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Director June 13th, 2009
Here's another nugget found in old hard drives.
While I was working for Viherjuuren Verkkoviestintä, before my trip to Israel, I was asked to look into Macromedia Director in order to support some of the "multimedia CD" projects the company was doing. I spent a while looking at the program and then asked if I could get into some actual course about it, in order to learn what the heck it was about in order to tackle the scripting side.
The company sent me to a university class about Director. It was.. interesting. I ended up having a shouting match with the teacher who claimed that 32 bit mode had "over 4 billion colors", and tidbits like that. By the end of the course I did the following:
You'll need the shockwave plugin to play it. Anyway, after the beginning message, click on the rotating box in the lower right corner to start the effect proper. That little effect included several things the teacher did not know were possible in director, and I doubt could figure out how to do.. =)
Back then director did not have actionscipt, but lingo, which looks something like this: "SET THE A OF THE B TO THE A OF THE B + 1", which in sane language would be "a.b++;". Other fun oddities include the fact that maximum line length of the script depended on window width - so if you run out of space, just make the window wider..
In general the whole scripting of director back then was a pile of hacks on a pile of hacks, with multiple levels of ways to override scripts, all linked to different things, like the timeline, scene, sprites, and possibly other things. Debugging, without prior understanding of how scripting had been used in said project, was a nightmare. From what I understand of lingo's history, it was a scripting language designed for graphics artists, not programmers. But then new features were desired, and the language mutated into something designers can't use and programmers don't want to use. May it rest in peace.
It's kind of a pity that I didn't end up doing much for those multimedia projects. I did do a online game for Pizza Hut though, which was on the finnish Pizza Hut site for several years.
Israel June 5th, 2009
First of those nuggets I mentioned a couple posts ago - I found some pictures of my time in Israel working for 3Dion, and figured I'd post them. Then figured I'd write some notes about the pictures. Then ended up writing over 30k of my memories along with the pictures. Then searched the old hard drives for more images to go along with the text..
I set up project wonderful ads in place of the google ads on the top of the pages; some say they work better than the google ones, so we'll see.
I bought an IDE-to-USB adapter to access some old hard drives of mine, and I managed to fish out a couple of gold nuggets. I'll probably do a few posts on these in the following days.
As a user request, I added timestamp at the end of the pages. They're not too reliable, but at least they're something.
Little This and That May 14th, 2009
Time flies, yet time moves too slowly. Such is life. Some things we'd like to happen earlier, while others don't last long enough.
Anyway. A few years ago I was hunting for someone to host forums for my tutorials, which never happened before I moved
to gfxile. Now, if I'd want to set up forums, I'd probably take the lefora.com Free Forum.
I've lately wasted some time playing broken picture telephone, which is simply brilliant, if they'd just figure out how to keep griefers in line.
Speaking of playing, I'm re-playing thief 3 now that "thiaf" has been announced, and I'm delighted at how good the game looks like still now. Only if it would be possible to make the load times faster somehow..
Oh, and decided to plonk down money for spotify premium account. I've basically only listened to spotify for the past month or so. =)
Flash May 5th, 2009
I've long felt that some of my tutorials would really benefit from flash examples, so I finally
bit the bullet and learned some actionscript. The interpolation tutorial
now features animations done with flash alongside the graphs.
I'm still quite a newbie, but who knows, maybe you'll see more flash examples in my tutorials later on. Or
maybe even a flash tutorial. =)
For those you wish to know, I used FlashDevelop IDE and the Flex SDK - so no commercial tools were harmed during
the production of those small applets.
Oh, and registered www.typomagia.com as well. We'll see when I find the time to get back to that.
Recent Search Terms April 12th, 2009
Here's a selection of some recent search terms. A bit early this time, but there's some good ones:
"allocconsole second thread second console only one console"
- I think a windows process can only have one console. Could be wrong, though.
"c program to display a given positive integer number like an lcd screen 3x3"
- Kind of an interesting school assignment. Does this refer to some graphics mode, or text? Either has its own challenges.
"calculate and plot pixel coordinates of line that have two and points (10,5) and (2,2) using bresenham algorthm assuming that the starting point is at the left"
- I don't know.. could you be a bit more specific?
"can you make an mmorpg in html?"
- Sure. Can you? Of course the back end can't be pure html, and some ajax stuff needs to be applied..
"dare survival"
- To quote Sokal's Ankardo, "bravery is not having imagination at the right time" (or some such)
"galaxql refreshes blinks"
- Probably on a mac. wxwidgets doesn't work exactly the same on all platforms.
