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Pictures of Game Developers

Yesterday I took some pictures of several game developers at the IGDA Chapter vienna meeting. Be impressed by my non existing photographer skills. And sorry for the also non existing thumbnails, somehow I didn't get it to work with this blog software.

[!-- error: could not popup ../images/igda1.jpg. File does not exist --]	[!-- error: could not popup ../images/igda2.jpg. File does not exist --]	[!-- error: could not popup ../images/igda3.jpg. File does not exist --]
[!-- error: could not popup ../images/igda4.jpg. File does not exist --]	[!-- error: could not popup ../images/igda5.jpg. File does not exist --]	[!-- error: could not popup ../images/igda6.jpg. File does not exist --]
[!-- error: could not popup ../images/igda6_copy.jpg. File does not exist --]	[!-- error: could not popup ../images/igda8.jpg. File does not exist --]	[!-- error: could not popup ../images/igda9.jpg. File does not exist --]
[!-- error: could not popup ../images/igda10.jpg. File does not exist --]

The meeting was fun and interesting, and I talked with lots of nice people. Unfortunately I had to leave quite early.
update:After a bit FTP, TheGimp and HTML, it works now.

Helden des Alltags reden beim Sport Vom Leben

I already wrote that I somehow created the ticked for a cabaret event. It took place yesterday, and was quite amusing. We watched Reinhard Nowak talking about Sport, Klaus Eckel about Helden des Alltags and Gunkl reciting Vom Leben. (wow, after blogging an entry in german, I start to mix everything up.. but the german words are the names of the programs of those Austrian cabaret artists). I did not take any pictures. But here's a picture of the used ticked

And thanks to my company - for the nice company :)

Chapters

Talking about chapters don't forget the IGDA Chapter Vienna meeting tomorrow, see you there :)

Transparency International Deutsches Chapter vs Moni

(German, sorry:) Wer's noch nicht mitbekommen hat, Transparency Deutschland hat ja Moni Unterlassungserklärungen und was weiss ich noch angedroht, weil sie etwas nicht sehr positives über sie gebloggt hat. Hier eine nette Zusammenfassung, wieder ein gutes Beispiel dafür, wie eine Firma (ok, hier ein Verein) ihr Ansehen komplett kaputt macht, indem sie die Blogosphäre herausfordert. Denn zum Glück gibt's da ja Leute wie den Herrn Vetter, der die Moni verteidigt und jetzt auch noch wegen übler Nachrede gegen die freundlichen Jungs von Transparency vorgeht, echt nett.
Kommt ja öfters vor, letztens z.B. der Fall Klum vs. Werbeblogger, oder Sozialgericht vs. Shopblogger. Nur was ich mich gerade frage: Ist jemandem in Österreich das auch schon passiert? Wenn ja, kennt jemand einen guten Anwalt, den man sich schon mal für so einen Fall notieren könnte? Am besten logischerweise jemanden der weiß worum es da geht, d.h. auch selber bloggt?

Simple metal effect

Short idea for creating a simple reflecting metal effect, by changing only one number in one of the Irrlicht examples:

This looks nice, especially in movement. Just like very reflective golden metal on the walls. To reproduce, just open the per pixel lighing example and change the MaterialTypeParam to something above 1 (should work with D3D at least, didn't try it out with OpenGL).
How does this work? Simple: In the parallax mapping shader, I'm calculating something like
mad r2.xyz, r3, r4_bx2, r0 ; newTexCoord = height * eye + oldTexCoord
where r3 has been scaled with this MaterialTypeParam value before. It influences the bumpiness of the material, but with bigger values, it makes the shader 'go mad'. Unfortunately, the fake reflections on the wall only change when moving the position of the camera. But this could be fixed up easily. Maybe a good start to play around and try out to create a new shader? Simply open CD3D9ParallaxMapRenderer.cpp and copy or edit the pixel shader programs and create your own. :)

Small editor

I just wrote this little program, using C# and of course, Irrlicht.

It's a small editor, for Irrlicht scene graphs. Well, ok, until now only a viewer, if at all. It doesn't do much yet, but lets see where I am going with this, I think I'll update and enhance it from time to time, and make it available once it will be useful. :)

Someone is locking the file!!1!!

Linking...
LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 
'C:\Development\somelongpath\Irrlicht.NET.dll'

Yeah, dear VisualStudio, because you are locking that file yourself, you stupid **CENSORED**, argl. Currently, I'm getting this after every recompile of any file in the project. This seems to be a known bug, lots of people on the web are having the same problem: VisualStudio locks a compiled managed .dll after the first compile, and trying to compile it a second time will fail because the IDE cannot write to the file because it still locks it. Only restarting the whole IDE helps. Looks like I'm going to change the project setup, I think this a lot better then having to restart VisualStudio every two minutes..
update: Helped as expected. If anybody has this problem: Simply make visual studio copy the .dll automaticly to another directory and use that for running your application.

MSDN.Dispose()

So, what the f*ck did I drink when I thought it was a good idea to uninstall the MSDN library to save some diskspace?

