Posted on: November 23 2011
Comments: 6I wrote a book, but it is in german. So the following post is in german. English Google translation.
Seitdem mein Büro nun ausserhalb von Wien ist verbringe ich ein wenig mehr Zeit im Zug als zuvor. Und weil mir es sehr schwer fällt während der Fahrt nichts zu tun, habe ich dabei ein Buch geschrieben. Mittlerweile ist es fertig, und kann schon überall im Internetz bestellt werden. Es hat den Titel "Die Wiederentdeckung der Erde" und sieht so aus wie auf dem Bild rechts.
Falls ihr Interesse habt ...
[Read more]Posted on: November 19 2011
Comments: 6Should I try google plus? Right now, I don't feel like I want to. I already use Facebook, Twitter and this Blog to communicate, adding another channel feels too much. Although I like the design and slightly different concept behind google plus. Let's see, later maybe?
[Read more]Posted on: November 17 2011
Comments: 5Currently, I don't have that much free time, because I'm pretty stuck here:
Yes, it's Skyrim, and I like it. I previously announced that I won't buy that game, but since Bethesda now lost the law suit, it's probably ok. ;)
The game is great, it's basically Oblivion with updated graphics and some code mixed in from Fallout 3 (finishing moves, for example, nice touch), and set in a bit colder environment, a bit to the north. Unfortunately, I'm playing the german version, and they even translated the names...
[Read more]Posted on: November 16 2011
Comments: 1Once already mentioned on this blog, but now it is finally available: The Irrlicht book by Johannes Stein and Aung Sithu Kyaw, named "Irrlicht 1.7 Realtime 3D Engine Beginner's Guide" is now available. It is a step-by-step guide to Irrlicht that starts at an easy level for beginners and then gradually works to more advanced topics.
When the book was 'in development' a year ago, I was doing the technical review for this, but after a few chapters, somehow they slowed down the work on the book, and my revie...
[Read more]Posted on: November 11 2011
Comments: 4I just implemented a small new feature for my tiny WYSIWYG website editor WebsitePainter: The possibility to justify align text in the editor:
This is one of the sitations where it pays back that I wrote the whole text editor myself, instead of relying on some existing control, or maybe even the operating system provided text editor. The original decision for writing my own editor control from scratch was because usually, any generic text editor control never would format text exactly like HTML would do ...
[Read more]Posted on: November 03 2011
Comments: 2Apple just announced that starting with March 1st, all apps submitted to the Mac App Store must implement sandboxing. Previously rumors told that the date for this would be November 1st, a few days ago. So this gives developers a bit of time, and maybe also Apple the possibility to refine their broken sandboxing a bit until then. Sandboxing is intended to be Apple's way to protect users from evil applications, limiting them to write and read random files from and to the disk, and to do other potential harmf...
[Read more]Posted on: October 22 2011
Comments: 2So great, I'm really looking forward to Opera 12: It looks like that version will have WebGL support. Meaning I can develop this stuff finally also with my favorite browser. Also, this means there is only one major browser remaining without WebGL support: Internet Explorer. But also this is no problem anymore. You can make WebGL content run inside IE as well.
[Read more]Posted on: October 19 2011
Comments: 2I just came across eigen, a C++ library for Matrices, Vectors and similar. It supports SSE (and others for other platforms) and does this on the fly, with lots of template magic. I currently don't need anything like this, but it's quite interesting reading its documentation: Quite amazing what's going on beneath. It has the same problem as all heavily template based libraries, it's source is incredible complicated and difficult to comprehend if you are not willing to sacrifice a lot of time for this, but st...
[Read more]Posted on: October 16 2011
Comments: 2I present you the Ambiera employee of the Month:
He isn't very productive, but definitely boosts the morale in the office. :)
[Read more]Posted on: October 12 2011
Comments: 10Maybe you've heard about Google Dart, a programming language which Google would like to replace JavaScript with. It has been taken a bit under fire, since a user posted what a simple "hello world" program in Dart looks like when compiled down to JavaScript. It results in a horrible, incredible long piece of code, choked out by the Dart compiler.
So Dart appears not to be a nice replacement for JavaScript, but honestly: why a new programming language at all? This has been tried numerous times before. We al...
