That is no moon ...

I'm an evening/night runner. Sunset in Heverlee near Leuven.

And have this one, too.

The age of beauty

Some final results of my computer graphics project. I implemented a graphics rasterizer, which is the implementation one would follow if you wanted hardware-accelerated graphics on today's GPU's, which have pipelines dedicated to vertex transformations. The other option was a raytracer, which is not (yet) suitable for real-time applications due to calculation complexity.

2 light sources, diffuse (gouraud) shading, phong (interpolated), 5000ish polygons. First without, then with bump mapping. Thanks a lot to this Nvidia Developer's Zone paper about Perlin Noise.

Implemented in Java from scratch, I'll drop the source code online soon.

Fax

Credit

Greetings from the low-end side of town

If there's one thing I've always envied console users for, it's the universal system compatibility. You buy a disc, pop it in, and performance (I'm ignoring TV quality here) will be the same for you and other players you encounter.

Not quite so for a PC gamer. I'm sure everybody is familiar with the so-called minimum requirements for a game. This brings me to the first problem. There's a huge ambiguity over what is acceptable as game performance. In game A, meeting the minimum requirements might be good enough to actually load the game into memory and gaze at a slideshow of half-baked pictures, while for game B, meeting them might result in a fluid - although low-end - gaming experience.

So here's my proposal for what a true minimum requirement would have to look like. A configuration which:

Taken an average over the full game (main quest / campaign if we're talking non-linear gameplay)

• renders at an acceptable framerate, say 25 or 30
• at a fixed resolution (1024px)
• benchmarked on a fresh system with the given hardware.

Options should - of course - be set to low quality for this benchmark, but players should not have to deal with serious gameplay disadvantages. All vital objects should be rendered, and 'pop-in' (the sudden appearance of game objects at the horizon, to preserve GPU memory) should be non-obtrusive to gameplay. I'm running out of fingers counting the occurences of a low-settings-configured game pointing to things in the horizon which haven't been rendered yet.

I am aware that game demos are the proverbial hook to draw new buyers in, but it is very important that they represent the state of the actual game, performance-wise. A lot of games are pirated to check out overall performance, because the demo lacks in benchmarking possibilities. And once you've got a pirated copy of a game which performs so-so, who's going to run to the retailer?

Now, I am aware that unlike consoles, not every PC system is the same, even if the hardware matches. I too shrug every time I get my hands on a box which is loaded with bloatware, degrading overall system performance. All I'm asking is for these requirements to be realistic. If an internet connection is required to activate the game, it has to be on the box. If there's an install limit, same story.

Another thing: it is not that hard to come up with new and shiny graphical improvements for games. The algorithms are there, and hardware evolution is catching up. The bottom line is: do we really need them? In the middle of a trans-galaxial firefight, who's going to wonder whether or not the smoke on the battlefield is volumetric, has soft edges and correct physical reaction? As a game developer, you've got to draw the line somewhere, because nowadays, it's a thin line between a fantastic tech demo and a very crappy game experience.

Sure, if your game is all about smoke, you better make sure it's the best damn smoke I've ever seen. If the game is about much more, careful planning of the performance budget is required. Example in case: Call Of Duty 4. Praised as one of the best games of 2007, it effectively balances showdown and performance. Sure, it's all scripted sequences and sprite-based-explosions, but did anyone really bother?

As a conclusion, some games which I've been playing in this busy release season:

• Left4Dead demo: I don't know how they pull it off every time, but Valve surprised me once again with the performance of their latest build of the Source engine. I barely meet the system requirements, but medium settings is all the rage.
• Fallout 3: It looks fugly on my rig. But it's Fallout.
• World Of Goo: I yet have to find the first person who doesn't play this game straight on for the first hour. The music, the animations, the puzzles ... it's actually really good.

Venus, dinosaurs and tablecloths

For my course in Computer Graphics, we had to implement the two basic algorithms in CG: Ray Tracing (using physics theory of viewing and lighting rays to evaluate the color of each pixel) and Rasterization (slap all triangles down to the screen using Matrix transformations).

It can be frustrating at times - one small error can have disastrous consequences, but that's more of a general problem when I code. We got some example objects to render, and I must say the results are great. It's pretty incredible that with these - relatively simple - algorithms, one can render quite a realistic (geometry-wise) image of an object.

Busy

So, the new academic year has started. I'm following a Master in Computer Sciences now, option Human-Machine interaction. I've got a bunch of interesting new courses (Computer Graphics, Distributed Systems, Compiler Construction, ...), but the workload is getting pretty heavy. I'm also organising events for the improvisational theater group I'm active in, Preparee.

So I'm going to do the very thing I think is a landmark in laziness: instead of writing out paragraphs and paragraphs about the tidbits of interesting things I've found in the last few weeks, I'm going to sum them up. That's right. Yes, Dave, I'm afraid I can do that.

• I've been using Drupal a lot for the Preparee website. It's quite complicated to get started with at first, although the module system is a bless. It was hard to get things running, since we opted for drupal 6.X, and a lot of modules still don't have release candidates for the 6 series. Especially the Date module had some problems, but with my little project living against the dev-release line, I helped to debug it.
• The Telectroscope is an awesome art project.
• World of Goo is the best indie game I've played in a long time. It's a physics-based puzzle game with a unique art style and tremendous music. It's quite hard to believe this is a two-man project. I try to avoid using the phrase Bedroom Programmers here, since it tends to sound quite homoerotic.
• Automated P2P enforcement gone wrong: printer sued for downloading Indiana Jones 4. Of all movies, the poor printer.
• Promising one-man MMO: Love. Procedural animation and rendering.
• Video series I've laughed at lately: twisted cubicle workers in ManInTheBox and the ever sarcastic Zero Punctuation.
  

