Older blog entries for TheCorruptor (starting at number 347)

Weekend

Spent the weekend in Devon, partaking in a belated Halloween party a collegue of mine organised. Was a lot of fun, for all the obvious reasons. Photo's are up at the usual place

Servers

Z'Hadum finally kicked the bucket on Friday. I'd previously mentioned it's flaky nature, well, I tracked the problem down. The SCSI drive was failing slowly. By Friday evening it was terminal so I proceeded to install an OS on the spare IDE I'd left in there. This didn't work so I figured now was as good a time as any to get a new machine. I needed a bigger case to hold all the drives nicely anyway (my self-justification!)

I'm in the lucky position of being good friends with the gent that runs an indy computer store in the city, so a quick phone call later and he'd spec'ed up a nice machine for 300UKP, cash. 1.8 celeron, 256MB, nice Intel Mobo, chunky PSU and a case with 8 drive bays. Pretty sweet. The shocker came when I got it home and found a Radeon 7500 in there. Dual head with S-video output. Now, this is a real arse as A) the machine is a server and B) I don't have an Intel PC that I use or have located next to a TV. Real shame.

It took about 3 hours yesterday to install, configure, patch and harden the machine (Kochanski), then another hour to get the FTP server's paths and users reconfigured. I've still not setup the port-mapping between the router and Kochanski, but I have at least got all the services on her. Apache and Tomcat included.

This will be my new dev toy methinks...

I have to admit, given the money I'm tempted to get another one built a similar spec (more RAM, large LCD monitor) and have a permanent Linux dev machine. I'm just not sure I'd use it now OS X is doing everything I need. Still, might be nice for cross compiling my little Games. Hmmm...

Code

Emily caught Tripix war-driving our network yesterday, so we set a nice trap and scared the pants off him. Consequently he was hanging around most of the afternoon, porting some of my SDL/OGL stuff to win32. He found some nice bugs that don't appear under OS X, but he couldn't get it running anywhere near as fast on windows as my TiBook seems to manage. Probably down to his GFX card...

Hopefully I'll be able to put up the win32 build and source on my website in the next few days.

PocketPC

I've been tasked with creating a front end for PocketPC enabled devices for work, and have been given an XDA to dev/test against. All well and good, except I've now had the pleasure of using Pocket Internet Explorer for the first time.

Call me stupid, but given the general ability of IE4, I was expecting something similar from Pocket IE; HTML 4 support, some CSS, maybe even XHTML support. Bear in mind there's 32MB min on this device and GPRS as standard...

Imagine my surprise to find an incomplete HTML3.2 implementation, some random XML support (it can load XML from SQLServer. Handy!) little or no DOM to speak of (innerHTML can be scripted) and possibly the most diabolical rendering of HTML to a small screen that I've seen. The "Fit to screen" functionality is a joke...

I'm shocked by all this. Given mobile 'net access is seriously byte critical (given the cost of GPRS connections) it's slightly annoying to realise that you can't just throw a super skinning [X]HTML file at Pocket IE and a single site-wide CSS file and have pages render. Oh no. You've got to embed all you font and colour information in every element that requires it. That's gonna make for some seriously large HTML files if you want things to look nice on such a small screen.

Seems like the next two weeks are going to be fun!

In general I'm not impressed with O2's GPRS network, PocketPC or the XDA. The device is nice enough, but it lacks Bluetooth, is quite slow, is unable to switch the phone on automatically when you try to connect, has a serious lag switching between apps, and the transfer rate over the GPRS connection is pretty comical. Especially when I run my t68i over Orange head-2-head.

Basically, it's just not worth the money. At all. In fact, I'm struggling to find any reason why an XDA is a better solution than my t68i. The t68i can't read xcel spreadsheets or word documents, but it's tasks and calendar work just as well as Microsoft's efforts, and I don't need to put my phone in a cradle to syncronise everything with iCal etc...

You pays your money, you makes your choice I guess... :)

OpenGL

My "Retro Cube" is nearly finished. Each face on the spinning cube is now a different "old skool" demo effect. I've got plasma, interference circles, 3D stars, roto-zoomer and unlimted sprites. Last face will be a sinus scroller.

The point? None really, but it does look very cool already. I'd like to extend it into a proper intro and commit to a compo for a laugh...

Servers

Z'Hadum died last night. Looks terminal for one of the HDs in there. I didn't have time to check it this morning, but I suspect the SCSI drive (or card) has given up the ghost. Best case: quick reinstall to another drive. Worst case: try and cram another drive into moria.

