No more gold in Fort Knox?

I've read an article today which hasn't gained as much publicity as I think it should have received:

Ron Paul, a texan congressman who even I, although German have heard of already, just called to mind what a lot of people already believe: That there is maybe no more gold in Fort Knox, the U.S. Gold Bullion Depository. Ron Paul simply wants an independent audition of Fort Knox to see if there is still gold.

The US have denied any independent auditing for decades and refuse to do so still today. It is an open secret that the gold price is being manipulated and artificially held down, but recently, this hasn't worked out that well, the gold price is celebrating all time highs during the last year. If it would turn out to be true, and there is no more gold in Fort Knox, and the US government has lied to the people (how shocking!), the gold price would probably explode. No idea what impact what this would have on the dollar. Maybe the economy and the dollar will simply break down, as Greenspan said, the gold price is basically a fever thermometer for the paper money. But anyway running a broken economy by lying to the people will also result in the same.

If I had some money left, I think this would be the ideal time to buy some gold now. Quite interesting times we live in today.

Timelapse developing a game

You probably all have seen those timelapse videos of showing gifted artists drawing cool images in photoshop, paint and similar, but this thing is a bit different:


It shows Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft developing a game named Metagun from scratch in 48 hours (and in Java, looks at least like it for me). Not sure if this is as interesting as watching those 2d drawing timelapses, but it is a fun idea :)

WTF-Week

Since I started my own business, I've quickly learned that there are weeks where every day is a big WTF-moment. This week is such a week. Sometimes it is incredible what weired things can happen and how strange people can behave. I wish I could go into more details here (but probably later).
At least it keeps me entertained :)
And to blog some (non-related) less vague stuff as well, did you see the new irrFuscator website already? Hope it works in all browsers, but looked correctly in the about 6 I tested it with.

Starcraft 2 Review

I recently played through the (quite short) single player campaign of Starcraft II and also finished quite a lot of multiplayer matches, so here is my usual small review of this game:

I loved the game back in 1998 and from what I remember, the new game is quite the same. Everything works as before down to the short cuts, but now it's in (pretty unnecessary) 3D. But anyway, it is still fun. You get to view some - interestingly - rendered in realtime 3d movie sequences between each single player mission and the mission design is also very ok. But nothing you've not seen before in any other up-to-date RTS game. The necessarity to connect to Battle.NET in order to play the game - together with that fact that half of Battle.Net regularily doesn't fully work (for example I cannot see portraits of the players half of the time at all) - is a bit nerving, but I guess this is how games are today. I am also not entirely sure what all the multiplayer ladder stuff is about (for example: What does that number mean next to my character? What does 'Gold league' mean? How do the scores work? etc.), it is not easy to find this out because the manual mainly only contains a printed version of the background story (wtf).
But apart from all this, it is a fun game worth buying and I think I will spend some more time in multiplayer matches in the near future.

Twitter is nice

So I've been using twitter for about one month now and like it. I've not twittered that much since then (23 tweets, well, maybe it's better than nothing), but I also read the tweets of others which is quite interesting. I initially decided to use it as a ~commercial~ account, i.e. tweeting only about my software project related stuff, and I think this wasn't the worst idea. Sometimes I blog about non programming stuff on here, and when it gets political, it's usually quite provocative. Explaining this in 140 characters is not possible, I guess.
So I will continue to twitter on there, and try to increase my tweets / second a bit. :)

CopperLicht 1.2.0 out now

I just released CopperLicht 1.2.0. If you are using that 3D engine, you should update to this new version because it includes an update which makes CopperLicht work with a change to be introduced in next releases of the main WebGL browsers (FireFox, Webkit): The WebGL array types have been renamed according to the WebGL specification. Additionally, it also now supports basic 2D drawing. Details in the forum.

Terrain editor taken to the next level: From Dust

Best terrain editor with the coolest water simulation/rendering I've seen yet:



Quite impressive.

Red rectangle II

Small update about my work on 2d drawing in Copperlicht: I haven't had much development time for this since the last post, but the red rectangle now looks like a rectangle at least:

My development version of CopperLicht now is able to draw 2d rectangles, images, and even text. The text part is a bit tricky to implement in WebGL (ok, let's be honest, this is also the case in OpenGL and Direct3D; drawing 2D text in 3D is not easy anywhere): Internally, a 2d canvas is created, converted to a texture and updated when necessary. Performance-wise this is incredible fast.

The main reason for implementing these features is of course to enable all the 2D overlay and behavior functionality which is offered by CopperCube, now in the WebGL version as well. Designing (game) menus, buttons and HUDs finally also will work in the WebGL target in the next version.

Quick Starcraft 2 Strategy Tip

If you are playing Starcraft 2 multiplayer mode and want to win a match easily, try this: Just a few minutes before prime time (in Germany and Austria, this is 20:15), start a match. If you are lucky, at about 20:15, your opponent will realize how late it is and leave the game, letting you win. Happend two times for me already (although I'm not sure this is the exact reason, but looks suspiciously like it).

Smartpacker Pro

I just came across Smartpacker, a group of products which make it easily possible to pack your files of your application or game into one single executable. I am used to program my own archive file format (for example the applications created with CopperCube store all the textures, sounds, 3d models, scripts etc in one single .exe file), but it is a lot of unnecessary work if you write your own game from scratch to design a package file format for this, just for the simpler distribution.
The smartpacker applications offer a quite nice set of options, including the creation of highly customized installers, virtual file systems, encryption, password protection and download module, so this sounds like a nice package to keep in mind for future projects. Additionally the price seems to be very fair and they have a flash packer in the works.
Hint to the developers: A Mac version would be nice. :)