Posted on: April 01 2015
Comments: 5It was a surprisingly strange procedure to get a Code Signing Certificate. Which I decided to obtain in order to make the nasty ones of the browsers like Internet Explorer stop complaining when downloading installers for the software I develop.
Finally, I now have one. If you should decided to get one too, one day, read here what I had to go through:
On the CA's website, I had to enter the type of certificate I wanted, for how many signing processes and for what type of software. The website left m...
[Read more]Posted on: March 20 2015
Comments: 2For watching the partial solar eclipse event today in Europe, I used only high tech equipment. It even apparently had HDMI support:
It actually worked, and the sun appeared like a crescent moon in that device, with a size of about half a centimeter. I didn't notice any benefit of that advertised HDMI support, though. :)
[Read more]Posted on: March 14 2015
Comments: 2About 25 (!) years ago, I played the first SimCity. You could build your own city, with streets, electricity and everything, and try to let it withstand catastrophic events like Godzilla or nuclear metldowns. It was great. I spent a lot of time with it. I also played Sim City 2000 as a teenager, but I didn't try the newer versions, especially not the latest incarnation from 2013, called simply 'SimCity' (without a number), which apparently sucked, according to many reviews.
Then, a few days ago, a SimCity ...
[Read more]Posted on: March 08 2015
Comments: 0Since about two months, I'm a Amazon Prime user, and quite happy with that. You don't only get free delivery with this, you also get to access to Amazon Prime Instant Video, an on demand video service, like the better known Netflix.
I was skeptical in the beginning, but although I have to live with our slow country side internet access, it works like a charm. You can watch whatever you want, whenever you want, without commercials. Amazon seems to be just starting with this, so the list of videos is big but...
[Read more]Posted on: March 01 2015
Comments: 5I just released the game engine CopperCube in version 5.2 as free update. Besides other features, it includes the announced water surface rendering, which I managed to make work on all supported platforms: Windows (D3D and OpenGL), Mac OS X, WebGL, Android, and even Flash. It looks nicely on all of these, here are some examples:
It looks much nicer in movement, of course. If you want to see it in action, you can try it directly on a website, I created a small demo with two different scenes: WebGL Water r...
[Read more]Posted on: February 13 2015
Comments: 3I think I mentioned this already on this blog, but this week, the Microsoft Developer Support again has left me completely astonished: I had a small problem and left without any other options, I contacted Microsoft directly, via mail. After a couple of hours, a real human answered my mail, with a working solution and friendly text referring my mail, which proved that the support guy didn't even copy and paste that text from some existing solution. I thanked him for that quick help and he even replied friend...
[Read more]Posted on: February 08 2015
Comments: 1I just implemented a nice looking feature into CopperCube, which will very likely make it into the next free update: Nice looking realtime water surfaces:
It will be possible to create oceans, lakes and rivers with it easily. I think this will also work nicely and pretty fast in WebGL, I'm not so sure about Flash and Android yet, but I'm positive so far.
The implementation is pretty simple:
Set a clip plane at the water surface
Render your scene with reflection matrix into a render target
Draw the...
[Read more]Posted on: January 29 2015
Comments: 3People sometimes forget that a programming language is a tool to tell the computer what to do, and to tell other programmers what you wanted the computer to do.
Programming languages are not a way to write a piece of modern art, to create algorithms in the most inconvenient, unreadable but shortest way possible. Unfortunately, some people seem to think that way. Fortunately again, this is also the reason why a lot of programmers still have a job.
[Read more]Posted on: January 21 2015
Comments: 0I'm not a fan or early access games, or "paying for beta testing games" as I would call it, but after a recommendation, I bought the survival game "The Long Dark" which isn't a finished game yet.
The game play works basically like this: Without a lot of tools or supplies, you get thrown somewhere randomly into the Canadian wilderness during Winter, and you need to survive. You mainly fight against hunger and the cold, and sometimes also wolves, but that's it already.
I don't have much time for pl...
[Read more]Posted on: January 15 2015
Comments: 0About 3 months ago, I added CopperCube to Steam Greenlight, Valve's pipeline for testing if unknown games and apps are worth for publishing them onto their game selling platform 'Steam'.