Fog of War

Once again from the lovely Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Rorsach

Thanks to the excellent Rock Paper Shotgun (best website title ever) I keep discovering cute little indie games. Rorsach is a short adventure game, which is interesting on two points:

• Art style: everything is drawn in chinese ink. Although the locations are limited (it's a one man game after all), this works pretty well with the theme, which is an asylum.
• Conversations: instead the of regular "IF you talked to X you can suddenly talk to Y about subject P", the game features an original system: every subject is an actual object. You can add objects (for example The Murder Weapon) to your inventory, and take them to other characters to get them talky about it. Although the inventory is quite small and you still find yourself running back and forth to get all the subjects, this is an interesting take on the genre.

It's free, so I highly recommend you check it out.

Evolution

credit

Summermuxtape !

Since the excellent muxtape.com was taken down by the RIAA yesterday, I thought it was a good time to post some of my favorite summer tunes:

• Tricky - Veronika
  Probably the best track on his newest album, which is worth listening too. It's a return to his trip-hop roots, and I can't help but wondering what Massive Attack would sound like if he was still in it.
  
  
• Cat Power - Hate
  It took a while before I could sit through the latest Cat Power album (The Greatest). The cover art belongs in the deepest bowels of hell, and at a first listen, all the songs sound pretty much the same. How wrong I was, and I stand corrected.
  
  
• Gnarls Barkley - Blind Mary
  It's okay, Cee-Lo. I love Blind Mary too. God forbid you should release this as a single, instead of the mediocre Run.
  
  
• Portishead - Threads
  Although not really a kick-back, hats-off summer song by definition, it surely is a powerful end track. I think. I'm always so unsure.
  
  
• Wilco - Impossible Germany
  You think the melody is nice, wait until the guitar solo at the end.
  
  
• Beirut - Napoleon on the Bellerophon
  Lights out.
  

The Sandvich

He was a good lunch who played by the rules, until the rules robbed him of everything he ever loved. Now he's lettuce, tomato, cheese, bread, and a mysterious slice of meat, marching down your throat and straight to hell. He'll satisfy your hunger. FOR REVENGE!

Noclip

Flox

A project I saw scrolling by on #thepiratebay.org on Efnet caught my attention a couple of weeks ago. Flox is an enhancement on several existing traditional P2P techniques.

"Flox is a technique in development which will identify the same parts from similar files and download those when needed. This will certainly increase speed, for slightly different files. This will also make the technique to strip off metadata from media files obsolete, since Flox will do it universally for ALL sorts of files, whether they have ID3 tags, ApeTags, or something completely new."

The current development draft contains some very interesting stuff about palindrome pattern file splitting and hashing. I'll surely get my hands on this when I have the time.

Unfinished Robbery

Hoping to see them this wednesday at the Lokerse Feesten (update: I missed them, bummer !), I thought this was the right time to release a remix I've been wrestling with during the last months. Danny The Dog (international title: Unleashed) was a mediocre thriller by Luc Besson (Taxi, The Fifth Element, ...), but the soundtrack was composed by Massive Attack. For me, the title track really stood out.

I tried to add a subtle dubby feel to it, by overlooping the beats two or three times (it's random), much like Portishead did in its recent single, Machine Gun. I also played around a lot with the echo/cutoff on the parts without drums.

I overlooped the piano synths by accident, but never corrected my mistake because I thought it sounded quite nice. There's clipping and misplaced frames all over the place, including the odd vinyl crack here and there.

Download

I'll probably never finish this, so I'd better get it out the door. Most of the reverb/pitch effects and rough cutting were done using Audacity, with some additional drumkit programming in Hydrogen and strings generation by the ZynAddSubFX Synthesizer. Those are all free, open source applications.

Men write code from Mars ...

and Women Write More Helpful Code from Venus, quoting the Wall Street Journal.

Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.

So it is true. Javadoc was invented by a woman, because all Sun (planetary pun intended) guys were too stubborn to ask eachother for directions. If it wasn't for women, we'd all be writing unindented lines of assembly. Bless them and their coding skills !

PmWiki

One of my activities these months is setting up a community-oriented wiki for the improvisational theater group Preparee (which I'll be captaining next academic year. Oh, the suspense !). I went for the PmWiki distribution, developed by Patrick Michaud. Since quite a lot of customization went into converting the base installation to a user-oriented / CMS-like system I thought I'd better share some of the tricks and snippets I've been writing.

Always check the PmWiki cookbook before you start hacking away yourself: there are tons of available recipes which might already offer the functionality you wish.

Installation is a piece of cake, it's a matter of unpacking the source files and making the right directories writable by the webserver process (by using chmod on the wiki.d directory). I installed pmwiki on a Linux box. All the further customization is done in the local/config.php file, in separate skins or on the wiki pages themselves. Make sure not to touch the files that came with the core distribution (scripts, default skin ...), it makes upgrading a lot easier. I learned it the hard way :)

Users

The first part consisted of converting the wiki into a private one with several accounts which had different permissions. Setting the site-wide privacy settings (which can be finetuned per page or group by using ?action=attr in the URL) is done in the config.php file:

$DefaultPasswords['read'] = 'id:*';
$DefaultPasswords['edit'] = 'id:*';

This only allows logged-in users to read and edit pages. The site-wide admin password is bound to one account name (mine, in this case), but can be bound to a group too.

