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New DVW screenshots
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Internet Fraud
I saw the following advertisement on AutoScout24 today.
5300 EUR for a 2007 Audi A3 ragtop. This looked too good to be true, indeed, but still I couldn’t hesitate to contact the seller. The telephone number shown in the ad turned out to be a fax number, so I tried to get in touch by email. I received a reply about 15 minutes later.
New publication
I have released another publication, a short (German) review of the last Spieleentwicklertreff NRW (Game Developers Gathering North Rhine-Westphalia) which took place at the Mediadesignhochschule Düsseldorf. Have a look!
Merry Christmas
(Image courtesy of mybestdesktops.com)
BlackBerry 8800 woes
I have a BlackBerry 8800 for work which is generally a good thing. I can read and write email, notes and calendar entries from anywhere, surf the web, get a route calculated from my current position and so on and so on.
Still, it’s a work gadget, so it would be just half the fun if it hadn’t a micro SD card slot and wasn’t capable of playing music and videos. So I installed a 6 GB card and copied some music on it. When I reinserted the card I was presented a message box saying, “Media card has been inserted that contains errors. To correct the errors please use a disk error checking utility on a computer.” (or “Es wurde eine fehlerhafte Medienkarte eingelegt…” in German).
In case you ever run across this message, make sure that your files on the media card have no spaces in it. The BlackBerry obviously can’t deal with them. Moreover, I removed all special characters from the files as a precaution. It worked for me then.
DVW Teaser Video released
Without further ado, here is our cut-together of Dusmania 9.0 scenes plus original ingame footage plus official soundtrack tunes. Enjoy.
DVW Data Leaked
Apparently someone has leaked internal DVW data, possibly using an iPod or iPhone, as the evidence shows. If you know this bastard, tell him that we’ll segfault him.
Happy New Year
So, last post for today: Happy New Year everyone!
Farewell adidts.sys BSOD
I promise, if this isn’t my very last posting on hardware and hardware driver issues (todays topic), I will add an own category. But since I finally found a solution for my last PC problem, namely BSODs caused by adidts.sys, I feel the urge to blog about that.
adidts.sys is the SoundMAX high definition audio driver for the onboard audio which came with my ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. The driver version available on the ASUS homepage, where I went frequently to check for an update, is still V5.10.1.4530 dated 2006/07/10, but now I learned that there are actually two newer versions available on the ASUS FTP site. I tried 1988b_32bit_510014560.zip and it worked like a charm. I just updated the driver from the hardware control panel instead of using the setup.exe, and finally, my last woe was gone.
Update: Although this fixed my BSOD troubles, I recognized that I did not have a stereo mixer available to record the output of my sound card. I tweaked around a bit to handle this, too. Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll write another short entry on this.
Update: I am using Windows XP.
Update: I wrote a posting on enabling the StereoMix recording device. I did this with a newer driver version than the one used in this posting. You may want to look there, too.
Hardware, again
After years on a 60Hz CRT at 1600×1200, I decided to get a 20″ TFT. It’s a Samsung SyncMaster 204B which is one of the cheaper models on the market, but it turned out to be a real bargain and I am really satisfied with it.
I like the pivot function. Although it is unfamiliar for me, I always wanted to have a better overview over the code above and below the cursor, and I know that this is the only solution left if you use a relatively high resolution and relatively small fonts. So I’ll try to get used to that. When I tried out the pivot function, I recognized the only drawback of the hardware so far: I found it quite hard to rotate it 90 degrees, and I missed snap points.
This is our game, DVW, at 800×600.
Another view of my hacker cabinett with flash. To the left you can see my old tube which I now use for chat and debug windows. Although the CRT takes a lot of room on the table, I will keep it as a desktop extension for my debug and chat windows, or to watch a movie while coding or so.
Friday the 13th
One might think this must be a unlucky day. It wasn’t for me, at least until I came home today ;-)
Work is very satisfying right now. I have to dig into several technologies that were new to me, because I’m going to impose JMX on our application. This is a rather challenging task, because the application consists of several distributed components, and unfortunately it’s an “identity management and security administration” application, so I have to be really careful not to break our own security. So, although I knew some of the technologies/APIs already, I learned a lot of new things about PKI, SSL, JAAS, JNDI, JINI, RMI, J2EE, SOAP, JPSs, Struts, Servlets, Application Servers like JBoss or Websphere, and finally JMX itself. After about two weeks of reading, playing around, testing, and comparing JMX implementations, a somewhat concrete picture of the implementation evolved, and I’m quite happy with it so far. I don’t have a 100 percent clear picture yet, but the most issues that troubled me are solved. One thing I’m still thinking about is how I’m going to manage the lifetime of an MBean, because most parts of our software simply rely on garbage collection and don’t have clear, designated “cleanUp” methods where I would unregister the bean. Another thing is the naming scheme of the MBeans, because I plan to implement a client which displays them in their natural hierarchy, and not just as a flat list. But I heard that JSR-77 proposes a nice naming scheme, I will read through these 190 pages on Tuesday. For now, I’m looking forward to enjoying this long weekend.
