Irrlicht3d.org

Impostors in Irrlicht

Maybe you've seen this already, but something I personally like, Impostors implemented in Irrlicht, hundreds of quake 3 levels! :)

Bitplane wrote this and is still working on it, quite nice.

Prime number based encryption

Development internals: Darkness Springs internally uses a secure, prime based encryption scheme: Rot13. :D

Know Facebook? Know StudiVZ.

I thought I never used Facebook in my life before and that I could live without it. I am at least
registered at StudiVZ already, the primary social network in the german speaking area. And StudiVZ already sucks and is quite useless, so I thought after all the bad things I've heard of Facebook I really don't need to get in touch with that thing at all. But looks like I am wrong: Because I didn't see Facebook in my life before, I - as well as about 90% of all other users as well - didn't realize that StudiVZ seems to be a perfect rip-off of Facebook - so I kind of used it already. Hilarious, just take a look at the images, the only difference seems to be the color (red vs blue):

Facebook (up) vs. StudiVZ (below), (source)

People are reporting that StudiVZ has exactly the same features as Facebook, and some paths of StudiVZ's PHP based implementation even seems to be named 'fakebook'. Well, Facebook already sued StudiVZ because of this right now (well, the real reason is of course because Facebook still has only 1 mio users vs. StudiVz's 6 mio users in this area). StudiVZ already replied that they still think it's ok what they are doing. Nothing unexpected from a company who admonished other websites with the letters 'VZ' in their domain name for their 'mark' which wasn't even fully registered back then.

Unexpected Massacre Use of Realm Architect

Realm Architect, the editor of the rpg Darkness Springs is now public for one week, and people really use it. That's very nice. But interestingly, about 70% of all people simply use it to set up big massacre scenes which immediately start when the game begins:

That's strange, but well.. why not. :) Those realms usually get rated down quite quickly and there are already some few realms with more interesting content. Looking forward to more :)

On Job Interviews in Software Development Companies

I think I now have quite some experience with job interviews, especially since I am working as freelancer from time to time.
Of course companies usually want to get to know you before you start writing software for them and ensure that you are the right person for the job, and it is always interesting to talk to other software development people during this process. Interviews like these are of course a bit different to job interviews when you simply apply for a company employee job, but there are a lot of common parts as well. One recent such occasion reminded me on this blog post by Svetlin Nakov, a software engineer from Sofia.

Basically he describes his job interviews at Microsoft and Google, where the interesting part is the short Google part:

It was like Olympiad in Informatics. Google asked me only about algorithms and data structures, nothing about software technologies and software engineering. It was obvious that they do not care that I had 12 years software engineering experience. They just ignored this.(source)

And then he summarizes that working at Google probably sucks because Google seems to employ everybody as junior developer, ignoring any existing software development experience.

Well, google may actually not suck as employer, but the problem is that a lot of companies today seem to forget that the job interview process is not one way: It's not only for the company to see if the job applicant fits their needs, but it also serves the applicant to get a first impression of the internals of the place where he may be working from now on.

So basically, if a company asks me stupid questions and treats me as an idiot in the job interview, I might not even want to work for it at all because I get a very bad impression from this alone. :)

Defender of the favicon

Defender of the favicon is a game implemented javascript, and the whole game runs inside the favicon. Impressive. And somehow.. insane. :)

Another 'Vote now' call-up

Nothing extraordinary to blog today. Bored? Vote for my game, Darkness Springs. It's a german page but you only need to enter the CAPTCHA and click on 'abschicken'. :)

Max Payne Movie Trailer - Nice

The just released Max Payne Movie Trailer looks quite nice, in my opinion. In contrast to most previous screen adaptions of computer games like Doom, Wing Commander, Tomb Raider, Mario Bros etc, this trailer really reminds me on the game and even makes me want to play it again :)
And I hope those flying Angel things in that trailer are just imagination or similar..

Darkness Springs: Realm Architect now Beta

Darkness Springs: Realm Architect is the name for the role playing game's game editor, which is now available for public use.

In short, everybody can create own role playing realms with own quests, maps and stories with it, and make them available to everyone with one click, because Darkness Springs is running directly in the browser.
There is a detailed editor manual available if you are interested. And some people already started playing around with the editor, obviously. :)

And another great video...

Just found this one:

Well done!