Programming, graphics, games, media, C++, Windows, Internet and more...
All blog entries, ordered from most recent. Entry count: 1198.
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# My Lecture on Polygon Group
Tue
02
Nov 2010
I've joined "Polygon" - a scientific group of game developers on Warsaw University of Technology (Website, Forum, Facebook). That's true I'm no longer a student, but this fact doesn't forbid me to drink beer just like they do :) Tomorrow I'll give there a lecure entitled "C++ in game development". Slides will be available for download in the coming days.
Comments | #teaching #events Share
# On/Off Expo
Sat
23
Oct 2010
I've spent whole day on On/Off Expo that currently takes place in Warsaw. I've met many interesting people there from both gamedev.pl and demoscene. Poeple from demoscene organize a place there with "retro games" where everyone can play some games on old computers like Amiga or Commodore. But the rest of expo is about the newest and most advanced technology available to ordinary customer. You can find lots of hardware there like graphics cards, motherboards, pendrives, speakers, headphones, cellphones, 3D TVs and more. You can play on PC, Xbox 360, some driving and flight simulators, Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, Wii, Kinect and even the unreleased Tron Evolution game. Generally there are lots of attractions so if you live in Warsaw, I strongly recommend visiting the expo tomorrow. Here are my photos from this event. One of them:
Comments | #demoscene #hardware #events Share
# Blender 2.5 - Programming Export Plugin
Fri
22
Oct 2010
Today I've been familiarizing myself with Blender 2.5. This new version is still in Beta stage, but as far as I can see everything is aleady in place and the program works OK. I only had to solve one problem at the beginning - my Blender was crashing at startup, because it was looking for PYTHONPATH environmental variable and thus trying to use old version of Python language that I had installed, while new Blender needs Python 3.1. The solution is to clear this environmental variable so Blender can use its bundled Python distribution. I've created a batch script to do this, called "Run Blender.bat":
set PYTHONPATH=
"c:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender.exe"
Many changes have been made in new new Blender version. Fundamental concepts stay the same, so we still have Object Mode, Edit Mode, select objects with right mouse button, grab with G, rotate with R and scale with S. User interface is still nonstandard with all its non-overlapping and non-modal philosophy. But they introduced some new features and made quite big changes to the interface, so it took me some time to play around and discover where is everything now and how it works. Readings on this topic I'd recommend are the new manual for Blender 2.5 and especially Blender 2.5 Changes - a document that highlights what's new.
The function that I've spend much time searching for was showing normals, so in case you also need this and can't find it: 1. You must be in Edit Mode 2. Click on the small (+) symbol in the right-top corner of the 3D View to expand a panel with some parameters 3. In this panel, look for Mesh Display / Normals section and select the checkboxes you want.
When it comes to writing plugins, Python API has been completely redesigned. Information about it can be found in Introduction, Manual and finally Reference. I couldn't find any article about writing export plugin for Blender 2.5, but basing on the information I could find and the source code of the existing plugins I've managed to code one. Here it is: io_export_json.py. It exports some of the data (scenes, objects, meshes, vertices, faces, edges, normals, texture coordinates, vertex colors) in JSON format.
BTW do you know any good program to view JSON documents as a tree? The best I've found so far is JSON Viewer, but it's not ideal. For example, it can't open files so the document has to be pasted via the clipboard.
Blender keeps Python plugins in the user's directory. In my Windows 7 it is C:\Users\%MY_LOGIN%\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.54\scripts\addons. To start using new plugin, you have to:
Comments | #blender #graphics Share
# Beginning with OpenGL ES on Android
Thu
21
Oct 2010
I've started learning programming for Android. It's (probably) nothing commercial, I just love to learn new technologies and APIs while I have not much experience in either Java, OpenGL ES or mobile technologies at all. The first thing I did was... buying a phone - LG GT540 in my case. It has Android 1.6 (upgrade to 2.1 is scheduled for this year).
Android is a nice platform. Anyone can code for his phone in either Windows or Linux, using Java language (native code development is also possible). To start my coding, I needed to install JDK (SDK for Java), Android SDK, Java version of Eclipse 3.5 (they say Android SDK is not fully compatible with new Eclipse 3.6) and Eclipse JDT plugin to connect them all. Android Developers website does a great job explaining all the steps required to setup the whole development environment so I've came across not so many issues to get annoyed as I often get when installing some C/C++ stuff :)
I've read a bit about the fundamentals of developing applications for Android and I like the API. All these ideas like Activity, Service, Intent, View, Widget, Task etc. seem very well designed. But just like PC game developers learn WinAPI to only initialize an empty window and launch DirectX or OpenGL in it, I went straight to OpenGL on my Android. Android 1.6 has OpenGL ES 1.1, which in turn is the embedded equivalent for OpenGL 1.5. This 3D API has no shaders, so all the graphics has to be done using fixed function pipeline, including MODELVIEW and PROJECTION matrices, 2 textures with register combiners, 8 dynamic per-vertex lights, 1 user clip plane, fog etc. - something like on the old good GeForce 2 MX :)
It's easy to start using OpenGL for someone who has experience in DirectX because all the concepts that are so diffcult to understand at the beginning of the game programming adventure stay the same - like 3D coordinate system, vertex, triange, matrix, texture and so on. Some things are only reversed - textures are addressed from left-bottom corner in OGL, matrices are stored in column-major order, matrix multiplication is right-to-left like Point2 = Xform2 * Xform1 * Point1, post-projective space is -1..1, -1..1, -1..1, coordinate system is right-handed so Z points to the viewer, angles are given in degrees, counterclockwise oriented triangles are considered front-facing by default and so one. Some objects have also different names, so in OGL there is "model" not "world" matrix, "fragment" not "pixel" operation etc.
