Posted on: June 14 2012
Comments: 3Yesterday, there was a big outage of a major cellphone and internet provider in Austria. Starting in the afternoon, no phone and internet worked until the end of the day for quite a lot of people in many regions of Austria, and I was one of them. If you are living in the countryside, and suddenly both your phone and your internet stops working, there is nothing you can do about it and you get no information about this, you feel quickly very cut off.
You also notice how the internet has changed your life a...
[Read more]Posted on: June 13 2012
Comments: 10About a year ago I blogged about The Upcoming Collapse. Most commenting readers agreed with me on what I was writing
there, but I also received a few angry mails about it, and one person even demanded furiously that I should stop writing political stuff on
this blog. Well then, better stop reading right now. :)
What am I talking about
After all, as you can now see for yourself in the news, I was pretty close, and the crash is now very near. Greece (10 mio people) is de-facto bankrupt. Spain is much ...
[Read more]Posted on: May 31 2012
Comments: 6As you might know, we had a Hamster living in the Ambiera Office. He had his own cage, and slept and digged holes in there, but he was also free to run around in the office when he wanted, which he frequently did. Sometimes even during the day (Hamsters are nocturnal and usually sleep when the sun shines). I made a short video of the last pictures I took of him, a few days before he died last week:
He was the friendliest and most social hamster I know. He really liked us, and nearly always came out of hi...
[Read more]Posted on: May 30 2012
Comments: 1Did 9 hours of straight programming work, answered all customer requests, finally successfully re-built a whole support library with new settings and without errors, checked everything in and done with the TODO list of this week already. Great! Now, for a quick relaxing game of Diablo 3, as reward!
What the...
I knew it was a mistake getting this online only game, although I only play single player. I like how Diablo 3 works from a technical stand point, the feature that your friends can join your games...
[Read more]Posted on: May 21 2012
Comments: 4Maybe you also already saw the Microsoft Internet Explorer ad on TV. Basically it's a few pictures of various web pages, with a song playing. Interestingly, the song also became quite popular and I've also already heard it on the radio a few times. You can watch it here:
Apart from the fact that I think it would have been more useful for Microsoft spending all that money in development to improve that broken and slow browser instead, there is something other I find interesting about it: knowing it's th...
[Read more]Posted on: May 19 2012
Comments: 4Apple just sent me and thousands of other developers a mail, stating that our apps on the Mac App Store (in my case, that's WebsitePainter and CopperCube) will have to be sandboxed until June 1st. That's in one and a half week. Nothing new here, they already said this long before, and actually, this is the third time the deadline has been prolonged. I think the fact that they are sending the mail again as reminder shows that they are a bit nervous, and probably means that not a big amount of developers, suc...
[Read more]Posted on: May 18 2012
Comments: 2I was quite late when I entered the shop for buying my Diablo III copy just before the official holiday on Wednesday: All shops were closing and there were only a few minutes before also this one would close. When I passed the register on my way to the games and DVD section, there was one guy waiting for the cashier. A Diablo III box was lying in front of him. Seeing this, I relaxed a bit. This shop had Diablo III, yay! The day tomorrow would be safe. :) The guy waiting for the cashier also saw my look and ...
[Read more]Posted on: May 10 2012
Comments: 8During the last weeks, quite a few people using CopperCube are reporting that they are discovering surprising performance testing results: It appears that for them, the WebGL renderer is faster than the one using Flash and Stage 3D.
Personally, I wasn't able to reproduce these results myself, although I must say that browser developers have improved the JavaScript performance very much recently, especially in Chrome and Firefox. Also, it sounds a bit strange, because Flash is statically compiled down to b...
[Read more]Posted on: May 08 2012
Comments: 2What? Diablo 3 will be out next week? Oh boy. There goes my free time....
Also, did you see my last blog entry? Not sure what happened there, but those 130 comments are real ones, not spam. Hm... :)
[Read more]Posted on: May 03 2012
Comments: 134Just read an article in a local Austrian newspaper, telling that local companies are unable to find good developers and programmers. There are currently 22% more open job positions in this area compared to last year, and even back then lots of positions were not be able to be filled. I'm not surprised at all.
