Posted on: July 15 2011
Comments: 7 About two months ago, the office of my company moved a few kilometers to the west, from the center of Vienna to the more rural area. Basically only the address of my company has changed, but technically, it also relocated from one federal state of Austria to another one. This wasn't a problem at all, and a short email to all official institutions let them know about this change, and everything was fine. Well, except for one institution: The commercial court of Vienna.
I've now written a total of 4 lette...
[Read more]Posted on: July 09 2011
Comments: 3Well, at least a try :)
There exists already a quite big German Irrlicht Engine community, but apparently some people feel the spam bots are winning in there. So a small group of people created this alternative german irrlicht forum: www.irrlicht-engine.co.de.
In other news, the official Irrlicht Forum has also been upgraded recently to a newer version (thanks to the new team member Yoran!). Nice :)
[Read more]Posted on: July 06 2011
Comments: 6Dear U.S.A, are you now completely nuts? The US now claims that all .com and .net websites are in its jurisdiction. If you own a .com URL, then you have to follow US law? Seriously? They appear to now go after all so called copyright infringement and trademark violations on .com and .net domains, even if they are on your own servers, in non-US countries. They already want a british student to be handed over from Britain to the US for this, to face jail time there. For creating a link list on his own Webserv...
[Read more]Posted on: June 29 2011
Comments: 9When looking at the following image, do you spot something unusual in there?
Correct: It's the Internet Explorer. And it is running a WebGL application, specifically one of the WebGL demos from the CopperLicht WebGL library. How is this possible? Didn't Microsoft recently tell us that they won't support WebGL and go with their own developed Silverlight instead?
Yes, they did. But now, there is IEWebGL. A plugin for Internet Explorer, which makes WebGL available also in that browser. For you as develop...
[Read more]Posted on: June 26 2011
Comments: 4Dear developers, if you are creating a software library to be used by other programmers, then you need documentation. Without that, nobody will use your library. Simply because nobody will know how. And if you provide some documentation, putting it on your website won't be enough. It must be possible to download it somewhere.
I am currently integrating a C library into a project I am working on, and there is only the documentation available on the website. Contacting the developers, asking them to provid...
[Read more]Posted on: June 23 2011
Comments: 4 Mozilla just released a new version of their browser - Firefox 5. Just three months after they released the latest major version, because they think it is a good idea to do the same brainless version number increments as Google Chrome does. Maybe they start using build numers as their marketing version numbers soon.
Anyway, Mozilla also included a major change to their WebGL implementation: Firefox no longer loads textures from other domains. Also, it refuses to load textures from the local disk which is...
[Read more]Posted on: June 17 2011
Comments: 10I'm running a custom developed forum over at my companies website. The software only gets used there, which has the nice side effect that most spam bots usually ignored the forum. Well, here and there, some bots, which apparently randomly posted stuff in all forms they found on the web got through. But this was removed pretty quickly by adding an own developed CAPTCHA. I don't like these image based CAPTCHAs, where you need to type barely readable letters, so I came up with an own, simple math based CAPTACH...
[Read more]Posted on: June 16 2011
Comments: 5I just went to a game magazine website and was forced to watch a video ad, overlaying the whole website for 20 seconds. There was no close button, intentionally. Then, after about 18 seconds, a button like a close button appeared, but behold, it didn't have an 'x' on it but a half-circle, it was a 're-watch' button. Clicking on it caused me to be forced to watch that thing again. Great. Dear magazine, you've finally lost another reader. And no, I'm not going to install ad block software. Most websites work ...
[Read more]Posted on: June 14 2011
Comments: 2Camy Adventures is a nice Jump'n'Run game and has been released today for free. Looks funny (couldn't stop watching the video) and uses irrKlang as audio library. Worth a look!
[Read more]Posted on: June 11 2011
Comments: 3 Hell just froze over and Duke Nukem Forever has been released. And of course, I bought my copy and tried it out already. In the german version, Duke talks with the voice of Bruce Willis, which is funny, but completely destroys the atmosphere. Luckily, you can change the game back to English in the settings menu in steam. It would be so great if all games would support this. German translations are in many cases really bad and annoying.
