Posted on: September 03 2018
Comments: 3It took a while, but I finally repaired the RSS feed for this blog: Previously, all the links in the feed to the articles where broken, but they should work now. Please tell me if you find any problems anywhere.
RSS feeds went out of fashion a few years ago, but it looks like they are gaining momentum again, a bit, also judging from the amount of people complaining about this. Sorry for the long time it took me to repair this, it was quite difficult to debug this blog software, and took me three attempts...
[Read more]Posted on: August 28 2018
Comments: 4I just released RocketCake 2.1, that's the free responsive website builder I am developing.
It now has support for SFTP, which it can use when the "publish to internet" button is used. It then automatically uploads your website (or the changed items) to your server with one click.
It was quite a lot of work to make it possible so that people can write sftp:// instead of ftp://. A lot of work for just one character difference. :)
Unfortunately, there is a lot of bureaucracy related to the US law for ...
[Read more]Posted on: July 13 2018
Comments: 7I just released CopperCube 6.0. One of the major changes is this:
CopperCube is now free.
You can develop games, sell them, publish them on Steam, any App Store, any website, for free now.
In order to support the future development of CopperCube, there are also two additional editions available with a few more features which can be bought: Professional and Studio edition.
The changes in the release are:
Post-Processing Effects
Full FBX import with Animation
New lighting system
...
[Read more]Posted on: July 06 2018
Comments: 1I recently bought Overload, a zero-gravity shooter, which you play inside mines in a very small one-man spaceship. If you know the game "Descent" from 1995, then you know Overload: It's basically a remake without the rights to the original game. Descent looked like this:
Overload copies nearly all game mechanics and has modern graphics:
Even the default keyboard and mouse settings are the same.
I played Descent very much back then in the 90ies and loved the game, and even created levels for it. And ...
[Read more]Posted on: June 08 2018
Comments: 7I just took a screenshot of the exact moment where I realized that I am old now. A few minutes ago:
Nothing more to say. :)
[Read more]Posted on: May 25 2018
Comments: 2I just implemented WebGL 2, in order to make the images rendered by the WebGL target look exactly like rendered by the native platforms using Direct3D and OpenGL. This worked before (and will be improved in the upcoming update), but with the new post effects feature, it wasn't possible anymore since WebGL 1 doesn't support non-power-of-two render targets. The update to WebGL 2 was worth it:
Looks pretty identical to me, doesn't it?
[Read more]Posted on: May 15 2018
Comments: 5There is this small simple multiplayer browser game which I am playing from time to time during a break or when waiting for a build to finish: Airmash. It looks like this:
I noticed that a surprising amount of the players on there are developers, too. I can also recommend this game for resetting your brain again when facing a problem, works surprisingly well.
I'm not sure what the business model of this is, though.
[Read more]Posted on: May 04 2018
Comments: 3I just created a Steam page for CopperCube 6 Game engine:
Yes, the next CopperCube update will be a major one, namely version 6. There will be some things in there which I think most users will really like, but as usual, I'm not talking much about this before release. But there will be a nice surprise at least.
If you have a Steam account, it would be cool if you could help and add tags to the CopperCube Steam page, tagging it as "Game Development" and similar. I think this also levels up your Steam a...
[Read more]Posted on: April 29 2018
Comments: 3I am currently working on adding post effects into Coppercube for the next update. It is not finished yet, but some features already partially work, like Bloom:
Needs still a bit of refinement, though.
[Read more]Posted on: April 13 2018
Comments: 0I'm not sure why I haven't added this feature already long before, but somehow I guess it wasn't high priority enough. But the next CopperCube update will have it:
It was quite a bit work to add this, but it is very useful. You will be able to move, scale, rotate all selected nodes at the same time, as well as editing their properties and similar.
[Read more]Posted on: April 06 2018
Comments: 0I just uploaded update 1.2 of Government Simulator. It icludes lots of balancing and simulation improvements, and also a Brexit scenario:
So you can try out if you could save UK after the Brexit.But I think also the Russia scenario is a bit more interesting now, after the balancing changes.
You can get the game here on steam.
[Read more]Posted on: March 31 2018
Comments: 1Adding a tiny change such as a new light model causes a lot of headaches, for example a lot of things in the editor need to be updated in order to work properly with that. Right now, everything seems to work again, it looks like this right now:
But other things like for example the wireframe mode don't work yet. But I'm working on it.
[Read more]Posted on: March 27 2018
Comments: 5I'm currently working on improving the light model in the CopperCube Game engine. The current one works well, but for some cases, it doesn't look very nice. For example, it doesn't look very good when you have just a few very bright lights. I now have worked a bit on this, and the result so far works very well everywhere (showing an example scene where the old model really looks bad):
And with 'everywhere', I mean the fixed function pipeline for old hardware, static light mapping for slow hardware, dynam...
[Read more]Posted on: March 25 2018
Comments: 1Apparently, I'm now also responsible for broken Anti Virus software.
It's my fault. Of course this results in a "not recommended" rating. What else?
[Read more]Posted on: March 09 2018
Comments: 2Today, I found a very simple inconsistency between browsers, causing a major PITA for me. Assume this simple code:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<span style="font-size:50px;">LINE 1<br/></span>
<span style="font-size:14px;">line 2</span>
</body>
</html>
Which will look like this in most browsers:
But in internet explorer and edge, it will look like this
Interestingly enough, if you remove the DOCTYPE tag, both browsers will do...
[Read more]Posted on: March 06 2018
Comments: 2A while ago I posted a table of ranges of electric cars because I was thinking about buying a new car in the near future. Unfortunately, my old car broke down last week, so I needed a new car much earlier than anticipated.
The problem for me was that I need a car with at least seven seats. As far as I found, there are only two electric cars with this feature:
Tesla Model X: With a price > 100k euro, this was much too expensive for me.
