Posted on: October 04 2010
Comments: 8Since I'm using Twitter now, I'm not always entirely sure what to blog and what to tweet. I don't want to write everything twice, so usually very short things which are just a few sentences now usually are tweeted, and the blog gets less postings, too bad. An option would be to embed the last few tweets into the side of this blog, but I'm not sure about this. But maybe it's better now anyway: The blog will only contain high quality articles from now on ;)
Any opinions about this?
[Read more]Posted on: October 01 2010
Comments: 3 Trying to sell my german dating website here, so this in in german, sorry. google translated version if you are curious.
Seit in etwa 2 Jahren betreiben wir hobbymäßig eine kleine aber erfolgreiche Singlebörse, die wir 'Bienen und Blumen' genannt haben. Leider fehlt uns aus diversen Gründen die Zeit, diese wesentlich länger weiter zu betreuen und auszubauen, darum haben wir uns überlegt diese nun abzugeben.
Die Börse ist im deutschsprachigen Raum (D,Ö,CH) als seriöser Gratis-Anbieter etablier...
[Read more]Posted on: September 30 2010
Comments: 0A new version of my small website editor is now available. This update is free for existing users, of course.
[Read more]Posted on: September 29 2010
Comments: 12Did you ever play Minecraft? I did, and I like it, but not as much as the fact that it was created by one single programmer which by now made an incredible amount of money with it. On monday last week for example, the day after the servers went offline, he made $350000. In one single day!
By taking a look at the stats page, you can even see how much he earned until today. At the time of this writing, it were 266383 people who bought the game, this is about 2.5 million euro gross.
Incredible. This guy ha...
[Read more]Posted on: September 24 2010
Comments: 1Interesting digital fiction project: Nightingale's Playground, by Andy Campbell and Judi Alston. The second chapter has been created using CopperCube and looks like this:
Quite scary. But exactly what I intended CopperCube to be used for. It's 40 MB to download, either as Windows .exe or Mac .app, but worth it, IMO.
[Read more]Posted on: September 22 2010
Comments: 3Open Trial is a 2D trial bike simulation game with vintage and modern trial bikes, with black and white display.
This game tries to be a most realistic as possible, and playful the same time. Open trial uses realistic trial bikes, riders and ground mechanic measurements. Looks quite interesting IMO. The game uses irrKlang as audio library, by the way :)
The demo version is free and without time limitation.
[Read more]Posted on: September 20 2010
Comments: 1If you tried out WebGL and never programmed realtime 3D graphics before, you might have stumbled over a small problem: Most of your textures are never shown, they all appear black. Some few users of CopperCube and CopperLicht reported this for example. Because these were only some very few people and I never received any example to reproduce this, I decided this must be a driver bug, something which still happens today [, shame on the 3d hardware industry :)].
Being an a bit experienced 3D programmer, it...
[Read more]Posted on: September 17 2010
Comments: 24Four years ago I started my own software company and named it Ambiera. I had no experience on how to run a business before this but quite a lot of programming experience, so I thought "what could go wrong?". Fortunately, most worked out nicely since then, and I've learned quite a lot stuff. So if you are thinking about starting your own software company, here are a few advises for you:
People lie
People will try to rip you off wherever they can. Especially when it comes to money. They will pay you late...
[Read more]Posted on: September 15 2010
Comments: 0I just uploaded a small update for CopperLicht, the WebGL 3D engine, version 1.2.1. It includes many minor bugfixes and improvements. Examples:
2D Text drawing via Overlay2DSceneNode Improvements for the Quaternion class (new methods)Added support for some new features introduced in CopperCube 2A new Line3D class
Lots of small bug fixes
Happy programming.
[Read more]Posted on: September 13 2010
Comments: 1Tim12345 just posted a game he made using CopperCube 2 into the forum. This one is a demo which kept me staring in surprise for about 2 minutes at the screen, because I could initially figure out how he did this. :) He claims he just clicked it together in the editor and didn't use any scripting, only the behaviors CopperCube provides. But try it for yourself:
function addSWFFile(swfpath, width, height) { var thecontainer = document.getElementById('containerelement'); var newdiv = document.createElemen...