Grml. Fortunately the MSDN for VisualStudio Express survived. :)

Broken signal

Hm...

Checking in os.h;
/cvsroot/irrlicht/Irrlicht/Irrlicht/os.h,v  <--  os.h
new revision: 1.2; previous revision: 1.1
done
cvs [commit aborted]: received broken pipe signal

I don't know if I now should not like my WLAN card, my WLAN hotspot, my provider, sourceforge, or CVS. But I think a change to SVN soon would be nice anyway.

Undercover - Operation Wintersonne

New game developed in Vienna. Somehow the flash demo doesn't work quite well in my Opera. But nice, anyway. Eva, auf Wiedersehen. :)

German or not German

If you want to imigrate to Hessen (one of Germany's federal states), you'll have too answer a list of 100 questions (german link). Nice to be german already, because after reading them, I think I would not be able to answer some of them (fortunately, there is a cheat sheet available on Wikipedia). Or would you have known what has been invented by Johannes Gutenberg? Or what the german scientist Otto Hahn did, in 1938? And besides that, most of the questions read like they were written by drunken law students. I mean

Die Wahlen zu den deutschen Parlamenten müssen nach Artikel 38 der Verfassung

allgemein
unmittelbar
frei
gleich und
geheim

sein. Erklären Sie diese Wahlgrundsätze!
WTF?

Server moved

Maybe you've noticed this, but irrlicht3d.org today moved to a new server. There were several problems because of this, it wasn't possible to add comments until now, and the last article I've posted here disappeared (not going to repost it), but I fixed hopefully all problems now, mostly by resetting some file access attributes. Also, I had some issues with the email server for some hours, but it looks it is accepting my account & pw again :). If you sent a mail to me and don't get an answer, just resend it, sorry.

Legal threats against The Pirate Bay

Laywers being ridiculed by a swedish guy running a torrent search engine. Really funny to read.

Games Giant

Last weekend I stumbled over this package in a Libro at the Mariahilferstrasse:

(Yes, the left foot is mine :) ) The package is quite huge (looks smaller on the picture) and contains lots of JoWooD games. Even three I've been working on. I nearly bought it, because it only costs 7.90 eur. Nearly. :)

Why doesn’t Irrlicht use the STL?

One question I get asked really often is why Irrlicht is not using the STL. I’m going to write a short answer here, and send people the link to this text in the future, or maybe even create a new FAQ entry on irrlicht.sf.net.
Irrlicht uses it's own template containers and does not rely on the STL, the C++ standard template library. In the namespace core, you’ll find several useful templates which I implemented, for example a vector named irr::core::array, a list and a string class. They are written in a way that you should know how they work, if you know how to use the STL, for example they have ::iterators and methods named like ::push_back or ::size(), ::clear(), etc. And they are really fast.
But why all the effort implementing those classes? Simply because Irrlicht is quite portable. Irrlicht compiles with 7 (or even more) different compilers and on 4 different platforms/operating systems, without a single warning. If I would have used the STL, it would have been a bit more difficult to achieve this, and to let Irrlicht keep its performance equally everywhere, because there are so many STL implementations, and all of them differ. Some of them even have bugs, for example the STL which comes with the latest VisualStudio has some known bugs. So I’ve simply a lot less problems by implementing these few simple classes and algorithms. There would have been the possibility to include a STL implementation like STLPort in Irrlicht, but as always, I wanted to reduce dependencies.
Ok, and honestly, another reason for implementing the containers was because I had fun doing that. And I think I did it quite well, the performance of the array is really good and has some really useful methods you don’t find in the STL, same for the string.

Commentless blog

Already >70 people downloaded irrUML3D, and only one wrote a comment, until now. Is it really that bad? :(
BTW: Altova UModel 2006 has been released yesterday, irrUML3D should handle this too, without modifications.

UML in 3D

Some months ago I wrote a little application to display UML class diagrams in 3D space. I now created a small webpage for it and made it available for download. Currently, it simply only loads Altova UModel .ump files and displays their content in 3D, but some more features are planned to be added soon. It looks like this:

It is quite fun to fly across your software projects in 3D. Hope you like it. But pretty senseless for now, because I don't display any relations yet. I named the tool irrUML3D because it uses irrXML as high speed xml parser and Irrlicht for 3D rendering, of course.

Schleichfahrt remake

Remember the game Schleichfahrt or also called Archimedean Dynasty? It was a nice game, and has a more or less successful successor named Aquanox, published and developed by a former employer of mine. Xaron is working on something like a remake of this game, named Silent Depth. It already looks pretty nice, example:

Looking forward to see the full game. Not only because it is made using Irrlicht.

IGDA vienna still not dead

Funny, everytime I think IGDA Vienna is now really dead, it convinces me of the contrary. Just accidentaly surfed to the IGDA website, where I found out that IGDA Vienna has a new website, igdavienna.org. And they even claim that a meeting will be held in April. Lets see. :)

Irrlicht in your webbrowser?

Christophe Leske is working on something which I would call Irrlicht for the Web. Looks promising. I don't know much about Shockwave and Director, but I'm looking forward to see more of it. :)