[Read more]Posted on: October 06 2011
Comments: 10 If you have missed it, Epic and Adobe announced this week that the Unreal Engine is coming to the Flash Player. On the Adobe MAX conference, they showed that their engine is already running in the just released Flash Player 11, and that you can even play a full game with it. This video shows a flight through an Unreal Tournament 3 level, running inside a browser.
The demo was quite impressive, but I was a bit disappointed when I found out how they did it: Apparently, they simply (where 'simply' isn't the ...
[Read more]Posted on: October 01 2011
Comments: 4I just released Coppercube 3. This is a major update, with tons of new features. For example, this release adds dynamic lights for all targets, plugins for the editor, JavaScript as language for Mac .app and Windows .exe, polygon editing tools in the editor, audio for the WebGL target, double sided materials, new actions, improved model viewer camera, better 3rd person camera for indoor scenes, improved file importers, better WebGL performance, and much, much more. I've posted a detailed list of all changes...
[Read more]Posted on: September 28 2011
Comments: 10Apparently, Bethesda is seriously suing the company of Notch, creator of Minecraft for naming his next game 'Scrolls'. Because they think people will confuse this with their 'The Elder Scrolls' games. Hm, I was looking forward to their next game, Skyrim, to be released in November. But apparently this would support this idiotic behavior, I prefer buying another game instead. Maybe Rage, BF3, maybe Torchlight 2. I have limited time to play games anyway, so why should I play a game of a company which appears...
[Read more]Posted on: September 28 2011
Comments: 6Yay, so apparently, we will soon have Mouse locking in HTML. This means First person shooter control will probably be possible soon in browsers.
[Read more]Posted on: September 22 2011
Comments: 0Adobe just announced the upcoming release of Flash Player 11, which is the one with real, hardware accelerated 3D, code name 'Molehill', now named 'Stage3D'. The demos on the CopperCube website will also soon be replaced with newer, nicer ones, using Stage 3D, and thus, will no longer run on old Flash Players. So it is necessary to add some flash player version detection. I'm not a fan of this, because in a lot of cases, something goes wrong with this detection and although your user would be able to view y...
[Read more]Posted on: September 14 2011
Comments: 1UT3 combined with the Nyan Cat. Of course as Redeemer weapon. Pure genius:
BTW: Why isn't there a good up-to-date unreal tournament? Like in the good old 2004 times?
[Read more]Posted on: September 08 2011
Comments: 0With the new 3D demos I'm creating, the amount and types of demos are becoming a bit confusing, especially for me personally and for the website where I need to link them from: There are huge demos, served from external webservers, demos on the normal server, regular WebGL demos with multiple files, flash demos for flash player 9, newer demos for flash player 10, and some which require the not yet released flash player 11. All this now creates a big mess, and it has become a bit of a pain in the *** to main...
[Read more]Posted on: September 01 2011
Comments: 5One PC game I've been playing from time to time since about one year is Starcraft 2. There are many quite fascinating aspects of this game which I like: For example the now huge international Starcraft 2 scene with all the tournaments and pro gamers. Every day it's possible to watch new, interesting commentated games between professional gamers, and interestingly, that's much more entertaining than watching for example a plain old sports event like football.
From a programmers view, SC2 also has some ...
[Read more]Posted on: August 26 2011
Comments: 7Because I now implemented so many new features for the upcoming update of CopperCube, I've noticed that most demos on the website are quite old already, some of them even two years now. So I decided it might be a good idea to produce at least a few new ones, and I started with this one here:
Trying to show some character animation, actions and behaviors, the usage of paths and billboards, and also some dynamic light. I'm not sure if I like the demo yet, but it is small and simple, shows everything I want...
[Read more]Posted on: August 24 2011
Comments: 7It's summer, and - you know - real news are rare during these weeks. Ok, maybe apart from the fact that our financial system now appears to start breaking down, but that's a completly different story.
Time for some cat content! Well, ok, it's not a cat, but see for yourself:
This little guy now is living - or better: sleeping - in my office. He was found as baby in Vienna in a dumpster. Apparently, someone didn't want him and decided to put him into the trash. He appears to like it better in my office.