Here is the list of Internet sources I already know about and I've been learning from:
Now you can expect more entries about Android development on my blog :)
Comments | #android #opengl #mobile Share
# The Fate of PC Gamer
Tue
19
Oct 2010
Today I finished single player campaign in the new Medal of Honor on my PC. It's a good game. It's also well optimized because desipte having very good graphics it was running very smoothly on my Radeon HD 5770 in the Full HD resolution and highest quality settings.
When planning to write that, I was thinking many of you could say "who cares?" There are so many types of games these days that the feelings of a PC gamer can be hard to understand for many. Some poeple play only casual/social/online games, some play on consoles... There is also a kind of people who enjoy games, but have no interest in the new positions on the market. Which seems strange to me because have you ever seen a sports fan, let's say a soccer fan, who is not interested in matches his favourite team plays in the current season but only talks about the matches that took place many years ago? :)
That's why (and maybe because I fill a little sick today) I've created a silly drawing: "The Fate of PC Gamer". Enjoy :)
# Static Code Analysis with Cppcheck
Sun
10
Oct 2010
Yesterday I've tried Cppcheck - an open source tool for static C++ code analysis. That was my first practical experience with this kind of tools and I like it quite a lot. Static code analysis is the analysis performed without actually executing a program. Source code is checked against some rules to find common bugs and mistakes.
I expected to see a program that must be given paths to my IDE and all libraries I use in some configuration file before I could execute some console application with poper command line parameters and get some crypic report as the result. All in all, that's the way many programmer's tools work, especially open source ones and specially these for C or C++ languages. But here it was not the case. Cppcheck is a GUI program in which I could just click Check / Directory and read the results of the analysis while the processing was still being done in the background.
Developers of Cppcheck state on their website that "The goal is no false positives.". Apparently they haven't high-performance gamedev code in mind :) The program reported many warnings like "Member variable not initialzed in the constructor 'VEC3::x'". Generally speaking it could be dangerous, but if I want my 3D vector structure to behave like a built-in type and work as fast as possible, leaving its fields uninitialized in the default constructor is exactly what should be done.
But Cppcheck also found some real mistakes in my code, like passing "const VEC3 lhs" parameter (where I forgot about the reference "&") or some local variables that were assigned but never used. So overall I think static code analysis could be of some help to a C++ programmer.
# JustSendIt Prototype
Thu
07
Oct 2010
It's not a new idea for me, but last weekend it made me angry again that I couldn't send a file from my laptop to my desktop PC over my home local network. It may seem strange and it's really shocking to me because transferring data is the most fundamental thing we do when using any kind of network. But at the same time I don't know about any program that would simply allow me to send a file to a destination machine without being overly sophisticated or causing some strange technical problems. Here are solutions I've considered:
Network Neighbourhood - most natural way of passing files between Windows computers. I tried to share some folder on my laptop to access it from my PC and it didn't work, despite machines could contact each other via hostname or IP. Same happened when I shared a folder on my desktop and tried to enter it from my laptop. Well, we all know that this service often stop working randomly... Disabling Windows Firewall on both machines didn't help either.
FTP - I have FileZilla FTP server installed on both machines and I know it's quite good software, but that day I couldn't make it work. I could logon to the server from remote machine, but not to transfer any file. I tried different settings on client side like Passive Mode etc., but it changed nothing. I don't like the idea of using FTP to transfer files anyway, because why do I have to install the server, setup user accounts etc. when I just want to transfer a file? Besides, FTP protocol is known for causing technical problems because it opens separate connections on different ports to transfer data.
Other possibilities to send a file over a network are:
So finally I've used an USB flash memory stick to copy this file :P But after this, I've recalled my old idea about a simple program to transfer files over a network called JustSendIt [PL]. Then I decided to code a quick prototype of such program in C# and here it is: JustSendIt Prototype. It requires .NET Framework 4.0 to work.
If you have some computers at home or at work that you transfer files between or if you want to a file to your friend over the Internet, you are sure one of the computers have public IP or is set as DMZ so the other can connect to it, the way to send a file is:
I hope some day I'll find enough motivation to polish and finish this program :)
Comments | #networking #tools #windows Share
# My new address: www.asawicki.info
Tue
05
Oct 2010
I've bought the "asawicki.info" domain, so now the address of my website is www.asawicki.info and my new personal e-mail address is adam__DELETE__@asawicki.info (without the "__DELETE__" part - it's here to fool spambots). Why did I do that? I'm not a proponent of a belief that when you write from a Gmail account, you are an amateur while having a SuperProMegaSoftware.com domain looks professional.
But my previous address - regedit.gamedev.pl - was associated by Google with "Geographic target" of Poland and I couldn't change it in Google Webmaster Tools because of this ".pl" suffix. Maybe that was the reason why my website was being visieted mainly from Poland despite I write in English here for quite a long time? Also, I don't like my old nickname a little bit. All in all, it's more than 10 years old now.
Why did I choose the .info ending? Well, obviously I'm not an .org-anization, my website is not .com-mercial and I don't do any .biz-ness here. This website has just some .info-rmation about me and the things I do :) Besides, other top-level domains with my name were already taken.