We've received primarily only positive feedback on that page so far, but the amount of votes isn't as high as I thought they would be. I think one reason for this might be the Steam User interface update: Today, it is not easy to find the Greenlight pages anymore, especially not the ones for apps (instead of games). Fir...
[Read more]Posted on: January 10 2015
Comments: 3I create software for a living, which is a rather clean and environment friendly business. But because of this climate change and earth destroying stuff going on, I recently thought it might be still a good idea to be more eco-friendly. So I made a few changes:
The first step was to switch our energy provider, which just needed 5 minutes of my time on a website. For a few weeks now, my office has been powered by 100% clean hydro-electric engery, and I pay even less for my power now.
The second step...
[Read more]Posted on: January 01 2015
Comments: 0Happy new year! I didn't blog for some time now, because there were quite a few changes in my life recently, fortunately all of them quite positive. To celebrate the new year, I am offering some big discounts (-40%) on most of my software, including CopperCube. See all the discounts and how to get them on the Happy New Year 2015 discount page.
The discounts are valid only during the next 3 days. Maybe there is something interesting in there for you as well.
Also, one of my New Year's resolutions is ...
[Read more]Posted on: November 13 2014
Comments: 0So ESA just successfully landed Philae on the comet. And Microsoft open sources .NET and is planning to make it cross platform as well. The week can't possibly get any better now.
[Read more]Posted on: November 07 2014
Comments: 2I finally made CopperLicht, the WebGL library free and open source. You can download the library including its source from its website, and use it for every project you like to.
It is quite mature already, and has been used by many companies for internal projects already. Now that WebGL is widely available, I thought that it would be nice to make it free for everyone.
There are a handful of games in development with CopperLicht already, and I'm looking forward to see them finished. The library is quite ea...
[Read more]Posted on: October 17 2014
Comments: 4After quite some people suggested this, I finally added CopperCube onto Steam Greenlight. This is basically Valve's pipeline for testing if unknown games and apps are worth for publishing them onto their game selling platform 'Steam'. You can vote for the software you like, and in theory, if you get enough votes, maybe Valve considers your software for putting it onto Steam.
I think this might be a nice way for getting CopperCube more popular, and if this will be successful, I would be able to invest muc...
[Read more]Posted on: October 15 2014
Comments: 0I created a short video for CCB5, and uploaded it a few hours ago. Strangely, it doesn't show the correct thumbnail. Must be a youtube bug? Not sure. Here is the video:
As near Youtube-Noob I'm wondering if I have to re- upload it.
Update: Yes, re-uploading fixed it.
[Read more]Posted on: October 09 2014
Comments: 10I just received the financial report of the last quarter of my book sales. And a couple of people seem to have bought my Book during the last three months. That's great, thank you! If a few more buy it, I can invite my family to McDonalds from the earnings, next quarter.
If you wonder: I only earn 50 cents after taxes from each book which gets sold. It is a pity that book writers only earn so little, so I'm probably not going to write a second book in the very near future. Nevertheless, I only received po...
[Read more]Posted on: October 02 2014
Comments: 9After quite a lot of work, finally, I uploaded CopperCube 5. It includes a lot of new features, such as terrain support, physics, video playback, network communication, iOS 8 support via WebGL, shader programming, animation blending, and much more.
I also created a list with screenshots with detailed descriptions of the changes in this new update. People seem to really like this release, and I received a lot of overwhelming feedback for this release of my small and apparently quite useful 3D game engine....
[Read more]Posted on: September 24 2014
Comments: 0On the weekend, I had some little free time, and I was able to try out the game Kerbal Space Program. It is a game where you are able to build your own space ships, launch them and try to do stuff with them, like orbiting or landing on the moon. It's actually a quite nice idea, and is fun to play. The game isn't finished yet, and unfortunately, the user interface isn't quite there yet, and it gets a bit frustrating in the beginning, because the game doesn't tell you which buttons you have to press in order...
[Read more]Posted on: August 07 2014
Comments: 4I'm currently working on implementing terrain rendering for the next version of CopperCube. I have some experience with implementing stuff like this, but this time it is a bit different: The implementation needs also be able to be editable, as being used in an editor. It currently looks like this:
It is not that difficult, but a you have to try around a bit until it not only looks nice, but also works nice with all the features of the editor, such as undo management, material editing, light mapping, ...
