Virtual Global

I'm just coming back from holidays (the reason for the silence on this blog for the last few days) and I think the best post to start again is a globetrotting and Irrlicht related one: WEN Yongning sent me some screenshots of a program he developed named 'Virtual Global'. It is similar to NASA WorldWind (some people might say it is similar to Google Earth) and looks like this:

It is written in C++ (as opposed to WorldWind which is done in Java) and using DEM data, image pyramid and other 3D data, which are downloaded from a server during user interaction. Irrlicht is used as 3D engine and has been extended and adjusted during the development of this project.

I have no web site for this project, but it definately looks interesting. It is also worth mentioning that they didn't use the Irrlicht Scenegraph interface for this, but used its IVideoDriver interface directly as far as I understood.

Hope to see this thing in action on my PC soon. :)

Irrlicht Nightly Builds

Marc Burns has set up an automatic nightly builds system for Irrlicht on his server. It builds the latest SVN revision of the Irrlicht engine every 24 hours. Builds are created in both debug and optimized release form, and for both Linux x86 and Windows x86 (MinGW), the Windows builds including DirectX 9 support.
Thanks for providing that service, I think it is quite useful.

EEE Update

I still like my eee PC.
But one big drawback is that I didn't get Truecrypt to work on it yet because I don't want to install gcc and all the other dependent libraries on the small hard disk just to compile Truecrypt from sources. And I don't trust some hungarian private website as only source for a precompiled eee-compatible Truecrypt version. But I think I can live without this software for now.
The second drawback: I can't use the eee PC to do my C++ programming work, although there is no direct technical obstacle. The problem is that if you are developing a game with 3d graphics which needs a slight bigger screen resolution than 800x480, you run into troubles. :)

First Irrlicht.sf.net update after an eternity

Finally, there is an update of irrlicht.sf.net again. Nothing new for you if you are a reader of this blog, but after people told me the irrlicht website looks dead somehow.. :) Also, we - the irrlicht team - just made some provisions against this, I think that page will now be a bit more active again.

First DS review

JB from ultimateflashgame already published a Review of DS online, nice. I think its quite fair.

No more engrish in DS

There is a new update available of Darkness Springs, which adds some new maps, quests and finally gets rid of my broken english :

A part of a quest written by myself:

I wonder where all those goblins came from exactly, I mean they were quite a few. I bet they came from the southland. Please go there and search for a goblins cave or similar. You can reach the southland from a gate in the storage cave, or from the Traor Graveyard.

The same version improved:

I fear that if I cannot find out where those ghastly goblins came from, they may invade our city yet again and the storage catacombs shall never be safe. Their nest must be destroyed before I can feel calm again! Now, I have a suspicion that they came from the Southland. Please, go there and search for a goblins cave or something similar. You can reach the Southland from a gate in the storage catacombs, or from the Traor graveyard.

I think that's really a huge difference in quality. :) About 95% of all texts in the game have been overworked in this way, and I know this was a lot of work. It is a role playing game after all, and I think only text adventures contain more text. A lot of thanks go to the anonymous 'translator'! :)

The Darkness Springs server will be taken down tomorrow for some hours for maintenance by the way, so don't be surprised if the website might look a bit strange for a short amount of time.

How to Build the Next Stasi, Step 2

If you thought the current surveilance laws are enough already, then take a look at the blueprint of the new BKA law in Germany. It's that severe so that the government didn't even dare to publish it, only some mainstream media recieved copies of it. But markus, blogging at netzpolitik.org made it available for download now.
Read a nice (german) analysis here.
And since there are further plans, like making it even illegal to read this wikipedia
article for example, it seems like the only terror we are facing currently here in Europe is made by our governments themselves.

Irrlicht Extensions

There is now a new project available at sourceforge net, named IrrExt. Managed by bitplane and Zeuss, it is a collection of extensions to the Irrlicht Engine, like scene nodes, animators, GUI elements, materials, shaders, mesh loaders, physics wrappers and more, just about any extension to Irrlicht. Here is the official forum announcement.

Dmitry also started a similar named project at sourceforge.net, named 'irrlichtEx'. It is a small static library used to provide users with some extension classes and methods that are not provided by Irrlicht itself natively and will not be implemented there due to architecture unification and 100% portability.

Trying to digg DS up

The open beta of Darkness Springs is running quite well. I've dugg the game website now, if you have a digg.com account and like it, please digg it too (see below why):

Digg it here.

I've released a new version of the game today, and there are no major flaws in it anymore, as far as I can tell. Thanks all for testing and bug reporting. The only thing missing now is a test of a massive amount of people playing the game at the same time, a server stress test if you will. And what method for getting a massive amount of users for a short time to the DS website would be better than digg.com? :) I don't think it will hit the front page of digg, but if it does, I'll share my findings and test results here on this blog of course. So Digg it if you like, thanks :)

My new toy

Recently I bought myself a little new toy, it's an Eee PC. I ordered via Internet and never saw an Eee PC before in real life until the package arrived, so I was totally surprised that it is THAT small. Here is a picture of it in action, compared to a normal PC DVD Box:

I totally like it, especially because it is very handy compared to a normal notebook. The preinstalled Xandros Linux OS is ok, although you need a lot of manual tweaking in the config files and even some bug fixing in the boot scripts until it gets usable for a more technical user. After I had changed the font sizes of KDE and installed Opera (ideal browser for that screensize btw, firefox is still not able to resize webpages correctly and about 3 times slower than Opera on this system) I'm totally happy with that piece of hardware, I can really recommend it if you are away on business a lot, like me.