Merry Christmas
(Image courtesy of mybestdesktops.com)
Author: Matthias Gall
Two good reasons to finish DVW
I bought my first Samsung SyncMaster 204b about one and a half years ago. Although I had some problems with it, I decided to complete my set and get a second one. As you might recognize, I did not get the colors to match exactly yet, but I’ll try twiddle with that later. The wallpaper is from mandolux.com. If you ever need excellent dual monitor wallpapers, this is the place to go. I have downloaded some of them, and while I’m writing this, I have already changed my wallpaper again because I cannot decide which one I like best. The actual reason for buying a second 20″ was to have a little more screen space for programming again after my CRT smoked away some time ago, so: happy coding!
Free Developer e-Books
Christopher sent word that entwickler-press.de offers 24 free German developer e-Books for download in a virtual Advent calendar. Here’s the full list:
Electively serialize to/from XML or binary
I started several projects during the development time of DVW and eventually none of them came to an end (yet) in favor of DVW, so I thought I could share some of my findings. I wrote a little tutorial about how to electively serialize to and from XML or binary respectively. I would really appreciate comments and criticism.
Enabling StereoMix with SoundMAX drivers
Since my posting on the SoundMAX BSOD issues has become quite popular, I have decided to write another posting on my more recent experiences with the drivers in Windows XP. The problem was that it did not crash anymore but it did not let me record my cards output (which is called “StereoMix” or also “What You Hear” as a recording device). Here’s how to fix it.
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.
irrKlang fully integrated
After I finished the Windows integration, Christopher did the necessary work on the Linux version (basically editing CMake files) and Jan did the OS X version work tonight (messing around with an XCode project in this case). Let me cite him to show how damn easy it was. [00:31] <sheijk|6S> sound geht ohne absturz: check (Sound works without a crash: Check.) [00:31] <sheijk|6S> musik laeuft artefaktfrei: check (Music runs without artifacts: Check.) [00:31] <sheijk|6S> das ganze hat abzueglich rebuilds < 10 min aufwand gekostet: check (Subtracting the rebuilds, it took me less than 10 minutes of work: Check.) irrKlang is now fully integrated into DVW and if the next release will overcome its last minor issues, irrKlang will officially become our audio library of choice. It’s always a pleasure to work with Nikos code. And, no, posting three irrKlang entries in a row this is not advertising but pure excitement.
First experiences with irrKlang
Now that I’ve played around with irrKlang a bit, it’s time to write down a first resume. The first and best experience was how easy irrKlang was to integrate.
Audiere vs OpenAL vs irrKlang
It’s funny to see how our requirements regarding sound support changed. When I started to incorporate sound into DVW (after our former teammate Anselm who wrote the very first audio device left us, that is) I went for Audiere. At that time, Audiere was a framework which fitted exactly our needs. We had a Windows-only game for the time being, were about to play WAV and MP3 files from memory and didn’t want to bother about threading and all the platform-specific audio internals ourselves. It had bindings for several other languages and it looked like lots of other projects were using Audiere. Eventually, even Irrlicht was using it for its demos, so I thought this was a good way to go. But things turned out differently over time.
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.