Nissan NV 200: The official range of 280 km is ok, but I guess...
[Read more]Posted on: February 23 2018
Comments: 3I am currently trying to improve several specific features in the CopperCube Game Engine. Right now, I am working on improving the terrain generation, because let's be honest: When you click on "create a terrain", the generated and built-in graphics are not that nice. So after playing around a bit, this is what it looks now after I've improved it a bit:
It's not great, but definately better. I only needed 3 clicks in the editor to create this scene for me. But I still have a few plans to make this nicer....
[Read more]Posted on: February 20 2018
Comments: 2Flash is dead, as it seems. Is anyone still using it? I am currently thinking about removing support for Flash in the next update of CopperCube. It would speed up the development of the other targets, and removing ballast that way.
I created a poll on twitter for this, if you like, vote and tell me what you think about it.
[Read more]Posted on: February 13 2018
Comments: 5I just realized that I'm now working since 14 years on this little C++ sound library which I called irrKlang. Today I pushed out a smaller update of it, modernizing it a bit again. Improving .NET support, support for gcc 5.1 and others, reducing dll dependencies (no MSVC runtime dll needed for C++), improving single threaded mode stability and speed, and more.
It is not only used by many indie games, but also by my own projects, of course. Basically everything I wrote which uses audio. Let's see what th...
[Read more]Posted on: February 10 2018
Comments: 1The situation in my country can currently be summarized as this:
The colors mean the following:
green = no influenza
yellow = isolated cases
orange = repeated cases
red = influenza wave
Source: virologie.meduniwien.ac.at
[Read more]Posted on: February 02 2018
Comments: 0It's weekend (in Austria, Friday afternoon is considered weekend, no really), so I uploaded a small update to Government Simulator: It is now also possible to play as the United Kingdom.
Great Britain was the most wished country to be added to Government Simulator, so I added it. Things I didn't know about the UK: They have an interestingly high spending on education, compared to other nations. Not sure exactly why this is, their results aren't that much better, oddly.
Let's see if people living in t...
[Read more]Posted on: January 26 2018
Comments: 2If you develop software or games, and sell them, you need to get used to the fact that your software will be be rated. No matter if you are on the Mac App Store, Google Play, Steam, or even your own website, people will comment and rate your software, make videos, blog texts and tweets about it. A lot of times, the feedback and comments you will be getting isn't very positive, sometimes even brutal, destructive and abusing. I'm developing commercial games and game development related software since now more...
[Read more]Posted on: January 23 2018
Comments: 6A reddit mod just banned me because I created version 2.0 of this free website editor named RocketCake and dared to submit the news. What has reddit become to?
I'm a reddit user for nearly 10 years now, and supporting reddit by commenting, posting and even spending thousands of euros in advertising on reddit each year. But I think I will stop doing this now.
Reddit is supposed to be a community where people up and downvote things they like or hate, not to be crippled by mods who don't know what they a...
[Read more]Posted on: January 22 2018
Comments: 0I just uploaded version 2.0 of RocketCake, the free responsive website editor.
This release contains quite a lot of new features, like multi level sub menus, selectable HTML version, support for placeholders, improved slideshows and galleries, and a lot more. See the detailed list here.
[Read more]Posted on: January 14 2018
Comments: 5Did you ever consider buying an electric car? My current car is very old and nearing its death, so I thought maybe an electric car would be nice, as next one. Looking through the websites of all the car makers, you'll quickly notice that the both most important factors for buying such a car are usually not advertised at very prominent places: Price and Range. Sometimes, they are even missing on the website!
So I created a list with all current e-cars (available in Germany and Austria) which would be poss...
[Read more]Posted on: January 12 2018
Comments: 1After more than one year and 15 updates, I've taken the survival game PostCollapse out of early access on Steam. The game has changed significantly since the first release on Steam. See this screenshot comparison for example:
The left shows the first released version of PostCollapse, and the right one how it looks now: The world is much more detailled, has better graphics and much more content. The game has evolved quite a lot during the early access phase.
The game now has reached a state where it f...
[Read more]Posted on: January 01 2018
Comments: 3Another year has gone by and since a few hours, it's now 2018. As every new year, I'm offering most of my products with a big discount for a few days, like -75% off CopperCube and -50% off RocketCake. You can see the full list here.
Maybe there is something interesting for you as well.
I think 2017 was an interesting year, and I did a lot of new things, like for example releasing a political simulation game on steam, or implementing realtime shadows in my 3D game engine as free update. I learned a lot ...
[Read more]Posted on: December 15 2017
Comments: 2I just uploaded version 5.7.1 of the Game Engine CopperCube. This is the 14th free update of Coppercube 5. As a few people already know, there is a bigger release in the making, but since it takes quite a bit of time, this is small update was preponed.
This update includes a lot of improvements to the WebGL tagret and other parts of the engine, you can see the full list here.
[Read more]Posted on: December 04 2017
Comments: 2My latest game, Government Simulator is now released on Steam. I think it is an actual fun and entertaining game, and you can even learn a bit from it. I at least learned quite a lot when creating it.
Fixing a country like Austria or the USA isn't actually that easy. Possibile, but there are always drawbacks. Get the game on Steam, if you want to try. The game is not expensive, and there is currently a -20% discount. Also, any feedback is welcome, of course!
[Read more]Posted on: November 27 2017
Comments: 2Is it just me or has Google Translate become much better recently? When I work on updates for my software (CopperCube in this case), I usually have to add a lot of strings, and need their translations into other languages. CopperCube for example currently is translated into 14 (!!) languages. It is usually fine for such specialized software to leave some special parts in english, but for most of the languages I speak, I translate them manually.
To speed this up a bit, I use Google Translate, and correct a...
[Read more]