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Litterae Finis

January 17th, 2013 #

It's reassuring to know that, apparently, I'm the best in the world in something, even if it's practically inapplicable to anything useful.

In other words, Litterae Finis, the demo I made with !Cube's music, won Text Mode Demo Competition 15.

There's a capture on youtube, as you can assume these days..

..although, again, you can download the binaries and watch it "for reals", if you want to. Here's the Pouet thread.

Like with the tAAt new year's demo, I've wrote a breakdown of the demo too. Warning: contains spoilers.

Oh boy. This is the worst flu I've ever had - or a chain of different flu-like symptoms, in any case. No flu can last for four weeks, can they?

Anyway.

I've been pondering on the OpenGL tutorials, and it's a tricky thing. The problem lies with the fact that OpenGL 3+ is very front-heavy; you need to know tons of stuff before you get to the good bits.

It's also a question of balance. On one end you have code with tons of OpenGL calls, and on the other end you say, here's an engine, just use it. I think I will have to write some kind of toolkit to jump over a lot of the complexity and to get the reader faster to the good bits, and then we can go back and see what the toolkit contains.

Still, it's a lot of work before I can even get started with the writing. There's a lot of cool stuff I'd love to write about, but you've got to start with the basics, and when it comes to OpenGL 3+, that's quite a lot.

Of course, I could just skip the basics, write a toolkit and hop directly to the good bits.

Tempting.

ps. I finally got around to writing in-page links to these news. The link is in the "#" after the date. Not quite a permalink, but close.

Twenty Thirteen

January 3rd, 2013 #

So.

Year rolled over, with no end of the world to speak of, although last year had plenty of .. history in it. Things are bound to get more interesting this year, for better or worse.

As I'm writing this, I'm suffering from the annual new year's flu (4th year in a row). This has been the worst flu I can remember, with the whole family (and everybody we've been in contact with during Christmas) being horribly ill for over a week.

Anyway.

Let's start with a shocking reveal that I've been behind the tAAt new year demos for a while, including the latest one which you can watch on YouTube:

..although you can download the binaries and watch it the old school way too, if you want to. Check the Pouet thread for download links etc.

And as a bonus, I've written a breakdown of the demo too.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to (one of) the reason(s) of writing this blog post at this time.

Last year, I wrote that I don't, in general, do new year's resolutions, but I'd give them a go. I tried to do a little bit of the following every day:

• Some form of physical exercise
• Some form of music
• Some form of writing

As results go, the physical exercise was a dismal failure, if you don't count the 1-2 walkies with dogs each day, bicycling, carrying groceries with a backpack (no car here), managing a 3-year old boy, moving snow, taking said 3-year old to daycare on a bicycle (or a sledge, or carrying in some cases), making firewood and so on - you know, the normal every day stuff. I probably should try to do better this year.

The primary problem with this is to find a time slot for it. Maybe I will find one. I'd like to get back to the shape where I could do a hundred push-ups (which I managed due to the Ludum Dare dare some years back).

When it comes to music, I haven't really been able to play around every day, but I tried to find time, and I'm definitely better at it than I was a year ago. I also spent over 600 Eur on music-related things, including Native Instruments Komplete (for which I should have waited for a couple of weeks so I would have been able to use one of their frequent discounts), as well as Reaper and Renoise, both of which have their uses.

I probably should get my hands on some kind of dedicated audio interface, as using windows' audio has quite a bit of latency, and while using ASIO4All solves that, it also means that I can't get sound from other applications, which may be rather critical. For a lot of playing, the latency doesn't actually matter THAT much, but for drums it's a killer.

I also learned that there's a lot of stuff to learn when it comes to music.

I don't have all that much to show for, but you can check some oggs under the audio tab of this website. I'll probably post new ones there sometime.