To be honest, I'm inclined to look for a second hand PowerMac, slap OS X on it and bung all the big drives in there. For the first time in my life I'm actually desperate to get rid of machines. Consolidation is the way forward here...

OpenGL

Yes, I'm still having fun with OpenGL. Lighting and blending modes have been explored and I'm just trying to decide what I want to do next.

I think I'll write some more cheap 2D effects so I can have some textures to play with...

Virusdot

Just done another T-Shirt for the merchandise collection. Hopefully these will all go up pretty soon...

YaSS2

After much fannying around I've finally done a basic ship sprite that I'm happy with. Also done some tests for ground textures and lighting. CrashChaos seems happy enough, although I don't think he's going to have time to do much for a while. Which is good, I've got some more things for Civil that I'd like to do...

OpenGL

So, my adventures in OpenGL continue. Managed to get live SDL surfaces mapped onto a cube, although this took longer than I thought. Mainly because I was being thick, and not converting the surface to the correct pixel format prior to binding the texture. In the end I had to google the web to find out how to do it properly, and found some nice example conversion code which was OS and free for use, so I changed that about to suit my needs and everything fell into place...

Yet another example of why Open Source is good. You can learn from it!

The new code is up on my website for anyone that's interested. I have to say, texture mapping a cube with a plasma effect looks pretty cool :)

TiBook

Upped the RAM in the TiBook to 768MB. The difference is only really apparent when I'm in Photoshop. Now I can have that, Illustrator and Project Builder all open on seperate displays with no lag. Damn nice as well ;-)

Says something about how well OS X 10.2 was handling my memory in the first place I guess...

GFX

Tonight I've finished a few more icons for Virusdot and done some more sprite work for YaSS2.

The first GFX I ever did were for a Shoot-em-up, in fact it's that project (Neutrino) that pulled me out of a life in Noisetracker and into DPaint. Man, things could have been different! Anyway, it's really nice to do sprite work for a shooter again. Brings back some old memories, and the problems haven't changed in 10 years. ;-) Animating ships is still a pain in the arse. I guess that's why most shoot-em-ups have rendered sprites instead.

Am I the only monkey that prefers hand-drawn sprites over rendered ones?!

OpenGL

Spent some time today playing with OpenGL and going throught NeHe's tutorials (again!). I found the SDL "Base" Code for the tutorials, which handles setting up a window, timing and event handling. As there was only a linux and win32 version of this (that I could see) I created an OS X PB project for it, made a few changes (and removed the win32 pragmas) so I have a nice framework for playing around in.

From there, I went through some of the examples and got the texture mapped cube up and running, making some changes to use SDL/SDL_Image to load the texture from a surface. All very easy admittedly, but I've not had the time to sit down and do this despite saying I would for ages. I'm also happy that I know what I'm doing (now) instead of stumbling around in the dark.

I'm surprised how nice it is to use SDL for events and surface mangling like this, not just because I know what I'm doing with SDL, but because of how easy it is to combine with OpenGL. Of course, the other benefit is taking some of my 2D pixel effects and bunging them on a texture each frame. The addition of linear filtering is gonna make some of those *very* nice when spun about and zoomed all over the place! ;-)

I think I'll have a play with this some more before I start using OpenGL to speed up my sprite work in Seal Basher...

Code

More code today. Got the Interference Plasma routine I'd done in C working in Pygame and did a basic Shade Bob routine. Well, to be exact I mangled the video feedback effect already in the PCR and got something similar for little coding. Shade bobs should really be additive, where as I'm just blurring the surface feedback. Still, it looks the same... :)

I submitted the Interference Plasma to the PCR, but I doubt it's worth a new addition. It's identical to the circles version previously featured bar the use of a calculated surface instead of a bitmap, although it does look mighty different. I should probably just include that as a comment to the existing routine instead...

Car

Ah, got my car back. Sounds as good as new although I've got to run it in for a hundred miles to let the cam-belt settle into the head. I did get shown the state of the old head and it wasn't pretty.

Anyway, 1200UKP dent in my wallet and I don't know if I should be happy or gutted. It was nice to drive again!

Spent some time today producing the Michelangelo t-shirt for Virus.org. Mort will hopefully make a variant of this available soon.

Code

I'm still having fun with video feedback effects. Got a fairly fast SDL version of it going, now I just need to do something funky on top of it. Or, I could remove the zoom and do a reasonable shade-bob. Hmmm, probably something for Pygame...

It's my birthday today, so I was sensible and did some work on Civil: added some forest clearings, added character level formatting to the QandA sets (in the docbook2HTML stylesheets) and some buttons for army status. Only then did I break out the whiskey and get tipsy! ;-)