The accounts themselves can be defined in the SiteAdmin/Authuser page, in the config file, ... I soon realised that this was cumbersome, since I had to create all of the accounts by hand. By moving the accounts to a .htpasswd file and the group definitions to a .htgroup file I was able to automate the registration process :

• Install the excellent htpasswdform recipe. It shows regular users a change password form, unregistered users a new user form and admin users a group/user management tool. Prevent account spam by installing the Captcha recipe too.
  
• New users get added to a unchecked group. They get restricted privileges. Authorizing them is simply transferring them to the users group. This allows admin to check user accounts first.
• The next part is letting pages display different links for each group. This is done by adding some custom Conditional Markup to the config file: $Conditions['authgroup'] = '$GLOBALS["AuthList"][$condparm] > 0';
  This allows you to check a current users group by using (:if authgroup=groupname:) and thus showing different content. I managed to write a quite complicated sidebar / AuthForm chock-full of checks. Dirty, but it works wonderfully well. Other interesting checks: (:if enabled AuthId:) (:if auth admin:) (:if auth read:)
  

Usability

The next step was to add functionality. It's pretty easy to edit the standard edit-form GUI buttons:

$GUIButtons ['textred'] = array($ArrayCount++, '%25red%25', '%25%25', '$[Red Text]','$GUIButtonDirUrlFmt/hightextred.gif"$[Red Text]"');

Adds an extra button which allows the user to color text. Check this page for more info.

Another thing I wrote was a simple shoutbox using Fox forms. This allows people, just by using standard button interaction, to post content to a page (in this case: a shoutbox). I wrote several fox scripts to allow users with no wiki knowledge whatsoever to perform basic tasks (shoutbox, adding themselves to an event, ...) by just using buttons and standard forms. It doesn't always result in pretty code, though ...

Shoutbox

I submitted this to the PmWiki cookbook. You can find the code here. This block was implemented as a page in a permanent div block I added to my custom skin. It's pretty straightforward from there. Don't forget: do not edit the default pmwiki skin, it will get replaced by a new version on the next upgrade.

Event attending/not attending list

This one's a bit uglier:

%comment% Start enroll/disroll code '''Attending''' %comment% enrolllist '''Not attending''' %comment% disrolllist (:fox enroll:) (:foxreplace template=Site.EnrollRemove target={$FullName} put=all mark="* [[Profiles/{$$author}]]" foxsuccess='[[<<]]' foxfailure='[[<<]]':) (:foxadd template=Site.EnrollAdd target='{$FullName}' put=below mark=enrolllist foxsuccess='Attending!' foxfailure='Probleem !':) (:input hidden author value='{$Author}' :) (:input hidden csum value='is attending':) %center%(:input submit post 'Im attending':) (:foxend enroll:) (:fox disroll:) (:foxreplace template=Site.EnrollRemove target='{$FullName}' put=all mark="* [[Profiles/{$$author}]]" foxsuccess='[[<<]]' foxfailure='[[<<]]':) (:foxadd template=Site.EnrollAdd target='{$FullName}' put=below mark=disrolllist foxsuccess='Not attending' foxfailure='Problem !':) (:input hidden author value='{$Author}' :) (:input hidden csum value='is not attending':) %center%(:input submit post 'Im not attending':) (:foxend disroll:) (:foxmessage enroll:)
(:foxmessage disroll:)

As you can see, both of the buttons are in a different fox form, each with two actions: replace the current occurences of the author name on the page, and add it to the right list. Disadvantage: you can't use more than one of these on the same page, only the first will get updated. Makes you wonder ... what if people were actually good enough to simply use the edit button and add their name ? :)

Voxel Trouble

Some interesting bits up at Google Code : it's my second Radiohead-related post this week, I know. For the recording of the House of Cards video clip they did not use any camera's. Yes, that's right. Instead, they used specialised hardware that can register 3D geometry at a very fast rate, and manipulated the information - not only in post-capture processing, though. You can see in the making-of video how they distort the 3D measurements by using reflective surfaces or water.

From a free-software point of view, this project is pretty interesting too: by using the Processing programming language and the data sets (a singing Thom Yorke and a lot of captured architecture) people can remix the video. It's no straightforward task, but if only I had the time, I'd give it a try ...

Big ideas

The song nude by Radiohead performed on old hardware. Several doses of awesome.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Hang in there

Things have gotten a bit busy for the summer. I'm writing code for several projects, personal and public. Since I made a strike of three 9/20's on my exams, I have to squeeze in some study time too (retries are scheduled for August).

Put mum on the phone !

Keep an eye on the jars. Brilliant.

Foxhunt !

Today marks the release of Mozilla Firefox 3.0. To celebrate this, the Mozilla Foundation is trying to set the Guinness World Record for most downloaded software. So if you've never tried out Firefox before or were bound to update anyway, go ahead. World-wide release times can be viewed here.

Version 3 adds faster rendering (through Gecko 1.9), intelligent bookmarks and smaller memory footprint. Pages load noticeably faster. Firefox is available for all Windows, Linux and Mac flavours.

Firefox is a web browser. I know there are tons of people out there still thinking Internet Explorer is The Internet. I have to cry myself to sleep every night over it.