Anyway, I played a few minutes through DNF already, and yay: It's the ...
[Read more]Posted on: June 03 2011
Comments: 4I always find it funny when I contact a company and tell them that I want to give them my money, and I get no response at all. It doesn't happen often, but it happens. I wonder how these companies are still in business? With such a way to handle your customers or potential business partners, it's difficult to keep up the desire to still actually want their product...
[Read more]Posted on: June 01 2011
Comments: 6I sent a notarially certified letter to the commercial court telling them that my company moved to lower austria now. Today, three weeks later, I get a letter from them, telling me that they would need a notarially certified letter about this from me. I call them, asking them if they are serious, if I should send them the exact letter again. After about 30 minutes in their phone line, having talked to about 6 or 7 people there, they tell me they have no idea. I should ignore their letter and sit and wait in...
[Read more]Posted on: May 25 2011
Comments: 0 Opera just released their Mobile Emulator for free. It emulates their mobile Opera browser on a Windows, Linux or Mac OS X PC, for multiple devices, like the Samsung Galaxy, HTC Wildfire / Desire / Hero / etc, LG Optimus One, Motorola Xoom and numerous others. I just tried it out, and it works great. Quite a simple way to test how your websites will look like on those devices. I think it is a must-have for web developers.
Apparently, there is also a way to make it run with Opera Dragonfly, their web deb...
[Read more]Posted on: May 16 2011
Comments: 1Puzzle Moppet is a 3D puzzle game made with Irrlicht. There is a demo available for Windows and Linux, and it has nice graphics.
I haven't had time to try it out myself unfortunately, but it looks like fun.
[Read more]Posted on: May 13 2011
Comments: 2Designing interfaces for software is hard, especially if your software again is for designing interfaces. :) I'm not a fan of modal dialogs and message boxes, so a lot of stuff in my products CopperCube and WebsitePainter tries to avoid these, in the hope of making the product simpler to use. Recently, I wanted to add a 'Navigation Menu' element to WebsitePainter, and thought about an interface to edit it. Navigation menus are complicated beasts, and it's difficult to provide an easy way to change them. The...
[Read more]Posted on: May 09 2011
Comments: 3My new internet connection is a bit slow. Not unusable, but definitely not that blazing fast as I was used to from my previous one. The new one was planned to be temporarily only, but I noticed that with a slightly slower internet connection, my productivity has risen quite a bit. Let's see, maybe I'll continue to use the slower one for now. :)
[Read more]Posted on: May 05 2011
Comments: 6Somehow everything takes longer than expected. But basically, my company's office has moved now. The bureaucratic part hasn't been finished yet unfortunately. You wont believe what you have to do in Austria in order to move your office from one federal state to another one, although you simply relocated a few kilometers to the west. At least the new, nice view from my office compensates this:
No longer a view plastered with concrete walls as in the city of Vienna, but trees, green and even a small hill....
[Read more]Posted on: April 26 2011
Comments: 2We are currently moving the Ambiera office to a new location, a bit outside of Vienna. Blog posts, Answers to forum questions and support requests will be a bit slower than usual, sorry for the inconvenience.
[Read more]Posted on: April 21 2011
Comments: 8Today, I bought a small box of plastic, and plugged it into the electric socket in the wall. And without connecting any cable or configuring anything anywhere, all my computers instantly had fast Internet access. I realized that today we live in the future. Technology is great.
[Read more]Posted on: April 19 2011
Comments: 9 Disclaimer: I'm not a financial expert, I'm a software developer. But in this role, I've worked and developed software for the military, for intelligence services, online game studios (seriously, see below why) and banks, and have a bit of an insight about what is going on and what will happen in the near future.
If you watched the news recently, you might be a bit amazed about the strange contradicting headlines. On the one side, we appear to be in a economic recovery phase (or even boom) but are surro...