The problem IMO is that companies are not willing to pay enough for developers and programmers. In Austria, an entry level programmer with high level university training will usually get offered 220...
[Read more]Posted on: April 26 2012
Comments: 7Just upgraded a 3rd party library I use in one of my projects. It's just a minor version update.
123 error(s), 319 warning(s)
Great. If that library wouldn't be that useful and fast, I would directly kick it out. Because replacing it with another one would probably be the same amount of work as fixing all those errors.
[Read more]Posted on: April 25 2012
Comments: 3As a lot of people, I'm quite excited about Planetary Resources, Inc, the just announced company backed by lots of rich
people like the Google Founders and that famous movie maker. They want to mine asteroids, which sounds great and is finally a reason to go deeper into space again. Finally, a bit of hope for humanity. :)
They say they need 2.6 billion dollars for this, which sounds like quite a lot. But if you remember: the purchase of Instagram, a tiny picture sharing app, recently cost one billion do...
[Read more]Posted on: April 14 2012
Comments: 0Apparently, I'm about half a year late, but I only now saw this video of an adventure game created with CopperCube:
That's quite impressive. Must have been a lot of work creating this. Also, I like how it uses the dynamic light feature extensively, most CopperCube projects I saw used static lighting.
[Read more]Posted on: April 12 2012
Comments: 11As you may know, I created and am selling an Actionscript Obfuscator named irrFuscator, which is useful for protecting your created Flash applications. For example if you created a game. And it seems to be quite useful to some people. It helps preventing people from copying and stealing your work.
What I find quite ironic is that there are actually people trying to get a pirated copy of irrFuscator. Really. Stealing some developers (=mine) work in order to prevent your own work to be stolen? Double-Sta...
[Read more]Posted on: April 11 2012
Comments: 8I hate those situations in which you sit down for a few weeks and implement a highly complex algorithm you made up yourself for solving a specific problem. Finally, happy that you finished it and it does what it is supposed to do, you notice that it doesn't work in all cases you have thought of, and that all your work was senseless. But instead of deleting all the code and starting from scratch, you try to fix those few edge cases with evil, evil hacks, but instead of getting better, the problem gets even m...
[Read more]Posted on: April 06 2012
Comments: 18As I blogged before, I programmed a little Android game and published it at Google Play, or the Android Market, which it was called still then. I wanted to see if and how you could make money of Android Game apps. Two months have been gone now since the game has been released, and I think it's time now to draw a conclusion:
I think the project can be classified as commercial failure. It has made a turnover of astonishing 16 euro so far. :)
As written previously in detail, the game has been rated very ...
[Read more]Posted on: April 05 2012
Comments: 5Sorry for the current lack of updates. Some bots are currently attacking this blog with lot of spam and other evil things. I hope it's now a bit hardened, but let's see.
[Read more]Posted on: April 04 2012
Comments: 2Usually, it's not a good idea to talk about political stuff with your customers, especially not during the process where they want to buy something from you. This dialog just happened:
Customer: [...] because the VAT is now 27% here in Hungary.
Me: Woha! 27%!? Has your government gone crazy?
Customer: Yes, indeed. It is indeed crazy. Fuck them. :-(
But looks like I was on the safe way here anyway. Nobody likes taxes. :)
[Read more]Posted on: March 30 2012
Comments: 0Apparently, this blog didn't work for the last 5 days or so. Commenting wasn't possible, and half of the blog entries linked into nirvana. Hope this is fixed now. Sorry. :)
[Read more]Posted on: March 28 2012
Comments: 1Even if I have a lazy day and cannot get much development work done, there is always one busy office member. See for yourself:
Just made this video using my Android test phone. The quality of the video is quite low, and it was a quite cheap phone, but I'm still quite impressed what you can do with that small mobile computer today everyone carries along. :)
[Read more]Posted on: March 18 2012
Comments: 3Leandro Serpa from Serpagames just let me know of their just finished indie game developed using Irrlicht: The game is named Morbid Land, and it is a single player hack and slash RPG. The game looks very extensive, although the graphics style needs a bit to getting used to, but feels very much 'indie' :) See for yourself:
It seems that a lot of work has been put into the game. The game is currently featured on Indievania, and you can get a copy of it for currently 4.50$ from there.
