Posted on: September 18 2013
Comments: 11I always wanted to create a whole 3D world by programming. Procedurally generating everything has a nice touch: You can build whole worlds with unlimited details, and by adjusting just a few parameters change everything easily. Because the work on my side-project game Darkness Springs has stopped (as reported on this blog), I needed another side project, so I started this a few weekends ago. I decided to write everything in JavaScript, using WebGL, and thus also be able to use it as test area for my WebGL J...
[Read more]Posted on: September 12 2013
Comments: 1Just watched the movie Elysium recently. It's a science fiction movie with Matt Damon:Update: Don't watch the trailer below if you want to see the film. The trailer shows the whole f**ing story and is basically a single spoiler. What are those trailer makers thinking recently?
I didn't expect anything good, just some half-assed action movie set in space, maybe. But I was positively surprised. Not bad at all. Good stuff. It had shortcomings, and maybe I liked it because I didn't expect anything. But I ca...
[Read more]Posted on: September 04 2013
Comments: 2Cyril created a first person shooter using CopperCube. It runs on websites using Flash, and looks quite nice, IMHO:
I personally like this very much. You can play the game directly here, or get more details about this in the Forum.
[Read more]Posted on: August 29 2013
Comments: 3 Once you finished writing a game, not even half of the work is done. The difficult part - in my opinion - is marketing and selling it. You need to let people know that the game exists, and let them start playing and/or buying it. I know, this is a very difficult task, I blogged about my adventures when I published my own game, Darkness Springs, a few years ago. And it is especially difficult if you have just a small or no budget for this at all.
Maybe you remember, a few months ago, I started the game dev...
[Read more]Posted on: August 28 2013
Comments: 0Today, I started to change my websites a bit under the hood to reflect the recent changes of how the internet works, especially regarding the NSA spying program PRISM and the EU cookie law.
Background: In short, the EU cookie law - depending on which country you live in, your users are from and where your server is - makes using cookies on your website a pain: Some countries demand you to show a message box prompting you to ask the user before you are able to store any cookies, in some countries like in m...
[Read more]Posted on: August 21 2013
Comments: 3I just uploaded version 4.2 of CopperCube. It was a lot of work, but still there is space for improvements. But I'm happy that it's out now. I also wrote a tutorial on how to create a first person shooter game without programming, and there is a new logo image:
You can download the new version from the CopperCube website, this update if of course free for existing users. There is a detailed list of changes, an also, all Irrlicht related features of course are still free, and will remain that way.
If yo...
[Read more]Posted on: August 16 2013
Comments: 1I'm currently in the process of writing documentation for the new features included in the next free update of CopperCube. I like particularly this image which I just created:
That scene looks so much better with normal mapping applied. Especially in movement. I guess I have to update the demo on the website as well to include normal maps.
[Read more]Posted on: August 10 2013
Comments: 1Normal map support in CopperCube is on its way now. It is much more than just a simple test already, and is actually usable. Here is a screenshot of the editor showing it in action, with more than just one light:
I implemented the shaders so they work on the most very basic hardware, and managed to squeeze out support for up to 5 lights (4 point lights + ambient light) for the same object, on pixel shader v 2.0 devices, with fallback for v1.1 ones, if there are ones still today. Remember that a lot of pe...
[Read more]Posted on: July 26 2013
Comments: 3Ever heard of the Buran spacecraft? It was the russian version of the NASA space shuttle. It looks surprisingly similar to the better known US version. A few weeks ago, I shortly visited Moscow, and to my surprise, discovered one of them in the Gorky Park:
It is surprisingly huge, when you stand next to it. Unfortunately, the russians are not very good at tourism: There is no way go into it, or get any info about it at the place where it is located. I would have paid money for both. :) But it was just st...
[Read more]Posted on: July 24 2013
Comments: 2The guys at jeux developpez.com have translated all the irrlicht tutorials to French. If you are french, maybe worth a look: irrlicht tutorials in french.
[Read more]Posted on: July 19 2013
Comments: 2I just played around a bit with normal map support, and quickly integrated it into CopperCube, as test. irrEdit, the irrlicht editor CopperCube is based on never supported normal maps, although irrlicht did, a thing which always annoyed me.