The unlucky part of this Friday 13th was the electricity bill I received today. I really need to get my salary raised.
sechsta sinn weekend
Tomorrow another sechsta sinn weekend is going to start, and right now I feel sick. This sucks. But not just physically, but mentally as well … mattin told me that he has to leave early on Sunday noon, Julius is thinking about attending a birthday party on Saturday, I have to work tomorrow before I can take off, and Christopher, Jochen, Jan and Sebastian won’t join us at all due to several reasons. Melancholic I remember the days when we managed to get the whole team AND visitors into our little cellar for the whole weekend. Anyway, I’m looking forward to being as productive as possible this weekend. I’ll take my webcam with me again, so don’t forget to catch a glimpse.
Why spending money on hardware sucks
Some days ago I needed a case for my girlfriends PC. I decided to leave her my old one and to order a new one for myself. My PC is running in the living room and three harddiscs, an overclocked CPU (1.6 to 2.4 GHz P4) with adequate fan, and a graphic card with fan made quite some noise. I hoped that a SilentMaxx case would reduce the noise audible. The case arrived, I put my hardware from one box into the other, but soon my graphic card decided to solve the noise problem in its own way. While I was away from keyboard, the fan silently stopped and allowed my GPU to make eggs roast. When I came back, I saw the same screen that I saw when I left, but I wondered why the Windows clock did not show the correct time. Nothing moved – the machine was totally frozen. Although I was able to see something before I restarted, the graphics adaptor never recovered – instead, the BIOS welcomes me with an unhappy “1x long, 3x short” beep. So I had to order a new graphic card too and had to decide whether to get some state of the art stuff or go for some mid-price hardware. I decided the latter, because I’m quite sure something else will break … soon …
And the beat goes on …
I had to recognize that the amount of entries in my personal worklog at sechsta sinn dramatically decreased since we returned from Dusmania 6.0, June 19th/20th. But it’s not only me who became slower, as it seems. We made plans to speed up the development of our game, decided what to do the next twelve weeks or so, and were full of beans. Today, about ten weeks later, virtually nothing happened. Yes, we did do some planning, all of us coders did do some code, and the graphic artists did work on some gfx stuff. But it was nothing compared to the amount of time and the potentials we had. Although the discussion we had that Sunday outside of the Dusmania halls was quite lively, it seems like it revitalised our motivation only for that one day. After we went home after this weekend everyone seems to have fallen back into his personal lack of motivation. One point indeed is that our project lead Jochen is currently busy with relocating to Finnland for some time, and one of our coders, Julius, is relocating as well to start his CS studies the upcoming semester; mattin was busy with a contest contribution (I guess he’ll win, won’t he?), Christopher and I are busy with our girlfriends, Gereon has his own little game project and works hard for the universty, and so on, and so on.
And this is the other point: everyone has become more and more busy with other stuff besides sechsta sinn. It’s hard to tell whether this trend is just a short term phenomenon … but I better don’t think about what it means if not.
Welcome
Welcome, stranger. I felt like writing some blog stuff again after I saw WordPress and thus decided to start another attempt. I don’t feel like attracting lots of people or assert claims on posting some intellectual stuff here, but maybe someone likes to read the opinions I share with the WWW. For now, I have set up two categories for topics I like to write about: Game Development and Personal — I guess they are self-explanatory.
Anyway, just some words on my motivation to write about Game Development at all: as most people, I love to dive into fantastic worlds, fantasy or scifi, past, present or future. But since I can remember I did not only like to play, read, participate; I preferred to create my own worlds, stories, rules. I started to draw a lot of comics as a child, later I wrote short stories. Finally, I learned programming on a C64 at the age of 10 – that was in 1989. (In fact, I even started at the age of 6, but at that time, I had to ask my dad to use his computer, and he mostly decided to deny and to send me to play outside instead.) I guess I made a very typical way then: from BASIC over Assembler to Pascal to C/C++. As before with one goal in my mind: to create my very own worlds. So that’s how I came to Game Development. After 15 years of programming it’s still a passion of mine. I’ve been working for Electronic Arts in the meantime and had opportunities to join several other well known German developers. I also sneaked a peek into medical computer graphics when I wrote my CS thesis last year – quite an interesting field. But I decided to join some more conservative branch of the industry for now. While I’m working as a software engineer in the security management area, I still work on my game projects in my spare time: sechsta sinns Die verbotene Welt (The forbidden World), an award winning real time strategy game project, and Pre Mortal, a bizarre medieval adventure game which is yet to be announced.
So, that’s about Game Development so far. Feel free to take a look at the projects and enjoy your stay. Let me know how you feel about the entertainment industry, the weather, your mother in law, or whatever – I’d be happy to hear from you.
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