Monthly Archive for June, 2009

Physics, sockets, anti-aliasing and a hell of a lot more!

Published on June 29, 2009 in Personal, Programming and Projects. 0 Comments

Holyshit, it’s been a while! Last week I wanted to write a blog, but the final week of school kept me occupied. To make it up to you guys, I’m going to make this blog as interesting as possible. Anyway, let’s start with small stuff and end with the climax, shall we?

To start off, I installed a new theme for XP today and picked a new wallpaper.

Not bad, amiright? I can tell you it’s not easy to find such a wallpaper for a widescreen monitor. After trying Google Images, I almost gave up, but finally found this one on DeviantArt. Why New York? Well, cityscapes like these simply fascinate me. It makes your wallpaper come to life in my opinion.

iPhone OS 3.0

A week ago I bought iPhone OS 3.0 for my iPod Touch. Basically it adds copy/paste, peer-to-peer gaming, Safari improvements and a lot more stuff. I can tell you it is worth the 8 euros. The copy paste feature is really one of those features you can live without until you got it. I immediately jailbroke it again and reinstalled my theme. For those interested, I’m happily using the Monochrome theme. Here’s a screenshot of it:

Motion Kit

Last weekend I decided to start working on Motion Tracker again, the ingame movement recorder. Since I thought the name WebKit sounded awesome, I decided to rename it to Motion Kit. I worked my ass off to write the new recording and replaying code and to make it all work smooth. It’s still far from done, but here’s a video of the progress:

If you want to try it out and personally know me, ask me on Steam Friends to boot up a server and demonstrate it. I just don’t think it’s ready to be tested by the actual public yet.

CakePhysics

CakePhysics is what you could call “my life work”. I’m writing it for three main reasons:

  • Getting to learn C++ and DirectX better
  • Having a demonstration of my (C++) programming skills
  • Creating a nice game to show off

Actually, in the last four days I’ve made a lot of progress. It isn’t limited to boxes anymore, it doesn’t use sprites anymore, it has a console now, it doesn’t crash randomly anymore and the first interactivity has been added. Here’s a nice little screenshot of its current state:

Oh and guess how easy it is to add anti-aliasing in DirectX?

d3dpp.MultiSampleType = D3DMULTISAMPLE_8_SAMPLES;

That easy! :3 Want to try it out? Download it here and have some fun with it! Let me know if anything goes wrong or of course if you just want to tell me what you think of it!

Tons of creativity

Published on June 3, 2009 in Personal, Programming and Projects. 0 Comments

A lot of stuff has happened between this post and the last one. To start off, I got really tired of the spammers when I started to get 12 e-mails per hour saying I had a new message in the guestbook. I decided to use my PHP GD Library skills once again to write a captcha, and I think it looks pretty damn cool.

Anyway, as of this article, I’ll finally be able to post new blogs on the site itself. This is how I used to post articles:

Lol. Then there’s the thing I need to do for a subject at school. I need to design something for people who only have one arm. My partner came up with the idea of a tool to get hot oven dishes out of the oven easily. He also gave me an idea of the design, I finetuned it and finally modelled it in SketchUp.

Who said school can’t be fun? Then Manadar commented it was too damn heavy to lift and I replied stating that people with one arm less need less energy and therefore less food, heh.

Also, yesterday I wrote one hell of an article about Fretta for garrysmod.com. It was kind of a comeback for me, since I thought the site lacked interesting content. I’d like to do more things like a column about GMod culture, we’ll see.

Still no menu for Evolve unfortunately, but I must say I made quite some progress on it. Groups and immunity are now fully supported and I made a settings class for simple settings saving, which is demonstrated in the restriction.lua plugin. Basically you can do things like this:

Evolve:SetSetting( "OvervIsAwesome", true )
-- Server restart
if Evolve:GetSetting( "OvervIsAwesome" ) then
     -- This code is now ran :>
end

And then, there is CakePhysics. Since my last post I got a shitload further. I’ve learnt how to work with DirectX, picked up the Win32 API again and this is a screenshot of the result so far :D

It already looks pretty cool, but there really isn’t anything to play with yet. The drawing is completely dynamic, but the world creation so far is static. By that, I mean that the box positions and stuff are hardcoded. But still, very awesome to look at! Note that I limited the FPS to the physics updates, otherwise it would exceed 4000, but 4000 frames per second don’t help much when the image on screen only changes about 60 times per seconds :P .

That’s basically it for today. *Tries to come up with something witty to end the blog* Damn’t :3.