[Read more]Posted on: September 10 2010
Comments: 9The EU is currently planning behind closed doors to turn Europe into a survilance state: The german pirate party has disclosed the INDECT documents which describe how they are planning to implement seamless surveillance. Interesting. Download the papers here. Time to emigrate?
[Read more]Posted on: September 08 2010
Comments: 6CopperCube 2 has been released today. It contains a lot of major new features and improvements, such as the recently mentioned game AI behavior. But there is also Undo/Redo, something which wasn't that simple to implement considering the fact that CopperCube wasn't initially designed to include this and that there are about 500 actions which can be done by the user in that editor.
But the major news for Irrlicht users is maybe that CopperCube 2 is now basically free for them: exporting .irr scenes in Cop...
[Read more]Posted on: September 07 2010
Comments: 6Incredible comment of an sysadmin active-duty sailor of the US Navy Marine Corps found on wired (via fefe):
Ships run the Common PC Operating System Environment (COMPOSE). It's essentially a Windows server with a huge and insanely convoluted proprietary set of applications that are all somehow dependent on one another. Not a day goes by where there isn't something that isn't working correctly on the network, and when you dedicate time and effort to troubleshoot the problem and then report your findings b...
[Read more]Posted on: September 03 2010
Comments: 0The next version of the Flash 3D and WebGL editor CopperCube will include a feature to make it possible to quickly prototype games: A very basic 'Artifical Intelligence' behavior, characters which can navigate around in your world and do basic game related things like attacking and dying. As always, no programming is necessary to enable this, only selecting the behavior for your 3d model. Here is a small demo of the very basic character, doing not much:
Controls: cursor keys to move, mouse to Look.
...
[Read more]Posted on: September 01 2010
Comments: 8I've read an article today which hasn't gained as much publicity as I think it should have received:
Ron Paul, a texan congressman who even I, although German have heard of already, just called to mind what a lot of people already believe: That there is maybe no more gold in Fort Knox, the U.S. Gold Bullion Depository. Ron Paul simply wants an independent audition of Fort Knox to see if there is still gold.
The US have denied any independent auditing for decades and refuse to do so still today. It is ...
[Read more]Posted on: August 30 2010
Comments: 2You probably all have seen those timelapse videos of showing gifted artists drawing cool images in photoshop, paint and similar, but this thing is a bit different:
It shows Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft developing a game named Metagun from scratch in 48 hours (and in Java, looks at least like it for me). Not sure if this is as interesting as watching those 2d drawing timelapses, but it is a fun idea :)
[Read more]Posted on: August 27 2010
Comments: 6Since I started my own business, I've quickly learned that there are weeks where every day is a big WTF-moment. This week is such a week. Sometimes it is incredible what weired things can happen and how strange people can behave. I wish I could go into more details here (but probably later).
At least it keeps me entertained :)
And to blog some (non-related) less vague stuff as well, did you see the new irrFuscator website already? Hope it works in all browsers, but looked correctly in the about 6 I teste...
[Read more]Posted on: August 26 2010
Comments: 2 I recently played through the (quite short) single player campaign of Starcraft II and also finished quite a lot of multiplayer matches, so here is my usual small review of this game:
I loved the game back in 1998 and from what I remember, the new game is quite the same. Everything works as before down to the short cuts, but now it's in (pretty unnecessary) 3D. But anyway, it is still fun. You get to view some - interestingly - rendered in realtime 3d movie sequences between each single player mission ...
[Read more]Posted on: August 23 2010
Comments: 4So I've been using twitter for about one month now and like it. I've not twittered that much since then (23 tweets, well, maybe it's better than nothing), but I also read the tweets of others which is quite interesting. I initially decided to use it as a ~commercial~ account, i.e. tweeting only about my software project related stuff, and I think this wasn't the worst idea. Sometimes I blog about non programming stuff on here, and when it gets political, it's usually quite provocative. Explaining this in 14...
[Read more]Posted on: August 20 2010
Comments: 0I just released CopperLicht 1.2.0. If you are using that 3D engine, you should update to this new version because it includes an update which makes CopperLicht work with a change to be introduced in next releases of the main WebGL browsers (FireFox, Webkit): The WebGL array types have been renamed according to the WebGL specification. Additionally, it also now supports basic 2D drawing. Details in the forum.
