Author: Matthias Gall

Hardware, again

Published by Matthias Gall

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 …

All Good Things Must Come To An End

Published by Matthias Gall

Today, I brought myself to a decision which was overdue. I spent the last five years or so hanging around in a neat gamedev IRC channel, and the last four or so with founder access level (which is the highest privilege one can have in such a chatroom). The channel was a place of relaxation, chitchat, and sometimes even interesting ontopic gamedev discussion, and these guys really meant alot to me – all of them. I liked even those ones who sometimes were a real pain in the neck, and sometimes I really had to laugh in front of my tube when I had to admonish them at the same time. I always joined this chat if my PC was running, regardless whether I was coding, playing, writing, learning, or, of course, chatting. I spent some 10000 hours online with my latest mIRC installation, always with these guys, in this one chatroom. Actually, these guys even “survived” several ex-girlfriends! Although there were some differences from time to time, all the 40 or so regulars stayed, …

Windows Genuine Advantage

Published by Matthias Gall

Microsoft now requires its Windows users to prove their right to download updates by verifying the serial number and the activation status. Within 24 hours, this check was passed over, as BoingBoing reports. But it looks to me like this one is very easy to fix for MS, maybe it’s even a debug flag which was forgotten.

Friday the 13th

Published by Matthias Gall

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 …

sechsta sinn weekend

Published by Matthias Gall

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.

Privacy and Copyright on ICQ/AIM

Published by Matthias Gall

I’m sure it’s an old hat for the most of you, but I read about this for the first time and found it unacceptable (and I can’t believe I really overlooked this when I agreed to the terms of service). From the ICQ Terms Of Service: You agree that by posting any material or information anywhere on the ICQ Services and Information you surrender your copyright and any other proprietary right in the posted material or information. You further agree that ICQ Inc. is entitled to use at its own discretion any of the posted material or information in any manner it deems fit, including, but not limited to, publishing the material or distributing it. From the AIM Terms Of Service: You or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to public areas of any AIM Product. However, by submitting or posting Content to public areas of AIM Products (for example, posting a message on a message board or submitting your picture for the …

Weekend Gamedev

Published by Matthias Gall

I’ve done a huge refactoring of our game project, DVW, over the weekend. One reason was that I could not see the GUI code anymore. It was a mess! Most of the stuff was about four years old, and it looked like 40 years old or so. So I was spending the whole Friday night to rearrange things, move attributes and methods up to the parent class, remove some redundant stuff, and I even killed about 1000 lines of code by simply removing some GUI controls which were not used any longer and which were buggy as hell. The main reason was that I am currently writing the main menu code which is completely controlled from a Lua script. I didn’t want it to be hardcoded, because I don’t want to be the one who needs to do all the fine tuning with all the visual effects we’re going to have. We have people who are much more talented with this detail work. I wrote a state machine which supports multiple states at once, so …

Why patents suck

Published by Matthias Gall

I found a great example why (software) patents suck on the IGDA homepage, and an oppressive feeling arises when I imagine what lawsuits like this mean for game developers and software engineers in general if the claim is admitted. A short excerpt: There is an ongoing patent litigation case in the Eastern District of Texas of interest to all developers because of how broadly the Plaintiff appears to want to apply the claims of the patent. In this case, American Video Graphics, L.P. (“Plaintiff”) has sued sixteen game publishers, alleging that these defendants infringe AVG’s [patent], “Method and Apparatus for Spherical Panning.” […] Plaintiff has identified over 1000 accused games, which Plaintiff alleges infringe their [patent]. IGDA is now desperately searching for prior art to invalidate the patent. Read the full story here.

Exceptions and Stacktrace in C++

Published by Matthias Gall

Today I was discussing about how one could implement a stacktrace in C++, where one has not the luxury of Thread.dumpStack() or Throwable.printStackTrace(…) of Java. The general C++ approach one finds often is to create a dummy object on the stack at the beginning of each method which receives the current file and function as constructor parameters (using the __FILE__, __FUNCTION__ and __LINE__ macros) and stores them, i.e. increases a list pointer and saves the const char* at the resulting position. As soon as the object gets destructed at the end of the function, the list header pointer is decreased again. So, my first implementation looked like this: The first test with an exception I threw somewhere deep in the call hierarchy of my program revealed what one has to remember about exceptions: objects that exist on the stack at the time the exception is thrown are ordinary destructed. So, the d’tor of my CallStack object was called, too, and current was not pointing to where I had expected. So I had to mark the …

GTK Font Size

Published by Matthias Gall

Although I’m not a Linux geek, I play around with it from time to time. I have a Gentoo installation on my notebook. One might argue about the different distributions, but I found this one to be the most intuitive among the ones I tried. Today, I updated to the current Eclipse 3.1 M5a milestone, which I use at work, too. I had no trouble with this version yet, and if it’s good enough for work, it’s fine for using it at home, isn’t it? I did not use portage, but downloaded the GTK 2 binary instead. One thing I disliked was the huge font size. I was able to customize most font sizes in the Eclipse options, but the main menu remained in its original way-too-large size. I found out that this was some kind of GTK default font, so I searched for a way to change it, and found a little handy tool called gtk-chtheme. I downloaded it using emerge gtk-chtheme and was then able to change this main font easily. Now everything …