Posted on: April 03 2014
Comments: 0I created a small Oculus Rift demo with my preview build of CopperCube, which will support the Oculus Rift. It is nothing special, and looks like this:
You can download the demo from here (25MB), it also works if you don't have a Rift.
A version of the editor with this feature should be released next week. But let's see. Any feedback regarding the demo is welcome.
[Read more]Posted on: March 28 2014
Comments: 6Last week, something strange happened: First Epic Games announced that you can now develop for their Unreal Engine for 19$/month (+5% of your revenue), making their AAA engine very, very cheap, especially in comparison to what they charged previously.
Then, one day later, Crytek countered with a similar offer: CryEngine for just 9.90$/month.
I think this is a reaction to their now 'new' competitor, Unity, (who just announced version 5), which for some time now is free for the basic edition. Maybe even...
[Read more]Posted on: March 21 2014
Comments: 6So now I finally sat down and programmed a test to see if Oculus Rift support in CopperCube would be possible/easy/nice to have. And although CopperCube uses a left handed coordinate system, I wanted to work it with D3D9 instead of D3D10 and other smaller unusual technical obstacles, it was relatively easy to implement. On my system, I now have a build of CopperCube capable of creating Windows apps which use the Oculus Rift:
It's cool with the headset on and running in 'real 3d' through your own 3D world...
[Read more]Posted on: March 19 2014
Comments: 5Last weekend, I edited a few articles in the Wikipedia again, as I do from time to time when I see an article about a topic I know a bit about (in most cases programming related, but somtimes also some local stuff). Usually, I first add this stuff into the english Wikipedia, and then I do the same in german language, in the german Wikipedia.
All the text I ever wrote for the english one is still there, and can be still read. People even have extended the articles I started. But the german wikipedia seems t...
[Read more]Posted on: March 14 2014
Comments: 7I just received a mail from a company, asking me to remove a few comments from this blog, linking their website. Because they say it affects their google rank negatively.
I am usually not censoring this blog, but being surprised to see such a request, I was curious to see what comment it was, and why they don't like it. Turns out the comments they are talking about are blog spam comments with links to their website. Which somehow made it through my spam filter.
BAHAHAHA!
So, summarized: They spammed ...
[Read more]Posted on: March 12 2014
Comments: 2Finally, this package arrived yesterday in my office:
I was able to try out an Oculus Rift before a few times, but now I have my own. I only tried the demos before, so I never wrote any actual code for it, but skipping shortly through the documentation, it doesn't seem to be difficult. The next days, I'm going to try to figure out if and how support for the Oculus Rift device will make sense in CopperCube. Because, yes, it would be great to create 3D apps for that device with just a few clicks. :)
[Read more]Posted on: March 09 2014
Comments: 0Just cleaned out my office and discovered this:
Yes, this is an original disk containing a legal copy of MS-DOS 3.3! Microsoft's operating system from 1987. It also contains GWBasic, the programming language I thought myself programming with. Very cool :)
[Read more]Posted on: March 06 2014
Comments: 6I'm currently updating and rebuilding a few libraries I wrote years ago, and my software and even software of some of my customers is depending on. To ensure the widest possible compatibility, I'm using for that a quite range of IDEs: Visual Studio 6, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013, Code::Blocks, XCode 2, 3, 4, 5 and even raw make files. It's not that easy, because not every IDE works on every operating system anymore. But my experience so far is this, surprisingly:
Visual Studio 6 is still the bes...
[Read more]Posted on: February 28 2014
Comments: 2Phew, this was tough. First MindArchitect, then yesterday I released CopperCube 4.4, and today, there is now finally a beta of irrKlang for 64 bit architectures available.
I could write a lot about every one of these releases, but now I'm too tired. :)
[Read more]Posted on: February 26 2014
Comments: 0A few months ago, I was experimenting a bit, and tried to write a graphical shader editor. Then, after I noticed that it sucked, I transformed it to be a graphical programming editor, in order to create complex scripts without programming. Also this one sucked: For programming, it is still best to write everything down in text. You need a huge diagram just to represent a few lines of code, for example a for-loop with a few ifs attached. Also, it is very inflexible, when you try to change something in the al...
