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Recent Search Terms, Fall'10

August 28th, 2010

More of these (and explanation what they are) here.

sdl increase number of pixels

Increase resolution.

why do we have .com, .net, .fi etc

Good question. It's all about hierarch.. wait a minute, how did that search end up on this site?

bitmap rotation scaling 486 cache

Hindsight 20/20, swizzled source material might have been a good idea.

eight bit value into single bit in c

Two liters of coca-cola in a two desilitre cup. Spills a bit.

galaxql 2.0 sucks

Thanks, I guess.

source code for putpixel

graphicsmemorypointer[memorylocationofpixel] = pixelcolor;

16m and 256k different

Yes.

alien spoon in brain

What?

can we register the same window class twice

No. Second attempt fails. Luckily, you can edit the window class on the fly with SetWindowLong and negative offsets. Yes, it's a hack. Yes, it's documented in MSDN. No, I'm not making this up.

circle drawing on fpga

currentpixelcolor = areweinsidethecircle()

death is just a step through window

Whaat?

develop game but dont know how to graphics

Learn "to graphics" then.

english is tough--simulated--how to introduce the stuff

I have no idea what's going on here.

fast colored ball sorter programing

Parallelize.

final project of pizza hut in c++

I didn't realize they had programming in the pizza hut university..

for loop dividing a collection into two and calculate

Smells like school assignment..

gray code atanua download

..as does this.

how to draw bones looks like diamonds programing c++

...

how to find the size of of any data type using bit manipulations

Set to 1, shift left until zero.

how to make my own 3d mmorpg with no experience and from scratch

Get experience.

how to write a program for karnaugh map in c++

Figure out how to do them by hand, devise algorithm step by step, and implement in C++. This applies to other things than karnaugh maps though.

is a keyboard hazardous waste

My first thought was about how dirty my keyboards are getting again, but in seriousness the keyboards do include electronics which may contain hazardous materials for the environment, so.. yes.

the bad girls from hinstance movie

Seriously, now.

videomode 16x16x16

I keep seeing this a lot. I have no idea what's behind it.

what are sols

You tell me.

why do people want to create projects

For the sense of accomplishment?

your karma hit my dogma meaning

It's a joke.

Updated CV

August 20th, 2010

My updated CV can be found on the "who" page.

Boom! Boom! Driller! Source! Release!

August 16th, 2010

Figured this might be a good time to dust off the BBD sources and release them. You can find the zip under "code" if you're curious.

In other news, the death rally porting article has had over 20000 visitors, thanks to having been on both slashdot and reddit front pages (as well as a bunch of smaller sites). I also received bunch of very interesting emails as a reaction to it, and made a couple new friends.

As to the wrapper I talked about earlier, it's taking shape, more or less. You can find download links to the work in progress on this thread on the Wing Commander CIC forums. If you're curious to take it for a spin, you can download wing commander 1 legally here; it was recently released to celebrate the 20th anniversary, or some such. That's the windows version of wc1, so my directdraw hack dll will work with it. For some definition of "work", naturally.

That's it for now. I'm going to bed.

DirectDraw

August 9th, 2010

So, like I mentioned, uh, yesterday it seems, I've been playing around with the "wing commander kilrathi saga", which is somewhat old.. in fact so old the wing commander 1 and 2 are constantly running in 256-color, 320x200 mode. They were originally DOS games, and the kilrathi saga box contains windows ports of these games.

The games use DirectDraw - the directdraw2 interface to be precise. When I run them, windows naturally switches to 256 color mode and blows up the resolution and all that. Irritating. Additionally there seems to be some palette issues, which can partially get fixed by switching on every single compatibility option Win7 offers.

So, how to fix this? One way that comes to my mind, especially with the experience from SolVBE is to write a new implementation of ddraw.dll that would handle things in a bit more modern way (as in, we don't care about performance as much and would rather have things run nicely)..