[Read more]Posted on: August 19 2010
Comments: 4Best terrain editor with the coolest water simulation/rendering I've seen yet:
Quite impressive.
[Read more]Posted on: August 18 2010
Comments: 2Small update about my work on 2d drawing in Copperlicht: I haven't had much development time for this since the last post, but the red rectangle now looks like a rectangle at least:
My development version of CopperLicht now is able to draw 2d rectangles, images, and even text. The text part is a bit tricky to implement in WebGL (ok, let's be honest, this is also the case in OpenGL and Direct3D; drawing 2D text in 3D is not easy anywhere): Internally, a 2d canvas is created, converted to a texture and upd...
[Read more]Posted on: August 17 2010
Comments: 2If you are playing Starcraft 2 multiplayer mode and want to win a match easily, try this: Just a few minutes before prime time (in Germany and Austria, this is 20:15), start a match. If you are lucky, at about 20:15, your opponent will realize how late it is and leave the game, letting you win. Happend two times for me already (although I'm not sure this is the exact reason, but looks suspiciously like it).
[Read more]Posted on: August 16 2010
Comments: 3 I just came across Smartpacker, a group of products which make it easily possible to pack your files of your application or game into one single executable. I am used to program my own archive file format (for example the applications created with CopperCube store all the textures, sounds, 3d models, scripts etc in one single .exe file), but it is a lot of unnecessary work if you write your own game from scratch to design a package file format for this, just for the simpler distribution.
The smartpacker a...
[Read more]Posted on: August 10 2010
Comments: 3This is supposed to be a red rectangle:
All the time I sit down to add some 2D drawing functions to a 3D engine, write code for hours and finally see the result, the rectangles I programmed usualy look like this. I guess I'm not so good with indices. Or geometry. Or both :)
[Read more]Posted on: August 05 2010
Comments: 8I'm using the Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express edition because it is free, even for commercial use, and most of the users of my software are doing the same. I usually bought the full or 'Professional' versions of Visual Studio because I really liked the extra functionality, but I've stopped doing this two years ago. The reason for this is that starting with Visual Studio 2003, Microsoft suddenly stopped supporting it. It doesn't run without bugs on Windows Vista and Windows 7, although I payed a lot of mone...
[Read more]Posted on: August 03 2010
Comments: 1Since Jailbreaking iPhones now is also legal in the USA, the website 'jailbreakme.com' has become pretty popular: You only need to visit that website, follow the instructions on there and your iPhone is jail-broken. This blog post by f-secure shows how it works: Jailbreakme.com is simply using a PDF exploit. That's both interesting and horrific: If a website is able to jailbreak your phone, it can also do much more other, more evil things with it.
Great security, Apple.
[Read more]Posted on: August 02 2010
Comments: 7If you were busy playing the latest RTS game by Blizzard last weekend, still can't get enough of it but have to work during the week, simply get the soundtrack of that game and listen to it while working: Congratulations: Now you are not only working, but also commanding armies of UML diagrams, ASCII characters and files and it feels totally like a Zerg war! :)
[Read more]Posted on: July 31 2010
Comments: 2WebGL is not 100% finished yet, and it is still a moving target. The next versions of browsers supporting WebGL (that is Firefox, Chrome and Safari) will introduce changes soon, breaking nearly all existing WebGL 'programs' out there. If you don't rewrite your code, your site using WebGL won't run anymore. In detail this is a subtle change to how shaders will be accepted (mandatory shader validation), and a change to the signature of a function everyone use who is loading textures, texImage2D.
Anyway, if y...
[Read more]Posted on: July 30 2010
Comments: 1On coldconstructs, Corey von Birnbaum reviewed all the major 4 flash SWF protectors and actionscriopt 3 obfuscators. He comes to this conclusion:
Overall I’d say irrFuscator takes the cake for being reasonably-priced and offering that Flex Project option which makes it very powerful, yet it still retains simplicity of use through an easy user experience, plus the program itself was fast to load and responsive. The others were written in Java or were otherwise slow to start, so they were a bit sluggish...
[Read more]