The third point, some form of writing, is trickier to judge, as writing is large part of what I do every day; but I can't honestly say I've succeeded in it. I should be able to do some kind of creative writing project. Maybe a new tutorial series? (the Argon-Selenium OpenGL tutorials maybe - my project name for a modern counterpart of the Neon-Helium tutorials). Google plus and twitter have also taken their toll of my writing budget, as it's so much easier to just hammer something away on a social network and get over it. Instant gratification and all that.

Looking back, I have plenty of unfinished projects; the speech synth, an audio library, evolution shooter, etc. Apparently I didn't even manage to do a single Ludum Dare entry last year either.

One thing I did do, however, is a TMDC entry. I've heard that the quality of the entries was very high this year, so I'm hoping I don't finish last =)

And now, since this has been long overdue, recent search terms:

"all of the following interpolation techniques are based on weighted averages, except one. which one?"

It never quite ceases to amaze me how many people seem to be delegating their homework questions...

"write a program that displays a checker-board in which each white and black cell is a jbuttonwith a background black or white,"

...to Google. How these ended up on my site is another mystery.

"im,jikuyyu ui"

So's this.

alesis q49 + virtualbox

Never tried. I suppose it should work like any other USB device though?

answers to galaxql 2.0

Yeah yeah. At this point I fear it would probably be a re-designed GalaXQL 3.0 as during the project I figured out how I should have made it in the first place, and it was far too late to change at that point. Since there's no incentive for me to actually make GalaXQL 3.0, though, don't hold your breath. (Feel free to give me incentives though).

arb_instanced_arrays tutorial

Damn you, minecraft.

atanua for mac

Since Apple stopped supporting me, I stopped supporting Apple. So it's kinda mutual.

Less snarkily, I have no financial incentive to support Atanua on macs, and Apple keeps breaking builds.

bachelor thesis layout

Varies from institution to institution.

can dev c++ game have save feature

Yes.

can using artwork instead of words be more beneficial?

In what way?

can we do division by using char data type in c using bitwise operation

Yes-ish? Everything's a bitwise operation eventually..

could i use galaxql as the basis for a game

I suppose.

dangerous spells

All of 'em.

debugging the millenium falcon pythagorean theorem

The what?

diablo 3 resolution 320x200 hack

Wha..?

difference between plotpixel and putpixel in computer graphics

Wh..?

drawing a cube from a shader

You mean a geometry shader?

easy way to do interpolation

Simplify range to 0..1.

explain the (when one teaches two learn)

If you don't get it, you've never truly taught anyone.

how i design a logical circuit for traffic lights using gates on atunua

This was a fun find; seems like someone's giving some real schoolwork based on Atanua =)

how to convert an image to a specific color palette

Depends on what you mean.. tone mapping or mapping to a specific N-color palette?

how to convert to text mode in photoshop

Photoshop has no text mode.

how to read files from a different folder in sdl tutorial

fopen("different_folder/file.dat","rb");

how to render lots of cubes

Damn you, minecraft.

i wanna make my own working game board

Working how?

if i don't own an ios device and i want to program unity ios

With difficulty.

in my cv which is correct national service done or finished

Who cares, as long as the point gets through.

include d3d.h what does it do?

Includes, or tries to include, the file called "d3d.h".

israel you are in my chair sitting

What?

most common magic effect in games

I'd guess healing. Or if you mean visuals, probably fade to white. Or particles. Dunno.

pitfalls of immediate mode gui

They make easy things very easy, but they make hard things very, very difficult.

sdl tutorial finland guy

I actually laughed out loud.

terra nova sfc source port

One can only hope.

vbo cubes lot of

Damn you, minecraft.

what are the things i need to get sol

What's this, spice girls?

what does regeneration do in typomagia

The monsters heal while walking. Normally there's no healing.

what is analytics.sol file doing on my pc

No idea, sorry.

what is text mode screen better?

Hardly anything-

what is width and height

...

what things do you need to make your own game

Time, imagination, possibly some skills, but skills can be learned if you have time, and imagination.

where is segment vesa

I kinda recall it may be remappable, but usually the video memory segment, A000, is used.

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