I was thinking about what types of normal maps to support, and considered only to support Object Space Normal maps, because they are easy to implement on all the targets, are a bit faster to compute on slow devices, and even need less memory. Unfortunately, they are a...
[Read more]Posted on: July 16 2013
Comments: 3About 12 hours ago, I sent a mail to Microsoft, regarding some problem I have, developing software for their platform, Windows. Known from how you are treated by other companies, I was surprised that I received a useful, friendly answer just a few minutes ago, in the length of about 15 lines which actually helped me, and was written manually in response to my specific question. I am baffled.
I try to answer support mail of my customers in the same way. Sometimes, this is not always possible, but usually, ...
[Read more]Posted on: July 05 2013
Comments: 1I nearly hit a squirrel this morning. Because I need a bit more practice with creating youtube videos, I created one of this accident:
(The date printed in the video isn't correct) My voice is a ~little~ bit pitched because I was horrified that I could run over this furry little thing. Thankfully everything went well :)
[Read more]Posted on: June 28 2013
Comments: 26I guess someone has to say it: Developers are usually no great business men. Instead of using the great possibilities the internet and the various app stores are offering us, we are in the process of completely devaluating our own work, our software.
But let's start at the beginning: As you might know, beside the main products I'm working on, I'm also doing some experiments here and there, trying out how to make money today by writing smaller pieces of different software. That way, I also have a handful ...
[Read more]Posted on: June 26 2013
Comments: 0So apparently, WebGL will be supported in the next Internet Explorer. That means all major browsers will support this now in the very near future. Will this open a new era for games, playable directly from the web? I think so.
Basically, I believe you only need to use a framework like my WebGL game engine to create your games and be able to run your games on all devices and operating systems, soon. But maybe I'm wrong, let's see. Exciting times :)
[Read more]Posted on: June 23 2013
Comments: 3Remember the video I created about a month ago showing CopperCube in action? Back then, I really liked it, but actually it wasn't that nice. It was too confusing, the aspect ratio wasn't correct, and cuts from the shown apps weren't ideal. I just recut it, with about 70% new video material and it feels much better now:
The resolution is a lot nicer, the action clearer, only sometimes the framerate dropped, unfortunately (like in the scene with the Jump'n'run game). Hope you don't notice this too much...
[Read more]Posted on: June 21 2013
Comments: 4As demo, I just created a small 3D Jump'n'Run game. It runs directly in the browser, using either Flash or WebGL, and looks like this:
That image is from the main menu, though. Although rendered directly from the game level, I just set the 3D camera into the face of the player. :)
You can play the game, let me know how much it sucks. :)
[Read more]Posted on: June 19 2013
Comments: 0Last weekend, I watched the movie After Earth. I heard before that it wasn't great, but after I saw its trailer and some people also told me that it looks a bit like my book, Die Wiederentdeckung
der Erde, I just had to watch it. And it wasn't that bad.
Unfortunately, we entered the cinema hall a few minutes after the film had started already, so maybe I missed some essential explanations like why they are only using melee weapons, but who knows, maybe without explanations the movie appeared better to...
[Read more]Posted on: June 13 2013
Comments: 33Seeing all the strange decisions Microsoft made recently, focusing currently on their "XBox One", it seems to me that they are actively trying to destroy their company. Starting with the weird name "XBox One", the focus on TV (where are the games?), the strange pricing (PS4 will be cheaper while apparently having superior processing power), the DRM preventing people from reselling games, and now the region locking to only 21 countries, preventing lots of people to buy/use the XBox One at all. Not sure who w...
[Read more]Posted on: June 10 2013
Comments: 1 A few months ago I blogged about the Asus VivoTab RT I bought, which is basically a tablet with removable keyboard, running Windows RT on it (Details on the official website). Now I've used it for quite a while, time for a review:
In short, that device is really nice, and I'm really happy with it. It has quite some advantages:
As known from Windows 8, also Windows RT is very, very fast. As programmer, I'm really impressed, and also wondering how they actually managed to do that. Boot times are so short ...
[Read more]Posted on: May 31 2013
Comments: 3I just released CopperCube 4.0.4, and it also includes the feature complete beta version of the announced extension and scripting System. I named it "CopperCube for Game Developers", for simplicity.
Basically, I made it possible on all targets (Flash, WebGl, Windows .exe, Mac OS X .app and Android apps) to run JavaScript code, and exposed the same JavaScript API on it. Additionally, everything was wrapped into an extension mechanism, so that scripts can be put into 'Action' or 'Behavior' form, edited with...
[Read more]Posted on: May 22 2013
Comments: 1After watching the Xbox One Reveal 2013 Highlights video on youtube, I'm glad I didn't watch that thing live. TV? Really? Was this thing designed by dinosaurs? They believe the main and future medium still is TV? And, where are the games? Why are only some random old PR people who obviously never would play games themselves talking on there? How is it possible that Microsoft always manages to leave me staring in disbelieve after they announced a new product? :)
[Read more]Posted on: May 20 2013
Comments: 5In followup to my archery post a few weeks ago, maybe something which doesn't happen too often:
Last week, a fellow archer splitted my fiberglass arrow with the metal head of his wooden one, by accident. Fortunately, my arrows aren't that expensive :)
[Read more]Posted on: May 16 2013
Comments: 5Sometimes its the small things. I just got this simple message popping up in my Android Emulator, but it made me very happy:
This is a message actually generated by JavaScript code, embedded in a .ccb file. Meaning that the scripting system has made its first steps to start working on Android as well. For non-programmers, it is probably not really understandable how much work it is just to get this little message up. But it was quite a lot of work, and now there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yay. :)
[Read more]Posted on: May 10 2013
Comments: 6 The software I'm working most on, CopperCube, is a quite complicated beast. It is targeted at people who want to create 3D apps and games, but do not want or are unable to program. To make this possible, you can easily click your apps together in CopperCube by using a fixed set of 26 Actions and 18 Behaviors. Together, they offer (an estimated) amount of 300 parameters, so you can do quite much with this already. But still, for more complicated apps - and a computer game is probably the most complicated pi...
[Read more]Posted on: May 05 2013
Comments: 3I just created a 2 minute youtube video, explaining what CopperCube is and what games and apps you can create with it. The problem is that I'm not very good at video editing, and I honestly think the video sucks. But because I do like experimenting with stuff, I dared to put this video onto the front page of the CopperCube website, to see how it turns out. Not sure if this was a good idea, maybe it will even harm sales. But see for yourself:
The worst mistake I did was probably that I recorded the video ...
[Read more]Posted on: April 29 2013
Comments: 5Do you know the scene in the Simpsons where Lisa buys a book named "Sane Planning, Sensible Tomorrow"?
(Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a youtube video of the whole scene.) The author, Al Gore, immediately gets notifed about this:
"Mr. Vice President! Someone finally bought a copy of your book, Sir!"
and Al Gore starts a short 'celebration'. Well, this whole scene feels a bit like everytime someone buys a copy of my book, as I just got the quartly report that a few people again bought it. :)
[Read more]Posted on: April 24 2013
Comments: 4As blogged before, I just made the my role playing game Darkness Springs free. Not free-to-play, but free as in beer. And as promised, here are the details about its sales and other stats, before it was made free:
Income
All in all, the game wasn't financially very successful. Which was no surprise, since I was the only developer behind it: I created all client and server code, all graphics, sounds and even the music on my own. Since I'm a better programmer than artist, this resulted in a probably a b...
[Read more]Posted on: April 19 2013
Comments: 1 So the game development news website I launched about one month ago is going nicely. There are unfortunately not as much news to report about as I initially thought, but currently, it's about 3 interesting news items each week. People are visiting the website frequently, and gamedevnewsnet even has 19 followers on twitter already! :)
It probably will take a bit of time until the site grows, but it is a nice start. If you want to help, it would of course be nice to follow the gamedevnews account on twitt...
[Read more]Posted on: April 18 2013
Comments: 2I'm currently working again a bit in Java, primarily because I'm currently testing out how to implement a neat extension also in the Android App target of CopperCube. And it is always frustrating when working with new Java APIs. Not sure why, but Java API developers seem to want to put as many Interfaces, Classes and Factories into there, to make their library look fancy. And they seem to forget that the documenting and example writing part is usually the most important part when creating a library to be us...
[Read more]