[Read more]Posted on: June 22 2014
Comments: 0I log into LinkedIn about once every 6 months or so. And I feel every time I do this, the page looks completely different... :)
[Read more]Posted on: June 18 2014
Comments: 1Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms an Action-RPG developed by Games Farm. Honestly, I never heard of this game before - I'm really not totally up to date with current PC gaming - but it looks promising:
I like the idea that you can play as demon in this game. The early access version was released just a few days ago. And the game probably has some nice sound. Because it uses irrKlang as audio library :)
[Read more]Posted on: June 06 2014
Comments: 6As you may know, I have a Windows RT Tablet and since the update to Windows 8.1, I'm very happy with it. My only main concern is a bit the lack of apps for it, although that situation seems to get better every day.
Last weekend, I had a small problem which a small app could have solved for me, but on the Windows Store, I could not find any app doing this. Being a programmer, I decided to write that app myself. I even have a Windows Store developer account, so I would be able to publish that app then for fr...
[Read more]Posted on: June 02 2014
Comments: 2On the weekend, I was able to try Blizzards latest released game HearthStone, finally. It is free to play, and apparently not one of those evil "pay to win" games. In short, it's basically a collectible card game, and reminds me very much on Magic: The Gathering - admittedly being the only collectible card game I ever played :)
In short, the game is fun, the rules are very simple, it is learnable quickly, and seems to be fair and balanced. If you are a PC gamer and in your mid 30s like me, you wil...
[Read more]Posted on: May 18 2014
Comments: 2I currently don't have much time to blog, but this one should at least be mentioned shortly here: Last week, I finally released the .NET and C++ audio library irrKlang in version 1.5, with unicode and 64bit support for all platforms. It also comes with 24 bit FLAC support, which seems to be a thing, lately. :)
[Read more]Posted on: April 30 2014
Comments: 0 Just a reminder: The website Gamedev news still exists, and you are free to post your game development related news on there yourself. Just hit the submit button. Until now, I am basically the only one posting on there, although companies have started to continuously send me their press releases already at least, which is nice. And the site already has readers, commenters and twitter followers.
So it looks nice so far, but the only problem is one I didn't anticipate: There aren't actually that much gam...
[Read more]Posted on: April 25 2014
Comments: 9I am currently doing a bit of work on Ubuntu, to be more precise on their just released version 14.04 LTS. It was quite a pleasure installing it, much has changed since I tried my first Linux distribution (I think it was Suse 7.0 back in 2000). It also works perfectly with all my exotic hardware, to my surprise. I am used to have to spend days searching through web forums for the right configuration file change or shell command to make everything work correctly, but this time everything worked. Cool.
I'm...
[Read more]Posted on: April 23 2014
Comments: 30I'm a very bad business guy. Maybe because I'm a programmer, and programmers and business guys don't mix very well, or only in very rare circumstances. Frequently, when some company contacts me in order to propose a partnership, buy a bunch of my products, or want some technical help, the conversation is very awkward because of this. In the worst case, the email conversation goes something like this:
Guy: Hi, I'm X from company Y, we want to do a partnership with your company because of your nice prod...
[Read more]Posted on: April 17 2014
Comments: 5If I have learned something since starting developing and selling my own software, then it is to never, never, ever, remove a feature when creating a new version of your software. No matter how stupid or irrelevant or buggy you think the feature you want to remove might be. Because there will be people who use this feature. And who will absolutely be pissed about you removing that thing they need.
I think this is also one thing which Microsoft didn't get, when they decided to remove the start menu in Windo...
[Read more]Posted on: April 09 2014
Comments: 2I just uploaded CopperCube 4.5, this update includes Oculus Rift support, but also WebGL and Flash fullscreen and pointer locking support, which is very nice for doing first person shooter games running on websites. There is a new demo showing this in action. If you can, try the WebGL version, the Flash version doesn't do pointer locking on some few browser/Flash player combinations because it is included on that page as an iframe.
It was really fun developing for the Oculus Rift, it's a very nice device...
[Read more]