So my first step was to search the net to see if someone has already done this. If we don't count wine, which I don't, there's nothing exactly like it out there. There is, however, tons of ddraw wrappers for various reasons - mostly to fix obscure bugs in old games. These are ddraw.dll wrappers though, and not full reimplementations, meaning there's a fake ddraw.dll the game talks to, which forwards all calls to the real thing, except for some small tidbits which they tweak in order to fix issues.

In some cases these even go awry, as I found a couple discussions about "fixing a game" by deleting ddraw.dll from the game directory. But these kinds of wrappers seem rather common.

Anyhoo, I found the sources to one of these kinds of projects, released under a permissive license, and reworked the source code to work with wing commander 1. This meant to implement wrappers for directdraw, directdraw2, directdrawsurface and directdrawpalette interfaces.

I also tried to see if my new call-logging dll worked with wc3, and found that it used only the directdraw interface (not directdraw2), but used it in much wider way than wc1/wc2 used directdraw2. I tried to tweak things a bit but gave up; there's something going on with the pointers that I don't quite follow (ending in the app using a null pointer); probably some small mistake on my part, but regardless, I figured I can play with it later if needed.

I consider the wrapper/logger to be as far now as I'm taking it, and if I go further with this project, this is the point where I ditch the calls to the original dll and start rewriting stuff. So this is also the logical place to release the sources before I blow them up. As I based them on some source off the net, maybe someone will base their code on this version. Who knows?

The Problem with DLC..

August 8th, 2010

The move towards more and more DLC is worrying to me, if only because of historical perspective.

Here's an example. The wing commander kilrathi saga. EA bought origin, and the box was released after that. So there's no reason why EA wouldn't keep hosting the DLC, now is there? It's not like they went out of business, or lost origin's data or something..

So what happens when you go to the well-advertised URL? Yes, you guessed right.

In other news, it's been over three months since my article about porting death rally to modern platforms was published, so I can post the text here for all of you who missed it in the print. You can still buy the digital copy of the magazine.

Also, here's a photoshop tutorial I did a while ago and forgot to mention.

Summer Moved On

July 25th, 2010

It's been one hellishly hot summer here in Finland. I mean, over 30 degrees celsius for weeks on end, with scarcely any rain. (That's around 90 degrees Fahrenheit for you barbaric non-metric people).

One of the things I've been involved with recently is this book thing. You see, sometime in the early 90's I ran a BBS, and at one point my father wrote a book, chapter by chapter, in it. It was a story he had written originally as a kid, but this rewrite was, naturally, quite a bit deeper and richer.

I stumbled upon the file in one of my old hard drives, and figured it would be a nice surprise to turn it into a real, dead-wood, physical book. I spent a few days with my wife poring over the text, fixing most glaring typos and grammar errors, did layout and printed a single copy on lulu.com.

This single copy showed that we had to do much wider margins for the book to be readable (the binding takes surprisingly much space from the page). I gave the book to my father who was rather stunned, and we agreed to do print several of them to be given to friends and family.

Of course when my brother heard of it, he wanted in on the project (I had not mentioned it earlier to make sure the surprise wasn't spoiled), and I was more than delighted to receive his input and cover design (seen in the picture).

The book itself is a mystery thriller kind of thing, starting with a plane crash with a lone survivor suffering from amnesia and a drive to figure out who he was. I'm biased, of course, but it's a real page-turner. It's got the kind of "truth" in its tone that Brenda Ueland is calling for in "If You Want to Write". And it's written in finnish, of course.

In other news, I turned Atanua's licensing upside down. Considering that I'd received approximately zero licensees in the past two years, I figured I might try something different. Now schools can get a free license by asking for one - so I might actually find out who's using it - and other people get the chance of paying for it.

Nothing from me to Assembly this year, I'm afraid. I have a few ideas, but absolutely no time. There's just way too many things fighting for the little free time I have - and several of them are much more far-reaching than a rushed demo or game project at this point would be.