[Read more]Posted on: February 21 2014
Comments: 3There are several ways for rendering grass in 3D graphics, in real time. The method shown below is one of these, a particular simple one:
As you can see, we simply create a few randomly distributed polygon 'crosses' with a grass texture on it, and that's it already. In the image above, I made about half of them solid instead of transparent - that's why they are black - so that you can see easier how they look like.
It looks quite convincing in action, especially if you are using a view from the per...
[Read more]Posted on: February 19 2014
Comments: 0Yesterday, I received this in the mail from an anonymous source:
It came with the text "thanks for the great support". Well, thank you too, I absolutely love this thing :)
[Read more]Posted on: February 14 2014
Comments: 2I just implemented support for easily loading and displaying external textures in CopperCube, like loading a texture from somewhere on your disk when you create a Windows or Mac OS X app, or from somewhere from your webserver if you are using WebGL and Flash. This feature will be in the next upcoming free update, and it looks like this:
The texture with the statistics on it is an image generated by Webalizer, and it was not included in the project, it was dynamically loaded.
This opens a lot of new po...
[Read more]Posted on: January 23 2014
Comments: 4If you have a newer OS X, and run some software downloaded from the web which wasn't signed, you usually get an error message, like
"This app is from an unidentified developer"
To run it anyway, either disable gatekeeper, or simpler: Press the control key and click the app icon. Then choose 'open'. That's it.
I am personally still refusing to sign the software I create, not on Windows and not on Mac OS X. So all my software causes problems like this above. But my users don't seem to care. And if they do...
[Read more]Posted on: January 16 2014
Comments: 1This blog was a bit quiet recently because I am working on porting a handful of my projects to the latest operating systems and development environments. Work which isn't that pleasant, and often quite frustrating.
The worst experience so far was with XCode / Mac OS X: In order to use certain features today, Apple forces you to update to XCode 5. That IDE only works on the latest Mac OS X, namely Mavericks. And Mavericks decided not to run on my Mac. So I had to use a newer Mac, move all my stuff to that ...
[Read more]Posted on: January 05 2014
Comments: 4I just rebuild the database of this blog (which is just a collection of 980 plain text files, interestingly), and noticed how long I am blogging already. I've posted more than 1400 blog posts on this blog already. I'm now blogging for 8 years on irrlicht3d.org, but before, I did this for a couple of years on my now deceased domain code3d.com, meaning I'm blogging now since about 10 years. And even before that, before the term 'blog' wasn't even used at all, I used to write game development logs in german on...
[Read more]Posted on: December 18 2013
Comments: 4As every year, I'm giving away my software at a discounted price for a short preriod. Starting with today, you can get the game editor CopperCube, the website editor WebsitePainter, the diagram editor DiagramPainter and the AS3 and SWF obfuscator irrFuscator for 25% less. Until the end of this year.
But this year, I made it a bit different. There is one single, big page where all discounts of all products are listed, and you can get the discount only via that page:
Previously, I just gave away a disco...
[Read more]Posted on: December 12 2013
Comments: 2The game development magazine 'Develop' has published a short article about CopperCube. It seems that finally, at least a few more people become aware of the existence of CopperCube. Which for now, still is a big problem: Most people looking for a tool like this don't even know that CopperCube exists. I'm trying to do my best to change this, but it is quite a difficult task :)
I guess It's a step into the right direction to be mentioned by such a major game development magazine.
[Read more]Posted on: December 04 2013
Comments: 8Since I'm using Piwik, I really enjoy analyzing my web traffic. It helped me to find some bugs in my websites, and improve some problems with them. But it is also interesting watching the configurations of the visitors. I've posted some stats like this before on this blog, so here is an update:
Chrome is apparently the new favourite browser of mostly everyone. And IE has totally lost it's prevalence, at least on my websites:
The top list is: Chrome (50%), Firefox (25%), Safari (10%), IE (10%), and Oper...
[Read more]Posted on: November 20 2013
Comments: 2 Although I had some troubles with Internet Explorer 11's WebGL support - and I think it still has some bugs but I reported them to Microsoft - most of the features in CopperCube and CopperLicht now work nicely in that browser. That means WebGL is now a real, useful thing, it works in all major browsers.
Apart from this great news, I'm a bit proud of one tiny new feature in CopperCube, which probably won't even get noticed too much: I added an integrated web server into the editor. When you click "test as ...