P.S: Congratulations to the Mozilla Art team for having that giant retro robot in the beta.

FT(cat) = Meow(f)

How can a man every concentrate on studying filters and digital signal processing when every Google search on the matter eventually leads him to a vortex of inproductivity ?

A Skin, A Night

I bought the slightly brilliant documentary A Skin, A Night by Vincent Moon last week. It's about The National, a Brooklyn-based rock band which have been making their way to the spotlights slowly in the last few years. Their latest album, Boxer, got some great media coverage in Europe last spring.

Moon didn't shoot a rockumentary: it's a - quite depressing at times - sober montage on the subject of the band members and the recording of the album. A lot of the songs have multi-layered sequences with a lot of instruments, and it's wonderful to see how it all comes together.

Also, the photography is quite odd: instead of using the standard interview and overview shots, we often look at scenes from a fly-on-the-couch perspective, the band members often not even noticing that the tape is rolling. There's also a lot of zooming in to small details, like eyebrows, mouth twitches and ... well, legs.

The DVD came with The Virginia EP, but with it's length of nearly an hour, it's fair to call it an album. Sure, it's a collection of live registrations, b-sides and demo's, but other artists would give a kidney to come even close to these gems. Make sure to check out the Rest of Years demo and the live version of About Today.

Which brings me to another project of Mr. Moon: Concerts a Emporter.

The idea is simple: follow a known (or less known) artist for a couple of hours (I'd like to know how exactly he tackles that part), which often results in a spontaneous street performance or very intimate versions of songs, all at unusual locations. Some of the highlights: The Arcade Fire performs Neon Bible in an elevator , Beirut performs Nantes in the streets of Paris, and once again, The National plays Ada on a mountain top.

Sex, Drugs and Video Games

Okay, you can stop the giggling now.

This is a lecture by Daniel Floyd (Savannah College of Art & Design) on the subject of sex in videogames, and why it is a necessary step to accept intimacy in videogames in much the same way we accept it in movies: a strong part of the storyline, a major factor for emotional involvement. Never mind the high-pitched not-really-Yahtzee voice.



Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun !

The Biggest Narcist in the World

Today I read about Erik Nordenankar, who did a pretty cool thing: he developed a GPS transmitter with elongated battery life, put it in a shock-proof closed case, printed out very detailed instructions (places and coordinates) and handed the lot to the world-wide delivery company DHL.

By using the acquired data from the transmitter he could set out a trace of the case's journey afterwards. To say it in his own words, he used the briefcase as a pen, and our planet as a canvas. The result is amazingly detailed, although it's a bit pretentious to throw bags of (sponsored) dollars around to paint the biggest self-portrait ever made.

All info and some nice videos can be found on the website: Biggestdrawingintheworld.com

I would have gone for a crudely drawn fallus (testicles left and right of the african continent, shaft crossing the meditteranean sea, ending in the Scandinavian area). Just to see the looks on the sponsor's faces.

Beats it

Since I moved my audio mixer to my student room in Leuven, mixing attempts have become more frequent. I'm not a professional DJ, I just like to recycle the tunes I love in a new way. Recording and after-editing was done using Audacity.

Any help at identifying that unknown Tiga track would be great :)



Playlist

• 0:00 : Simian Mobile Disco - It's The Beat (from the album Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release)
  
• 0.00 : Faithless - God is a DJ (Rollo Live dub from an Athens 2004 bootleg)
• 1.40 : Kraftwerk - Radioactivity (from the album Minimum, Maximum)
• 3.20 : Moby - .257 (from the album Last Night)
• 5.48 : Junior Senior - Shake Your Coconuts (DFA Remix)
• 8.20 : Hot Chip - Over and Over (taken from the 2 Many DJ's Essential Mix)
• 11.42 : Tiga - Unknown track (taken from Live set)
• 11.42 : Soulwax - Another Excuse / NY Lipps (from the album Any Minute Now - Nite Versions)
• 15.13 : The Chemical Brothers - Do It Again / Electronic Battle Weapon 9 (from a We Are The Night b-side)
• 18.40 : Daft Punk - Around the World - (from the album Homework)

Update: this mix was posted on the Tempo Music Deal website, a Belgian mixing contest. Go here to listen, vote and win me that car.

Towel Day

Thanks to fellow blogger Pelle at Blikkendoos.be, I will never forget that the 25th of may is from now on Towel Day. In order to celebrate the festivities, I went for a Vogon-green one.

Don't hesitate to post your pictures of Towel Day madness, but make sure to cut off the parts future employers could use to identify you. Much like I did.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

And then, on one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.

This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
(...)
This is her story.

One of the best prologues of a book ever, and it's from So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish, the fourth book in Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker trilogy.

If you haven't heard about these books before, you should go out and recklessly buy them. If you have seen the movie, forget it - reckless buying is the way to go here, too. If you have heard about it and already own a copy ... well, backup is nice.

Mind you, don't buy any translation. Some of the jokes depend heavily on the English language and Adams' clever way of twisting it. Honestly, it's the best birthday gift I ever got :)

• Wikipedia on The Hitchhiker's Guide
• Wikiquotes (lots of good ones there, but some of them might spoil parts of the books - read them first.)
  

Plain Talking

I will go to hell for this. Especially for the over-use of the vocoder / beatslicer. Whoops ! Most of the effects were done in Audacity with the help of the ZynAddSubFX software synthesizer. Both are freely available open-source products.