It's also soon three months since my article appeared on Game Developer, so I can re-publish it on this site soonish. The whole process with GDM was a very interesting one; I recommend trying it out, if you get a chance. One of the things that really surprised me (in a positive way) was the contract - being in the IP business, I'm used to seeing contracts where you have to give up 37.5% of your soul just to do something simple, this was straight-forward and quite fair. The editorial process was very interesting, if rather rushed near the deadline (but what isn't?), and the resulting text is much better than what I write "naturally".

Finally, I turned 0x23. Yay.

Recent Search Terms, Summer'10 Edition

June 3rd, 2010

A fresh mammoth set of recent search terms for your enjoyment:

"bresenham line algorithm" "source code" open gl

If you're using OpenGL, which includes line primitives (ugly ones, granted), why are you looking into bressenham?

"fan for air, vivarium"

We use PC case fans. They're cheap and simple to use. Just plug in 12 volts.

"is graphics programming fun"

Beats analysing database access times, in my opinion. Although I guess that can be fun too.

"spherical heightmap"

Representing any map of a spherical object is tricky, heightmap or otherwise.

"tutorial, interpolate a simple animation"

Take position 1. Take position 2. Calculate delta (difference) between the two. Increment position 1 by a fraction of this delta until you reach position 2. That's it.

"why is putpixel(320+x,240-round(y),color) used in computer graphics"

I don't have any idea, really. I don't think you should. Instead, you should be drawing a bunch of pixels at once.

+animations +autodesk +flh

+animations +autodesk +flx

As far as I know, neither file formats are not in the wild. They are (supposedly) extended fli/flc files with 16 or 24bit color.

1 bit graphics programming in c

Do 8 pixels at once. It may get a bit tricky but it's doable.

1 point to start creating own mmorpg game

Don't.

1) write a program to change the working mode from text to graphics and plot a pixel.

2. how will you draw a circle with radius equal to 4 using midpoint circle drawing algorithm. find coordinates and fill table for the above calculations.

develop a java program that simulates a game in which the program tries to guess that the number user has thought off

show how the binary counter with parallel load can be made to operate as a divide-by-12 counter

why discard values. can you state why you threw out the negative value when you solved for x?

write a program on saving money and interest on bloodshed dev c++

bloodshed dev c program example on calculating the years of saving amount

Do your own homework.

64k demo mac

Use a small icon. =)

a thousand pardons affendi origin

I took it from hero's quest 2, don't know the actual origin.

aero will use the solsole mode

wat.

are demos still written in assembly

Sometimes. Rarely. On exotic (or legacy) platforms all the time. Also in some performance-critical places, as well as when doing size optimization.

atanua velleman does not work

And you didn't consider sending me a mail about it?

bachelor thesis display checkerboard vga controller

Doesn't sound like a much of a thesis to me.. more like a FPGA course project, and a simple one even then.

gta 4 how to make english language

Buy the English version?

how force win xp vesa framebuffer video mode

You don't. XP doesn't work that way. There's no access to the video BIOS the same way it was possible in DOS and win9x.

how is bit manipulation faster than arithmetic

Bits get toggled. Arithmetic needs to understand values. That's how I'd see it.

how to create mmorpg characters in html

...

how to draw a game screen without doing per-pixel stuff

Draw sprites instead, or something. Blit stuff. Draw textured rectangles.

how to draw cubes with bits missing

Alpha textures? Of course you'll get sorting issues, but you can solve those by first rendering backfaces and then the front ones.

how to get people to come to your mmo

Marketing.

how to make a good graphics on a game

Practise.

how to run terra nova: strike force centauri in 64-bit

Dosbox

how to stop the glass fogging vivarium

Increase airflow.

how to wait for vertical retrace in vesa mode

There was a VESA call for that, but in practise I used the VGA retrace registers, seemed to work everywhere.

i want to design my own mmo

What's stopping you? Just pick pen and paper and off you go. Implementing your design is a different matter..

movement of blood through cells using opengl source code

That's... quite specific.

parallax formula game programming

Scroll different layers at different speeds. A simple multiplier of the primary layer is enough.

sdl how to make gun crosshairs drift

Add some interpolated noise to it.

small example code on 'opengl' very small successfully compiled

Sadly, this depends on the platform.

 

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