[Read more]Posted on: November 17 2013
Comments: 6More then ten years ago, I played the first version of Battlefield. Last week, I bought the latest edition, Battlefield 4. The game basically is still the same, and is fun to play. It now looks much better, has an incredible high demand for hardware resources and forces you to use some ugly Steam clone named 'Origin'. Those are basically the major changes I noticed.
Although the game is very fun and looks great, I'm still kind of disappointed by the technical defects. It started with the installer not wo...
[Read more]Posted on: November 06 2013
Comments: 4I just recently read that Microsoft is praising its Internet Explorer 11 for its speed and feature completeness. Unfortunately, somehow I cannot agree, specifically when it comes to WebGL, which is now also supported in this latest browser version, which you get when you update to Windows 8.1.
In short: Somehow, on all my test systems, nearly all WebGL demos I try in IE11 are comparably slow, and look completely buggy. In contrast to when run in Google Chrome or Firefox. Here is an example:
This is fro...
[Read more]Posted on: October 23 2013
Comments: 2Last sunday, I implemented the generation of power poles for EndTime, which are placed next to some streets. The idea was that if you are somewhere deep in a forest, you would be able to spot such a power pole line easily and find back into the city using it. I tried it out, and it works nicely so far. Also, I created a video of the current state of the game:
Unfortunately, the youtube video compression doesn't seem to work nicely with fog. The video somehow ended up very blurry...
[Read more]Posted on: October 18 2013
Comments: 0Just updated my Tablet to Windows 8.1. Looks nice so far. The touch screen mail client still doesn't support POP as mail protocol, which is a shame. But somehow, Microsoft now apparently included a full version of Office with this update (previously, there was only a trial version), and this time, it also includes Outlook. Which is great, since this is one of the most usable mail clients, with so many features. Great! Finally I can use the tablet for real, more in-depth work as well.
[Read more]Posted on: October 16 2013
Comments: 6I usually create Windows and Mac OS X versions of most of my software. Most people seem to think that with the right library, you only need to recompile your code for the other operating system, and everything automatically works perfectly, but this is seldom the case, and especially not for very complex software (what for example my 3D editor is). So there is still much work and testing involved for creating each version of a software. That's why I also sell separate licenses for my software. A license key...
[Read more]Posted on: October 09 2013
Comments: 0Kromaia is a six degrees of freedom adventure shooter, developed by Kraken Empire from Spain. They just started an IndieGoGo campaign - if you don't know, this is similar to the better known Kickstarter. I always thought about creating a Kickstarter or IndieGoGo campaign for my game, but I decided to take it myself, and offer preorders instead. Not sure if this was the best idea, but for now, a few people already supported me with this. :)
Anyway, take a look at the Kromoia IndieGoGo campaign, and suppor...
[Read more]Posted on: October 06 2013
Comments: 4For my side project game Endtime At Home, I now implemented the first version of city generation. I wrote some details about this on the game's blog, and I'm really happy about how it looks now. It's nothing spectacular for now, but it is a beginning. The game engine now can create a more structured 3d world, where it can place interesting things and connect them. Like in this case, it can place cities and connect them with streets. Here is a rural area vs. city comparison:
There is still much work t...
[Read more]Posted on: October 03 2013
Comments: 5When working on new features, I sometimes have the feeling the most time spent is figuring out how the icons on the buttons for the new feature should look like. It really isn't easy. And definitely not unimportant. But I feel I spend way too much time on this, every time. They either look ugly, don't match the other, existing icons, or you have no idea what they do when looking at them. Not easy.
[Read more]Posted on: September 26 2013
Comments: 7Well, the announcement of the game I am writing a few days ago on this blog caused my book to be sold out (the game is set in the universe of the book). There are a few copies available now again. And apparently, they also ordered more already. I wonder if amazon will notice that the demand goes up a bit and will order more to prevent that the book is sold out again soon. But at least if it is sold out all the time, it looks like my book is popular :)
[Read more]Posted on: September 23 2013
Comments: 4Bought and watched the fifth season of Breaking Bad. But there are only 8 episodes inside. And the story ends abruptly in the last episode. Searching the web, it becomes clear that the DVD box of the "fifth season" only contains the first half of the fifth season. It doesn't say this anywhere the box. No where. Isn't this fraud? Reading the comments on amazon.de, most people seem to be upset, just like me. I'll probably going to bring the box back and demand my money back.
Also: Does anybody remember the t...
[Read more]