Elements you might recognize:

• (vocals / synth) Moby - Lift Me Up (from the album Hotel)
• (bass) Trentemöller - Into The Trees (Serenneti Part 3) (from the album The Last Resort)
• (bass) Justice- Let There Be Light (from the album Cross)
• (weird double kicks near the end) The Chemical Brothers - Electronic Battle Weapon 9 (from a We are the Night b-side)
  

Steamworks

Steamworks went live today. I've requested my API key, have you ?

On a lighter note, here are some interesting articles I've stumbled upon during the last few weeks. Cracked compiled a list of 7 commandments all video games should obey. (#3 is my favorite). Another - more serious - article was posted on Eurogamer by Rob Fahey, concerning the interactivity and freedom users get from the latest closed console systems. It really is an interesting viewpoint on how the gaming industry should evolve.

User-created content on the Internet, everything from YouTube to Flickr, from blogs to MySpace, from Flash games to MP3 mash-ups, is absorbing more and more time from the generation videogaming would like to have called its own. If this industry is going to sit back en masse and act as though encouraging a select few to put shareware-style games on consoles is enough of a response to this revolution, then gaming risks taking a serious blow - knocked off its perch, ironically, because the most interactive medium of all refused to let its audience interact.

Smashing Mashups

If there's one thing that can drive traditional music lovers crazy, it's mashups. Take the vocals from song A, the bass-line from song B and that funky synth sound from track C, and put them together so it sounds like something new. Blasphemy, you say ? I don't think so.

I recently discovered The Kleptones. They are a Brighton-based DJ collective who mixes rock/R&B instrumentals with rap and hip-hop bits. The albums get released online for free, as "promotional material", because the samples obviously weren't cleared. Be sure to check out their conceptual album 24 hours (which is indeed, a two disc soundscape) and the registration of their show at the Bestival in 2007. A comprehensive list of samples used can be found on Wikipedia.

Tracks to check:

• War of Confusion (Genesis, Edwin Starr and Bush samples)
• Underground Hand (The White Stripes, Nine Inch Nails, Primal Scream, Tori Amos)
• Cymbalicker (Aphex Twin, Bon Jovi)

Another good place to look for recent mashups and remixes is The Hype Machine, which is a tracker of music blogs and creates charts for popular tracks. Lots of free music up for the grabs there !

Interview on ND

There's a small interview up on the independent gaming industry blog Pariah's Guild about the project I'm working on, Nuclear Dawn. It's an interesting read, although my lack of English vocabulary makes me sound like a five year old from time to time.
The blog itself has a bit of an amateur feel too it (lack of markup and image scaling), but you've got to start somewhere, and I'm in no position to criticize someone else's blog skills.

The long dark teatime of Dist-Upgrade

Every six months, it's that time again ... upgrading to the newest Ubuntu release. I don't know which department is in charge of the release branding, but with the label for release 8.04 (The year 2008, fourth month) they have outdone themselves: Hardy Heron. I really hope Mark Shuttleworth opens an Ubuntu Zoo out there in South Africa. Screw PETA, it would be horribly nice of him. The man's been into space, is there anything he can't afford ? A couple of drakes, fawns and herons would do the trick.

Back to the dist-upgrading then. The great thing about Unix is that all of your settings are stored in a central place: the Home folder (trademark). Backing up your system is a simple matter of backing up one directory. Even if it all goes bottoms up, it's just a matter of an hour (I/O wait time, mostly) to get your system back into the exact state it was.

After the obligatory reboot - yes, the only necessary reboot is when your kernel has changed - all seemed to work, except for a few Gnome panels. I'm 23 days early, the release is still in beta, so I was expecting some trouble either way.

Let's go quickly over the big changes in this release:

• Firefox 3 beta: A huge improvement. The overall feel is a lot smoother, pages render blazingly fast, regardless of how many flash elements, poorly structured chunks of HTML or high-resolution pictures the page holds. The interface (and the download dialog) had a necessary cleanup, and the bookmarks system is a lot clearer now.
• Gnome 2.22: Simple, yet elegant, Gnome remains my favorite desktop manager, although I'm going to check out the spectacular-looking KDE4 too. The most noticable improvement probably is the bundling of file transfer dialogs. When you're moving a lot of files between disks, the task bar used to get cluttered with "copying files" or "moving files" dialogs. Now, they are all bundled into one convenient dialog. It's a detail, but it sure makes a difference.
• CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler): Since kernel 2.6.23, the standard Linux schedular has switched to CFS mode, which is an intelligent way of distributing processor time over several processes. It improves desktop reaction time, and makes the overall experience of working with GUI's feel smoother. You can read the (nerdy at first glance, extremely interesting at a second look) lengthy discussion Mr. Torvalds had with the other kernel developers here.

I'm very satisfied with the new release overall ! Also, very interesting for windows users: you can try out Ubuntu from within windows now, thanks to the new Wubi installation system !

(warning: next section is extremely boring if you don't have an Intel Proset Wireless chipset in your laptop, if any :) )

And now, on to the slightly bad news: this update bricked my wireless connectivity, partially. Since the 2.6.24 kernel version, ubuntu has switched from ipw3945 to ilw3945 as kernel module for Intel Proset Wireless interfaces. This new module seems to have several quirks, which hopefully will be ironed out before Hardy goes out of beta. Here's a couple of things you can do if you're experiencing troubles with given card:

• Launchpad #204709: Solution for network interface wlan0 changing to wlan0_rename and useless activation of eth1 after performing an upgrade.
• This thread offers a solution which is connected to a broken CAPA implementation, but that seems to be resolved in the latest Network-Manager updates.
• Launchpad: #210005: My bugreport about the issue

Level Designers wanted

Just a quick word to note that the Source Engine modification I'm working on, Nuclear Dawn, is looking for fresh level designers. If you've got a fair amount of experience with VHE and some kickass work to show, don't hesitate to apply !

Development has been a bit slow at Nuclear Dawn, but the mod is still on the public radar (we were mentioned in Moddb's Modcast Episode 3 last week), and we're trying our very best to get it out the door. The team consists of a fair amount of industry professionals, and they tend to have their precious time sucked up by other projects. The team leader, for example, is working on the very promising Battlefield: Heroes.

Check out the newspost for some new shiny media, too !

Update: the newspost was featured at:

• HalfLife2.net
• Planet Half-Life
• ModDB and this ModDB article about 'Eye Candy'
• HLFallout
• Interlopers
  

The untold story

Happy Easter !





















Source

We are the robots

The city had nothing to lose

I'd like to share some of my favorite free (and legal) music I found on the web.

Nathan Wiley is a pop/folk musician and singer from the great Canada, which over the past five years has released 3 albums on an indie label. His most recent album was released last year and has received numerous of Canadian awards already. Some of his tracks are free for download at his website. Recommendations are the title track The City Destroyed Me and a great song from his first album, Renegade.

I discovered Isabelle Antena through a Thievery Corporation remix release (Versions, 2006), on which her song Nothing to Lose got the standard thievery touch: dubbed up with a great vocal mixdown. The tracks which are available at her website vary from pop to lounge, in French and English. Recommendations are Les Poissons des Mers du Sud and Melodie.

On a lighter note, my lengthy previous post seems to have hit the right buttons at Epic.

Disarray

Cliff Bleszinski recently told MTV Multiplayer the following in an interview:

I think the PC is just in disarray… what’s driving the PC right now is ‘Sims’-type games and ‘WoW‘ and a lot of stuff that’s in a web-based interface. You just click on it and play it. That’s the direction PC is evolving into So for me, the PC is kind of the secondary part of what we’re doing. It’s important for us, but right now making AAA games on consoles is where we’re at.

A pretty bold statement for someone who gets his paycheck written out by a company who scored its first commercial success on the PC platform in the nineties with a series of shooters which still remain their most important releases nowadays.

Also notice how Cliff nicely reduces the platform to a playground restricted to thirteen year old girls with personality issues, disfunctional nerds and poker addicts. He actually makes it sound like Click and Play ain't quite right. Wait, what's the major selling point for consoles ?

I actually had to look up disarray.

1. a mental state characterized by a lack of clear and orderly thought and behavior; "a confusion of impressions" [syn: confusion]

So what, one might think. Our friend Cliffy has a strong preference for console games. He just made a million-selling title for the Xbox360. And then he drops yet another bomb.

"I think people would rather make a game that sells 4.5 million copies than a million and Gears is at 4.5 million right now on the 360,"

Hold it right there, Cliffy. This so called logic might apply in your wretched view on the games industry, but it's time to get the facts right.

• Platform exclusives are killing the industry: One might say that they are a major selling point for people to buy consoles, and I can't compete with that. On the other hand, you can't compare a game which was hyped-up for a year with a poor PC port thrown out six months later. Here's a pro tip: don't go bragging with the parallel development teams when you're not going to release their products on the same day.
  
  Even without the obvious port quality issues (a recurring problem with console titles), you're actually frustrating possible customers because their friend Bob with system X can already play the game and enjoy the content, while they are still in the dark about l possible port to their system Y. Oh, and they don't know Bob good enough to get themselves invited for a game night.
  
  There is solid proof that a simultaneous release works, and ironically enough, CliffyB noted this as his favorite game or the year - with the possibility that he praises it as an Unreal 3 techdemo - Bioshock. It was released on all platforms (even on content distribution networks), and the sales went through the roof.
  
  
• Unified gaming is blocked deliberately: I've stressed it before, and I cannot stress it enough: the only thing standing in the way of enabling cross-platform gaming for gamers around the world - and thus ease some of the hostility between platforms - are the big corporations. Epic's main game publisher, Microsoft, only allows this feature on a very restricted amount of titles, undoubtedly in exchange for a huge bag of dollars. All of the console manufacturers have a functional online service, which works over regular ISP services. We have missed our mark there, and the consequences might be bigger than we expect. And I'm not even talking about the classification of customers. Gold, Silver, Bronze ? If I buy a game, I want the online functionality to be complete, disregarding my will to shell out cash for an online service I should get for free.
  
  
• Ignorance of modification support is a big mistake: Still a long way to go on the console front. If I create a mod for an XBox 360 game, I have to go through a long XNA procedure to actually get the game on the XBox MarketPlace (if I manage to cook it together with the provided half-assed tools), and don't even get me started on what happens if - god forbid - the mod gets too successful. I should have read the small prints in the XNA License Agreement. There is no way to publish custom tools for console games (Texture Mappers, UV mappers, ...). There is no way to publish custom content for console games (Maps, Sound packs, skins ...). Get your act together.
  