[Read more]Posted on: March 15 2012
Comments: 2I just released CopperCube in version 3.0.3, adding the features I blogged about before: Support for vertex colors (=nice 3d models without using textures) and correct import of huge 3d models, including the possibility of showing them in Flash and WebGL at decent speeds.
It's pretty cool that you can now basically download mostly any 3D model out there and use it in WebGL or Flash Stage3D using this. But maybe and idea would be to add a feature to quickly simplify such a big 3D mesh? I mean, really, 5 m...
[Read more]Posted on: March 14 2012
Comments: 5If you have an App on the Android market (like I do) and are a developer from Europe (like I am), you might have noticed that Google hasn't payed you this month. It appears that Google simply didn't send any money to all European developers selling their apps on Google's store. Which is - quite frankly - for lots of developers quite a disaster.
Ok, this can happen, and usually a company which makes a huge mistake like this instantly tries to resolve this huge problem as fast as possible. Not so google:
No...
[Read more]Posted on: March 09 2012
Comments: 2I am currently working on a new feature for CopperCube: Vertex colors. More and more people are using the editor, and although it was intended to be used for creating games and short game style demos, it is now also used by other people, with other demands. It seems to be a common way to do stuff is to download free 3d models from the internet, and place them into your 3D scene in order to create something. The problem: 3D Models used for other things than games usually are a bit different. They are huge an...
[Read more]Posted on: March 03 2012
Comments: 1Since lots of software and game developers are reading this blog, maybe this could be interesting for you: Cliffhanger Productions, Vienna based game developer (Jagged Alliance Online' and 'Shadowrun Online') is looking for programmers (C#, .NET, Unity). For details see the job description. Also, Vienna is a great place to live. Moved here 12 years ago, not intending to leave soon. :)
[Read more]Posted on: March 02 2012
Comments: 0I just watched a great video by Egoraptor, about game design and MegaMan. I'm not very much interested in game design and I never played any game of the Megaman series, but this video was both entertaining and interesting:
The video is a whole 19 minutes long, but it's really worth watching it. It also shows nicely what's wrong with todays games. Now I feel I know a bit better why games back then really simply were fun, compared to the scripted game movies we have to play through today.
[Read more]Posted on: February 29 2012
Comments: 1From time to time, people send me links to the work they did using software I wrote, and it is always very interesting. Sometimes I like the product very much personally, and even blog about it, just like today: Atanas Bakardjiev just sent me a demo of what he recently did with CopperCube:
It is a realtime 3D view of some appartments (I guess), and you can switch the camera into different modes in order to for example walk through that apartment yourself. All running inside a website, without plugin. Nic...
[Read more]Posted on: February 24 2012
Comments: 5Google just notified me that they re-rated my Android Game, K-Space Shooter from 'For Everyone' to 'Low maturity'. Not sure why. The game does not include Alcohol, Tobacco and Drugs, Gambling, Hate, has no access the the users Location, doesn't do Profanity or Crude Humor, Sexual or Suggestive Content, and doesn't include User Generated Content or User to User Communication. I don't think that what you can do in the game classifies as mild cartoon or fantasy violence either.
So not sure if Google's re-rat...
[Read more]Posted on: February 22 2012
Comments: 4I just wanted to take another shot to start implementing the sandboxing feature required for Mac OS X Apps on the Mac App Store starting with March 1. Sandboxing basically means that your application is prevented to access files on the hard disk, communicate with other apps, access the Internet and similar, if the user didn't grant the application access manually (by for example choosing the file the app wants to access using a file dialog). This sounds great at first, but unfortunately, the way Apple imple...
[Read more]Posted on: February 19 2012
Comments: 3I shot this picture yesterday in our driveway:
Those are the footsteps of an animal which ran in a straight line from the forest directly to the engine bonnet of our car. In doing so, it apparently even jumped over a fence (80 cm height) without problems. It looks like it slept in or below the car and then left in the morning. Its footsteps are frightingly big, like those of a dog. I wonder if there is a mutant sized Marder (=an animal like a weasel, but much bigger, common here in austria) living in our...
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