefully somedays I will write down in my blog on how I did it.

Previously this blog was hosted at private shared hosting service by https://www.arvixe.com/. I signed up for that hosting service exactly 10 years ago on 24th November 2011. It was pretty good as I only need to pay USD$ 4 / month (USD$ 96 for two years) and I get unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage, and one free domain name.

However, from November 2017 onwards, they started to charge me USD$ 5 / month (USD$ 120 for two years renewal), and today (24th November 2021), I am supposed to renew the service for two years at USD$ 145.20, but after I made some complaints to their customer service, I was given 10% discount and thus I only need to pay USD$ 130.68 for two year renewal.

Should I renew it?

My friend who introduced this hosting service to me is still being charged USD 96 for two years.

This hosting service once had very high rating but now there had been many complaints after it was bought over by other hosting company.

What I dislike the most is that it does not allow us to use the free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate service. My previously blog can only be access via http connection but not secured https connection.

I have now transferred out all the websites, including this blog, that I once parked there.

I am still undecided if I want to renew it or not. The main reason to continue would probably so that I have a cPanel to play around.

So should I renew it?

How To Transfer Unreal Engine From One PC To Another?

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This semester, I am introducing the game engine Unreal Engine (https://www.unrealengine.com/) to my Game Physics students.

The latest version of  the Unreal Engine is 4.10.1 (UE4). In order to install UE4, we need to first install the Epic Game Launcher, the installer is just about 30 MB.

After installing the Epic Game Launcher, we can download the game engine from the UE4 tab of the Epic Game Launcher. The download process will begin by downloading files with a total size of 4 to 5 GB !!

If you have a slow internet access, this is going to be a huge problem. For my case, 30 of my students were trying to install this at the lab PCs at the same time, and very few succeeded within the 2 hours lab time we had.

So, the question is whether we can install the UE4 on one PC when the internet is fast, and then copy the installation files to other PCs?

After google-ing and trials-and-errors, it turns out this can be done! Thank goodness.

Below is what we need to do:

  1. Install Epic Game Launcher and then UE4 as usual on PC #1, when the internet access is fast enough, it still takes me about an hour on a 20 mbps line.
  2. Install Epic Game Launcher on PC #2, i.e. the PC you wish to copy UE4 to.
  3. Copy the whole “C:\Program Files\Epic Games\4.10” folder of PC #1 into the “C:\Program Files\Epic Games\” of PC #2. The files could be at “C:\Program Files (x86)\” instead, but here we simply assume it is at “C:\Program Files\”, you will need to check on that. We also assume it is version 4.10, hopefully this would also apply for future version. The whole folder may be more than 25 GB in size, so you may want to zip it up first before transferring, the zipped file should be only about 5 GB. Take note, you may not be able to unzip the files directly into the “C:\Program Files\Epic Games\” folder, in which case you should unzip it at another folder such as at the Desktop and then move the folder into “C:\Program Files\Epic Games\”.
  4. Copy the file LauncherInstalled.dat at “C:\ProgramData\Epic\UnrealEngineLauncher\” folder from PC #1 into the same folder in PC #2. You may need to edit the file (just a text file) to remove unnecessary entries. You may also need to double-check in this file the path where the UE4 should be at PC #2.
  5. Now, click “Install” at the UE4 tab of the Epic Game Launcher at PC #2. Hopefully, it would detect the files and would not download the files again, and it should initiate the file verification process, checking for prerequisites etc., until the installation is complete.
  6. Take note, the Windows User Account Control (UAC) may prompt you for permission in some stages. If you do not press the “Yes” button on time, the installation may fail, but no worry, just try again.

So, good luck! Hope this works. If you find this helpful, or if you find any errors, or if you think something need clarification, please let me know at the comment box below. Thank you in advance.