Posted on: December 19 2010
Comments: 4Dear Americans, you seem to have a serious problem growing in your country. I know, there are a lot of things going on, and here in Europe the same thing start to happen with a ~3 year delay. But when the pentagon defines demonstrations as 'Low-Level Terrorism', then you know that you are fucked. Do something now.
[Read more]Posted on: December 17 2010
Comments: 0As nearly every year, Ambiera offers an Xmas discount, this time for three of its products:
Pay 20% less for CopperCube, irrFuscator or WebsitePainter. Simply use the Coupon Code 'XMAS10' on the 'buy now' page.
Only valid until 25th of December.
[Read more]Posted on: December 15 2010
Comments: 8Germany had planned to introduce new rules for the Internet (named JMStV) with the beginning of the new year. Every website should have been labeled with an age limit. If you run a website where you think it's for 16 or 18 year olds, then even had to implement some costly age verification and even take the website offline during the day. (Yes, so that children won't see it when they are awake. Politicians at work).
This was the cause of a huge outcry, because physically, this would have destroyed the whol...
[Read more]Posted on: December 10 2010
Comments: 6Just read this article: How to fail building a Massively multiplayer online game. Probably I liked that article especially because back then when they hired people I also went there (their company was located in Vienna) for a hiring interview together with some friends. But we decided not to work for them because most of the problems discussed in that article seemed quite obvious to us even back then. :)
[Read more]Posted on: December 08 2010
Comments: 9I do consulting work from time to time, in most cases this involves helping companies creating computer games, but it's also about Website development quite often. This discussion came up yesterday:
Client: We think about using Amazon AWS for hosting, what do you think?
Me: I wouldn't do it. Amazon recently showed that they'll shut down your whole site from one minute to the next, without any warning, if they don't like you.
Client: Really?
Me: Yes, they did this with Wikileaks, just last week.
Clien...
[Read more]Posted on: December 04 2010
Comments: 14Great, PayPal just banned the Wikileaks donation account. This means my donation never reached Wikileaks, and Paypal keeps holding my money. Isn't that fraud? Deception? I tried getting my donation refunded, but it doesn't work. So I sent PayPal this mail:
S.g. Damen und Herren,
vorgestern, am 2. Dezember habe ich über ihren Service Geld der Wau-Holland-Stiftung (WikiLeaks) gespendet, deren Konto sie laut zahlreicher Nachrichten heute gesperrt und eingefroren haben. Demzufolge ist mein Geld dort niema...
[Read more]Posted on: December 03 2010
Comments: 0I released a new version of the WebGL 3D engine CopperLicht, version 1.3.2. It's adding new materials (reflections), performance optimizations, better font rendering, and several bug fixes.
[Read more]Posted on: December 02 2010
Comments: 17I can't stand this WikiLeaks bashing by those stupid politicians anymore. I just donated money to Wikileaks. There are a lot of ways you can do this too.
[Read more]Posted on: December 01 2010
Comments: 0I released a new version of my website editor, WebsitePainter today. It includes a bunch of nice new features, including some HTML code syntax highlighting. The reason that something like that hasn't been in before is that you usually don't edit HTML code in the editor, but simply drag and drop elements around. But of course, it is possible also to add some stuff in the HTML code, like attributes and CSS styles, so a syntax highlighting was nice to have.
Interestingly, the feature becomes quite slow on t...
[Read more]Posted on: November 29 2010
Comments: 5Just read that a Congressman wants WikiLeaks to be declared a terrorist organization. Right. Dear politicians: Terror isn't the problem. It's you.
Mahatma Gandhi was a terrorist. Melson Mandela was a terrorist. George Washington as well as Thomas Jefferson (in fact, all the participants of the Boston Tea Party) were terrorists. Terrorists in fact are men labeled by politicians doing things the politicians fear. And not primary men doing things bad for the people.
Just a thought.
[Read more]Posted on: November 26 2010
Comments: 2Tim12345 created a small game using CopperCube, a kind of Super Mario Bros as Ego-Shooter in 3D:
He didn't use any programming for this, only clicking stuff together in the editor, I guess this has been a lot of work. I like it. :)
[Read more]Posted on: November 25 2010
Comments: 2There is currently an Irrlicht Book in the making, it will be named "Irrlicht Realtime 3D engine Beginner's Guide", written by Johannes Stein. I am currently reviewing it, and if you are interested, you can already preorder that book.
[Read more]Posted on: November 24 2010
Comments: 4In a surprising move, Irrlicht 1.7.2 is available since last week. It is mainly a bug fix release. Totally slipped under the radar of this blog. Sorry.
[Read more]Posted on: November 23 2010
Comments: 2I saw the film Pandorum yesterday, and I wonder why it received bad reviews. It's a very nice science fiction horror movie with a very thrilling and interesting story, and unlike most other films in this category, most of the plot makes sense. Also, it has a great ending, IMO. Definitely worth buying on DVD, if you like science fiction.
[Read more]Posted on: November 19 2010
Comments: 0If you are interested in getting Website Painter, a software product created by me at a much lower price, try this: The web editor currently is included in the software bundle by TheMacBundles.com. You can get 12 mac apps all together in one bundle for $49,95 there. Only available for 9 days still.
[Read more]Posted on: November 18 2010
Comments: 3I just uploaded the latest release of CopperCube, version 2.2. If you don't know what it is [then you've probably never read this blog :)], it is a 3D editor for creating interactive 3D scenes as Windows .exe or Mac .app applications, or even Flash .swf or WebGL applications for your website. All without programming. One of the new features is a fake reflection material:
Controls: cursor keys to move, mouse to Look.
What you see there is still the old Flash 10 software renderer, once Adobe makes their...