[Read more]Posted on: August 19 2011
Comments: 4The Iplugin for making WebGL work also in Microsofts browser 'Internet Explorer', IEWebGL, has been just released in version 1.0. It works in IE8, IE9 and the IE10 previews. This is a great step for WebGL, meaning apps using pure Javascript based 3D graphics will now run on all major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, InternetExplorer, and soon also Opera.
I will start using this plugin on ambiera.com for the WebGL demos soon. I also like the business model of IEWebGL: basically it's freeware, but for s...
[Read more]Posted on: August 17 2011
Comments: 1Most of the WebGL demos posted on the web, trying to showing off some of the great effects people can do with their mad programming skillz feel like the NVidia or DirectX SDK demos years ago: Half of them simply won't work on my system because they are using some extension my 3D hardware doesn't support. Not sure why people always need to use the latest and most obscure features of 3d drivers and cards. With a little bit tweaking, you can also do great stuff on the hardware everyone has.
[Read more]Posted on: August 12 2011
Comments: 8I'm currently working on a new feature in CopperCube, which requires some similar icons to the ones already used in the editor. So I have to diversify both a bit, resulting in new icons also for the existing features. Having repainted them about 3 times now, and having looked at them now at least 500 times, I'm not sure anymore if they are brilliant or absolutely crap:
What do you think? Are the icons ok?
I generally have the problem that looking at art repeatedly, I'm not able to tell anymore if the ar...
[Read more]Posted on: August 10 2011
Comments: 36 I have a probably unusual habit: I'm applying for jobs as programmer at least once a year. It 's not that I don't have a job, or that I don't like what I do, but since I am self employed and running my own company I have the feeling that I am coming out of touch of what the current job market is like, and so I started to apply for jobs at different companies once in a while. Just to keep in mind how this is like and for the fun of it.
I think this is also a good training should I need to be employed again...
[Read more]Posted on: August 10 2011
Comments: 2Are all people getting more stupid during the summer months? Or is it just me? Fortunately, also the scammers seem to become more stupid...
[Read more]Posted on: August 05 2011
Comments: 5I'm currently working on unifying the lighting system in CopperCube. Basically, there is a lot of code in it to create lighting in that editor: Static lighting from the lightmap generator and lots of different dynamic lighting implementations for D3D8, D3D9, OpenGL, WebGL and Flash Molehill/Stage3D. While I was ensuring that all of them work and look exactly the same, I also adjusted the lighting method a bit, resulting in the ability to fine tune the lighting quite a bit.
After that, I tweaked the backy...
[Read more]Posted on: August 03 2011
Comments: 4Now that a few negative articles about the Amazon App store are popping up up all over the web (Amazon App Store: Rotten To The Core, Game Developers Warned Away From Amazon Appstore), I thought it might be interesting to tell you my short story related to this:
I run a small company which creates a few small, but useful pieces of software, like irrFuscator, an Actionscript 3 obfuscator used also by some quite known developers. A few months ago, Amazon contacted me via email, asking me if I would be in...
[Read more]Posted on: July 29 2011
Comments: 6Tim Preuß from Appcellent just mailed me a photo he took from the developer conference 'mobile Dev Con'. The image shows a slide with the title 'Choosing the right Cross Platform Strategy'. It shows various products supporting cross-platform development, like the widget library QT, the mobile C++ lib moSync, and other stuff I don't recognize. But included in that list are also four 3D game engines (or logos of their developers):
I like that selection ;)
[Read more]Posted on: July 27 2011
Comments: 8I added a new feature to the 3D editor CopperCube and its free JavaScript 3D engine CopperLicht which should be included in the next update: Dynamic light when publishing as WebGL or Flash application. I expected it to be slow and complicated to implement, but fortunately, everything went fine, see this WebGL demo for yourself:
The renderer now supports 4 dynamic lights at the same time per mesh, which should be enough for most 3D scenes. You will be able to place many more dynamic lights in the editor...
[Read more]Posted on: July 25 2011
Comments: 7I just found out how my girlfriend uses her smartphone (it's an Android, btw) to store new phone numbers, and TODO list items: She takes Post-it's, writes the numbers onto them and sticks them onto the back of the smartphone. I was speechless for a few seconds when I noticed this. :)
[Read more]