"getting x and y coordinates from the color hex like "0xffffff""
- You're asking for a two-dimensional coordinates in cartesian space from a 3-dimensional color space?
"how do i get pyrokinesis to show up on my webcam"
- Step one: perform an actual pyrokinesis.
"how to block off water in a vivarium"
- We keep the ventilation and temperature high. High temperature keeps the water in mostly gaseous form, and ventilation gets rid of the extra moisture.
"how to calculate transformation in 3d game"
- That's probably one of the most fundamental things while making a 3d game.
"how to change levels in a game programming"
- Depends entirely on the game in question, but the basic idea is to ditch all the data about the old level and load up the new one.
"how to convert picture to ascii art 16 colors"
- More art than science, I've found.
"how to find text mode character size"
- You generally speaking don't. And the user may change fonts on the fly, as well. Some fonts are vector fonts as well..
"how to get calculate position using srand"
- Now, 'srand' initializes the random number generator. It doesn't even return a value..
"how to pause loop sdl"
- SDL_Sleep() yields the thread for N milliseconds, if that's what you're after. To make a 'pause' mode in your game, you need to implement game clock separately, and don't increment that while in pause mode.
"i want a mmorpg that's a bit different"
- That's the problem, isn't it? Everyone wants to make an mmo that's only a bit different.
"if we received a radio message from alpha centauri today,how long agp would have it been sent?"
- About 4.37 years.
"in the game,what is the most important tool in the time of survival"
- Your wits.
"latest survival stuff"
- You're on the wrong site.
"my logitech webcam has suddenly gone hazy"
- Stop smoking.
"no suitable graphics card found couldn't find a direct3d device that has a direct3d 0 level dirver and supports pixel shader 1.1 or greater this program requires pixel shader 1.1 and vertex shader"
- That sounds a lot like an error message from some application. How about searching the net for the application instead?
"please play these samples in windows media player before playing them in fake webcam"
- What's a fake webcam?
"secret capture mouse c++ wxwidgets"
- It's no secret.
"setting up game programming environment on windows"
- Depends a lot. You may want to use pygame, or install visual studio. Maybe you want flash devel tools instead.. or inform.
"text mode blocks how many pixels"
- 8x12 is the normal one.
"vesanen juho evtek"
- Yeah, I know, I've been trying to reach him for ages, but he's always busy.
"what graphics program should i use to create a game"
- Adobe Photoshop is my weapon of choise, but there's plenty of free tools out there nowadays that may do the trick, like paint.net.
"what you need to know to start programming your own mmo"
- If you need to ask, you're not ready.
Spotify April 11th, 2009
I got an invitation to Spotify, and it's pretty much blown me away. It's kind of like having an itunes library with.. everything. It simply works. Searching for a song, playing it, seeking etc. - everything feels like you'd be playing with local files. I have no idea how they've managed to make it work this well.
Of course there's plenty of holes in the library, but it's still surprisingly comprehensive. Like, there's some dance nation, but not all.. both versions of the 'chess' musical, and so on. On the other hand, lots of 80's hit bands only seem to exist on best-of or collection albums. A pity, as I'd love to explore the more obscure songs by some of the one-hit miracles. Anyway.
The business model: 10e/month, unlimited music, as long as you use it on a computer and never copy it anywhere. So, they're aiming the market which is always connected to the net and always on their computers: students and office workers. Both markets are probably high users of mp3 warez. Spotify makes the illegality go away, and, like I said, the library is enormous.
The 10e is, for me, on the borderline. If it was 5e, I wouldn't think about it and would subscribe in an instant. At the moment I know I can live without it, so the 10e makes me think. The "ad supported free" model doesn't help either.. I wouldn't have tried it without the "free" model, but moving from "free" to "premium" is a strange step. First, all I'd "get" would be to be rid of the relatively rare "hey, go premium" ads, and.. if I did go premium, but decided at some point that I can't afford it, could I move back to the "free" model? Thus, paying it feels like a risk.
There's a couple of things I'd like to see in Spotify. First, it would make sense to have stronger music exploration tools. There's some, but still, finding even more new music that I like would be a killer feature. Another feature I'd like is "buy now" links. Yes, that sounds odd, but since there's the limitation of not being able to move the music, I'd love to explore music this way and then buy what I like to copy on my ipod or whatnot. That would also give Spotify another revenue stream that they definitely need, and by, let's say, giving free credits to premium customers, would also give a greater incentive to "go premium".