  
• Unreal 3 sales aren't all rainbows and butterflies: Maybe Cliffy is itchy about the bad Unreal 3 PC sales. It is my opinion that the platform was spoiled with excellent FPS-titles this year (Orange Box, Call Of Duty 4, Quake 4, ...). Also, Unreal 3 might not be the strongest title in the series. You don't enhance a game by making every playable character wear a ton of ridiculously bloated armor (kevlar-plated breast support, anyone ?) and throwing in a bunch of far-fetched gameplay modes. Even if it's all covered in DX10 chocolate, this waffle tastes like it's been in a closet for five years.

Kind regards,
Me

No Blog for Old Men

Five reasons why No Country for Old Men deserved to dominate Oscar night:

• Bardem: Take a sniff of Lecter, tone down the voice to bass level, add the worst hairdo since Prince became a symbol and you've got Anton Chigurgh, which might be the most ruthless villain in film history.
• Violence: Some critics pointed out that the movie wouldn't have a chance at the Oscars, because there is too much violence in it. It is my opinion that most violent scenes were deliberately cut out by the Coens - which makes them even more special. This is not a violence-oriented movie, far from it.
  
• Ending: Without revealing too much: the ending might feel awkward at first, but when you pause and reflect about the whole movie, it actually fits.
• Panoramic: Only the Coens would take the time to stretch out this movie with widescreen-shots of desert environments.
• Music: There was none. When shooting a movie (I'd entitle it A Black Western, minus the shooting) in the Great American Desert, it would be easy to fall back on Ennio Morricone-esque pieces.
  

Pay attention to the man behind the curtain

After a second playthrough, I must say Call of Duty 4 is hands-down one of the finest games you could buy in 2007. It really puts the focus on certain points which have an enormous impact on a player's perception of the game, points where other game developers usually beat around the bush or hide behind the proverbial big white 'look, we've got Next-Gen' rabbit.

Let's start with the graphical presentation for instance. Even when playing on a fairly low-end system (an experience which has been a constant throughout my young life), one only has to play the opening sequence (on a cargo ship in the middle of an atlantic storm) to get the picture: whew, what happened ? How did they pull this off ?

It's very simple. Nobody cares whether or not every drop of water splashes the way Newton would have predicted. Nobody cares whether or not the floor they're walking on has that certain griddy bump-mapped feel to it. Nobody cares whether or not every light in the environment interferes dynamically with every model. The bottom line is not 64-bit floating point specular lighting, it's good old whatever-bit spectacular lighting. It scales down well, too. Don't go for that perfect approximation of real life - it would be a hard sell.

Another aspect CoD 4 brilliantly nails is this: Scripted sequences done right. No matter how twisted your gameplay style is, you never get the impression that you're linearly traversing a level, crossing invisible triggers that spawn baddies. The same point gets stressed here: don't waste your time on cross-map AI that's too subtle to notice - at least for a FPS - and just make sure the local, in-your-face presentation makes sense.

Buy it ! :)

Autoviewer XML Generator

For my webdesign activities, I sometimes use the great Autoviewer, which is a handy flash application to quickly display images in a slideshow fashion. Recently, I implemented this in a small website for a company.

They were going to add photo's every day, and don't know how to edit XML files to include the new pictures. I added a handy python script to generate an XML file based on all the images contained in a folder. All comments are left blank, so if you want comments on every picture, you still have to edit the XML. Alltogether, it's better than nothing. Enjoy, hope it's of good use somewhere.

Update Dec 30 2008:

This script seems to be very popular. Possible enhancements are proper image scaling using the python image library. Let me know if you have implemented this.

Steamworks

A big announcement was made by - ah well, it is my favorite game developer after all - the great Valve yesterday. They are going to release the back-end resources which have proven to work in their recent high-profile titles to other developers, for free.

Steamworks will be a platform for developers to access the server system, copy-protection and community system from within their game. In an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun , Doug Lombardi mentions that this combination will be seamless: all steam dialogs can be integrated within the game. Another important point is that the game doesn't have to be distributed in the Steam store.

It makes sense for developers to just have access to this stuff that is essential, but no great design challenge – the copy protection, the server browser – and the motivation for us is that if a game uses our encryption and sells millions of copies, all those people who didn’t already have a Steam account have to make one. Once they’re there we can talk to them and turn them on to all the other games on Steam.

That's essentially what this is about, and it sure isn't a bad motivation. But things can get even better.

• Unified gaming: With the current load of console systems having full internet capability, there's no reason not to allow cross-platform gaming. Sure, Microsoft tried it with Shadowrun, but that never really hit it. You have published two of the most succesful games of the last decade. If anyone can pull off the cross-platform trick ...
• Mod distribution: This was vaguely promised in the very first steam releases (which ironically didnt work - pun intended). Community-made modifications have always been one of the cornerstones of the Half-Life series, and it's a bit of a shame that mod developers still have to write an external installer to install these mods. Most certainly, if you're going for the release early, release often development cycle, some way of pushing out updates without hosting and mirroring small incremental patches would be nice.
  

ModDB MOTY Results

The results are up !

Some surprises in there though. When it comes to indie games, there's a strong move towards the ID Tech 3 engine, which was GPL'ed recently. It's nice to see that because of ID's engines are OpenGL-based most of these new games run multi-platform.

In the unreleased mod section, mods based on Half-Life 2 traditionally perform well, but the next-gen technologies (Crysis engine, Unreal2k7) are gaining interest of developers.

Overall, it's been a great year for modding. Congratulations to all participating teams !