[Read more]Posted on: April 18 2011
Comments: 6Since most people now heard of Minecraft and its unbeliveable commercial success, Minecraft clones are popping out everywhere on the web, implemented in various languages and using lots of different technologies.
For example celeron55 created Minetest c55 using the Irrlicht 3D engine, and it looks like this:
Runs on Linux and Windows, features multiplayer support and is very fast. Nice project :)
I think the reason for all those Minecraft clones is not that people think they can also get a lot of mon...
[Read more]Posted on: April 15 2011
Comments: 7Because I just released a new version of CopperCube and CopperLicht, I also updated the WebGL demos a bit. There is also a new demo, the 'Third Person Camera Demo', as already blogged before. Looks like I created quite a few demos already, here is the current list:
Quake 3 Map Demo This demo loads and displays a full Quake 3 level. Warning: Needs a fast PC. Start Character Animation Demo CopperCube supports realtime 3D character animation, also known as skeletal animation. This Demo show...
[Read more]Posted on: April 14 2011
Comments: 3Thanks to the readers of this blog, there is now a new version of the web editor WebsitePainter released which supports 11 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Slovensky, Spanish, and Swedish. Thanks everybody for sending in the translations! I especially like the languages which I'm completely incapable of even reading, like Chinese:
Looks awesome to me :)
[Read more]Posted on: April 13 2011
Comments: 5There is a new game using irrKlang, it's named Family Farm. If I remember correctly, the last game I mentioned on this blog also was a farming game, so apparently, this is now a new popular genre.. Interesting. :)
Family Farm will be released on 15th of April and can currently be pre ordered for a reduced price.
[Read more]Posted on: April 08 2011
Comments: 5I just created a small demo for a new feature in CopperCube, a third person camera. If you are using the latest Firefox, Chrome or Safari, you should be able to try this WebGL demo:
Because of this blog software creating <br/>'s for line breaks, I had to embedd this using the iframe tag. You can also see the demo here without the iframe.
No programming was invovled creating this scene, you only need to select the new behaviors in the editor to create a scene like this. This is not yet finalized ...
[Read more]Posted on: April 06 2011
Comments: 7Do you want to get a free copy of CopperCube or Websitepainter? Do you speak French, Spanish, or Italian? Or another popular language? If you provide me with a translated language file of WebsitePainter, I give you a license as thank-you. Here is what you need to do for this:
Download WebsitePainter and locate the language file named 'websitepainter_language_en.xml' in the sub directory 'language' of WebsitePainter (or inside the .app bundle on Mac OS X). Create a copy of that one, and instead of _en, re...
[Read more]Posted on: March 30 2011
Comments: 2Google just sent me a mail with a poll, asking me why I visited their help pages two hours ago. They want to know if I found what I was looking for. Besides the fact that this is already quite unbelievable, the poll in the mail didn't have an option like "Because last time, your CENSORED human support guy told me that I was making up the bug and that I must be wrong". Argl.
[Read more]Posted on: March 30 2011
Comments: 5If you are planning to publish a game on the Mac App Store, you obviously need some code to play sounds and music. I have some software on there as well, and I know that the Apple review team can get a bit picky and might decide to reject your app if something isn't as they want it to be. So if you are looking for a software library to play sound and music, irrKlang also might be an option for you. There are now three games using that library on the App Store, so it looks like it works. Nice. :)
[Read more]Posted on: March 27 2011
Comments: 6Beautiful:
..and somehow depressing.
[Read more]Posted on: March 23 2011
Comments: 1I just released an update for my web editor 'WebsitePainter'. New features are for example a german language translation (wasn't too difficult since it is my native language), support for Quicktime videos, Youtube videos, HTML 5 audio, support for creating external CSS files, improved FTP upload, and new templates. One of the templates looks like this:
I like this one especially because I took the picture of the rocks myself. They look quite unreal, but yes, they really exist. :)
[Read more]