[Read more]Posted on: November 15 2010
Comments: 5This is so cool: Oliver Kreylos created a realtime 3D video capturing program based on the new Kinect hardware of the XBox. Pretty neat hack:
More info on his website.
My thought: Shouldn't it be 'easily' possible to use the input of a few of these to create a full 3D scanner, for example to quickly generate animated 3D models for games?
[Read more]Posted on: November 12 2010
Comments: 1This week, I started working on implementing a new material into CopperCube. The editor currently only supports three very basic materials (with variations), which seems to be enough for most people, but of course, more specialized materials would be nice. So the first new material I added was this one (warning: ugly, self-composed background music ;-) ):
[Read more]Posted on: November 09 2010
Comments: 6 I recently downloaded OpenTTD, an open source re-implementation of the classic Transport Tycoon from 1994 and tried playing it. And I must say: Wow! I'm absolutely impressed.
OpenTTD previously was just a reimplementation of the game which needed the orignal game graphics and sound files. This has changed now, it now comes with it's own independent art set, which looks and sounds great. The game still is the same simulation game as known from 1994, every detail is there and you can start creating your o...
[Read more]Posted on: November 08 2010
Comments: 6Interesting commercial on YouTube.
I think the fact that the american TV channels refused to show it says more about the situation than the commercial itself.
[Read more]Posted on: November 05 2010
Comments: 0I'm not entirely sure how this software made it nearly two years now without that feature, but today I implemented it. A wireframe mode for CopperCube:
Probably because users are supposed to create 3d models in another editor and import them into CopperCube, I've never received many requests for this feature. But with the next release, it will be in, finally. Yay. :)
[Read more]Posted on: November 02 2010
Comments: 1I always wondered how DNA worked exactly, because I am a programmer and I always thought that DNA is nothing else but code. So it shouldn't be too difficult to understand it, right? This article explains DNA for C programmers, it's a great read and very interesting.
[Read more]Posted on: October 29 2010
Comments: 5 I just released the JavaScript WebGL Library CopperLicht in version 1.3.0. It includes several new features and major changes, for example enhanced shader support (callbacks for shader variables), better debugging support, possibility to clone 3D meshes. But the major change is that the whole library is now included in it's own namespace, CL3D, which makes it easier to use it together with other libraries, for example jQuery.
In previous versions, CopperLicht was optimized and minificated using the Goo...
[Read more]Posted on: October 26 2010
Comments: 8Adobe just announced that their next official Flash Player will support real, hardware accelerated 3D graphics. Basically, you will have access to 3D drawing functions with the ActionScript API, which is a great step forward: You will be able to create real 3D games with Flash then as well. Current 3D engines for Flash, like PaperVision, or the Flash 3D renderer included in CopperCube were basically only using the 2D drawing features of Flash and transforming all polygons from 3D into 2D manually. Altough w...
[Read more]Posted on: October 25 2010
Comments: 9 Apple recently announced their Mac App Store which is basically their App store already known from the iPhone, but for the Mac Computers. Developers will be able to upload applications starting with November, and it's expected to go live for end users in January.
If you are a developer, the App Store initially sounds like a good idea. But Apple is Apple, and the details don't sound that nice: Apple wants 30% of the revenue if you publish your program on the Mac App Store. And additionally, you need to p...
[Read more]Posted on: October 21 2010
Comments: 1Most people don't know that there is an easy way to create an .exe from your flash .swf files, especially if you are not using the Flash IDE but the flex compiler instead: Simply go to the directory runtimes\player\10\win, start FlashPlayer.exe, open your .swf with it and choose 'File -> Create Projector'. That's it.
Unfortunately, this lacks certain options. Your .exe still will look like the flash projector, with the menu bar and doesn't have the possibility to start in fullscreen and similar. There are ...
[Read more]Posted on: October 20 2010
Comments: 3Google just released Chrome 7.
I'm not a Chrome user myself (I prefer Opera), but this still is great news: Version 7 includes WebGL, although you still need to manually enable it. But the best part: The next version, Chrome 8 is already available in the developer channel, and WebGL is enabled in there by default. This release of version 7 now means that version 8 is very close and that it should not be much longer until WebGL is enabled by default in one of the major browsers. Probably in December already...
[Read more]Posted on: October 11 2010
Comments: 5Two months ago, there were rumors that Starcraft 2 was causing graphics cards to overheat. Although I read that Blizzard fixed the problem in the meantime, apparently Starcraft 2 killed my geForce yesterday. It was a spectacular disaster, with lots of blinking pixels and a flashing monitor, but in the end, it gave up and died.
Farewell my friend. I slayed countless virtual enemies with your help. Time to replace your dead remains with a new Radeon.
[Read more]Posted on: October 07 2010
Comments: 2If you are working with Linux and looking for a easy WYSIWYG web editor for creating HTML, PHP, ASP and whatever pages, you might want to try Website Painter. Simply download the windows version and run it using Wine, it seems to run perfectly:
Also featured on the official wine page for websitepainter. Quite impressive what those Wine developers did, the editor is using quite a lot of Windows functions.
Thanks to Nick Law for pointing this out (I didn't know it would run using wine) and creating the Wi...
[Read more]Posted on: October 06 2010
Comments: 1Thanks for all the feedback, I've now embedded my twitter feed directly on the front page of this blog. Since I'm using a very old, manually enhanced version of Pivot, I've also embedded it manually using TwitterJs, a pretty nice piece of software. Simply download the .js (or even hotlink it from googlecode), and add code like this to your website:
<div id="tweetcontainer"><p>Loading tweets...</p></div>
<script> getTwitters('tweetcontainer', { ...
[Read more]