ModDB Mod Of The Year Awards

In 4 days, the results of the ModDB 2007 Mod of the Year Contest are announced. These awards showcase the best game modifications and indie games of the last year. It's the first year I'm participating in the contest too, with my work on the mod Nuclear Dawn. After a first round, we received a nomination for the top100 mods, which then was showcased on the ModDB website and on AMD Game.

Nuclear Dawn is a total conversion mod in development for the Valve Source Engine (the engine powering the popular FPS Half-Life 2), aiming at fast-paced action in a post-nuclear world. Yes, although the theme might seem a bit generic, the artwork and attention to detail in the mod is pretty incredible. Most of the people working on the assets and maps are industry professionals, have a look at some of the more recent media releases:








I'm working on the Linux server build and some things for the HUD and in-game dialogs, and I have to say I have learned more than I could imagine working with this talented bunch. I don't think we stand a chance to win anything in the Most Promising category, where Black Mesa might win again.

When it comes to released Source mods this year, it's been a fan-tas-tic-u-lar year. A short overview of the ones I've tried:

• Dystopia: After a solid U4, this mod still is the best Source mod in my book, although the player count has dropped lately. Lovely futuristic theme, top-quality polish (shiny body armor is sexy, period) and balanced maps.
• Minerva: Hats off for mister Adam Foster. A one-man, three-episode single-player adventure with lovely writing and great puzzles. Valve: hire this man !
• Sourceforts: One of the first mods making full use of the multiplayer physics which were enabled in one of the earlier SDK updates. It's fun to play, but has one major flaw: there always has to be an admin on the server to verify the built forts. I don't even want to think about the deep-space math involved to check this automagically, so no harm done.
• Empires: The closest to Battlefield you can come. When you're playing this on a server with people who know what they're doing, it's fun. Otherwise you'll be running around desert environments for ages.
  
• Pirates, Vikings and Knights II : It has all that is promised in the mod's name. Honestly, how could this fail ?
• Zombie Master: One of the new mods that faced this year. Lovely idea, great programming for the overview mode, but somehow I'm getting tired of seeing the same City17 player models.
• Fortress Forever: A very unlucky release date (very close to the release of Team Fortress 2, the "official" sequal to Team Fortress Classic) might have killed this mod. It's fun to play, has all the polish it needs, but the playercount never peaks. Also, the absence of the quintessential Fortress classic 2fort in the release only makes me think this was rushed out.
  
• Insurgency: Somehow the first release (beta 1) ruined it for me. I don't have any problem with full-realism mods, but the complete lack of objective waypointing or a map makes the learning curve very steep. Also, for no apparent reason, this mod has severe performance problems on my box.

I wish the best of luck to all participating mod teams, let's make 2008 even better !

Know your classics

If your father is like mine, and thus tried desperately to talk some sense into you when it comes to music, preferably by playing records. You know what I'm talking about. I vividly remember afternoons in the living room, playing around with those funny vinyl covers containing big pictures of men with moustaches, and listening to music that 'would never die'.









Well, eventually some of it did, and I might have turned out a mixed blessing. I know every song in the Beatles catalogue by hard, whilst still enjoying the other sides of the musical spectrum - pounding, pounding techno music. You tried, dad, you tried, but Kraftwerk might have been a mistake.

Then again, any of the following would drive him nuts. Please turn away from what I'm about to reveal to you now:

Hippocamp is a collection of electronic artists which are all working in a different field, ranging from classic to dubstep over techno and home again. As an experiment, they sometimes recontextualize classic albums, in this case: Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys, containing the hits God Only Knows and Sloop John B. This album was recorded when Brian Wilson was still a genious. The album was recorded in 1965, using only four track recorders. And now, 40 years later, Hippocamp ruined it.

This has a variety of implementations: stripping a song to its bare minimum and make something new out of it, or seperating the seperate beats, guitar riffs and vocals and do an alternate mix of the song.

Although obviously, the samples used on this release haven't been cleared - and they never will - I warmly recommend giving this a listen. Another HippoCamp project is the ruining of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Fred Viola version of For the Benefit of Mr. Kite is brilliant.

Never leave the chair

In my never-ending quest to make life even lazier than it is, I decided to fiddle around a bit with my Bluetooth-enabled phone. I have a Nokia 6600, which only downside I've found so far is it's clunky size and weight. Then again, the weight has its upsides too. Within a 10-yard radius, I'm deadly with this phone.

Back to the Bluetooth-goodness then. Although it was hyped up by the telecom sector around the year 2000, it's most common use field today is still in the business section. You've seen them, those fancy headsets. Have a look at the advert on the left. It's hard to neglect the pure joy of wearing a headset, even when you're a businesswoman with curly hair. Most people have Bluetooth-enabled phones nowadays, but don't realize the tremendous fun and excitement it brings.

For instance, I was at a concert once, and a guy in front of me was trying to capture the whole experience using his cell phone. I fail to see how much joy he would have afterwards when watching the blurry VGA 30-second clip, bundled with the sound equivalent of farts in a box, but hey, who am I to judge. He was, however, blocking my view with the desperate cell-phone waving.

So I flipped out my mobile, scanned for Bluetooth devices, and found his gadget. When I sent him the Bluetooth connection invitation, the video recording application on his phone quit. He spent the next 10 minutes figuring out what the hell happened, and I was the concert hero. Well, not exactly, at least I could see the stage again.

Today, I managed to control my Linux music player using my cell phone. Using Remuco, an open-source server/client(java) bundle, I'm now capable of switching tracks, changing the volume and rating tracks, all without leaving the chair.

And that, my friends, is holy.