Also, noticed that the front page was starting to be insufferably long, so I archived most of it already (in the past few years I've only archived once per year).
Droject and the Heureka Team Stomp April 8th, 2009
Back in 1995 I was in the same high school with !Cube, and as a school computing class project we decided to write a demo. Now, because we felt the demo sucked so bad, we didn't release it back then. I've lost the source code and assets at some point, but Tonic happened to have a copy of the binaries, so I figured we might as well release it now. Enjoy:
There's also a pouet page for the demo, and it's got a relatively good response.. so it's a pity we didn't release it Back Then. Anyway, there it is now. For more info and trivia, check the info file.
I visited Heureka recently and managed to record a few minutes of people playing the Team Stomp game. I only have a very small memory card, so after editing, here's about a minute of gameplay:
The crowd in this video is again not exactly typical one, as this was another exhibition launch day - plenty of people in suits, and most of the visitors were in other parts of the museum, ogling at the new exhibits. Which were pretty nice, actually. So, if you haven't visited Heureka for a while, now might be the time =)
A Couple of Baby Pics March 29th, 2009
Here's a couple more baby pictures. First off, we have Niklas beating the heck out of Max Payne:
Second, some people have wondered how our dogs react to the baby. I think this image describes the situation pretty well..
So far Kiku (the dog in the picture) has eaten a few cloth tissues and a couple pacifiers, has been curious about the baby but nothing horribly alarming.
Finally, here's a video of the vivarium mist/fog maker in action. I think it looks pretty cool. Watch in HQ if possible.
""did she blush"
- Possibly. Who's asking?
""game programming" "cpu cache""
- Largely irrelevant.
""tutorial" method "develop" high graphics "games""
- Prefab materials. Use prefab materials to populate content. Use lighting and shading to provide variety.
"1. what pixels will be marked in drawing a circle (100, 90) in graphics"
"c++ samples guessing number, coordinates size of triangle exit program"
"create a graphical app java program that displays a checkerboard with 64 squares altering blavk and white"
- What's this, ask google to do my homework?
"atanua remove grid"
- There's no way, but you can simply select everything and drag it up or left out of the grid.
"avr reading mouse movement"
- Depends on how you're interfacing mouse with your AVR.
"bullet hell algorithm"
- From what I've seen, they're mostly sin/cos things.
"glcopyteximage2d is slow"
- Yes. Use FBOs instead.
"how do you code the graphics part of a game"
- Blood, sweat and tears. And some fun mixed in, too, I guess. There's also lots of reference material, books etc, available, but effort is the key, I think.
"how much milliseconds does getmessage(&msg, null, 0, 0) execute"
- Probably around zero, but it rather depends.
"how to power a pc fan vivarium"
- I used an unused cellphone charger. It was an old one, and conveniently gave me 12V. Your mileage may vary.
"how to use boolean logic with effects alcohol has on syndrome babies"
- What?
"make your own mmorpg without programing or writing codes"
- You know, there's probably a real market here. Set up a turnkey mmorpg solution, and sell tons of copies. Except that these dreamers probably don't have any money.
"nibble twiddling"
- That doesn't sound quite right..
"parts of a microsoft keyboard and putting one back together"
- Oops =)
"photos alien wrist implant"
- It's actually some more or less common disease, doesn't really have anything to do with aliens.. (no, I don't have one, I googled this)
"project+microcontroller based baby cradle system+source code"
- That sounds pretty dangerous to me. Someone's life might be at stake.
"site: sol.gfxile.net -"congrats on the boy from druggy :)""
- Thanks druggy, and now we retire this "hacking" trick. Can you figure out others?
"source code in opengl projects on cracking of egg"
- Sounds interesting. I'd probably skip the physics and just fake it.
"start your own mmorpg server"
- Follow the installation instructions supplied with your product.
"uncfl created by jari komppa"
- It was actually created by Jetro Lauha. I am the authof of CFL though.
"what happens if you dont start your writing sol on the first line?"
- Based on how the question is formed, probably something awful. I have no idea what you're talking about though.
"whats the meaning of the "best swordsman""
- It means that by some commonly and independently agreed on standard, there is some person who is the best swordsman.
"where can i get documentation for data encryption and decryption in .net for mca fianl year project"
- I'll just hazard a guess, but.. from microsoft?
"who owns terra nova strike force centauri rights"
- I wish I knew. Although, if I did knew, I probably couldn't do anything about it.
Important note:
