Posted on: May 09 2016
Comments: 2Dear online journalist, game community manager, youtuber, streamer, and others. Thanks for requesting a free steam key, for you to review our 3D game engine on Steam. Unfortunately, we get numerous requests like these every day, and most of them are made by teenagers, gamers and similar, just trying to get a free steam key. For them to use themselves. And not for a review. Some people are really good at this, and using various sophisticated techniques, including faking a full website, just to get a free ste...
[Read more]Posted on: April 29 2016
Comments: 0I just released a small update of CopperCube, version 5.4.2. It is just a small update, but it has some cool new features. Also, to celebreate, CopperCube is now on sale for a few days.
[Read more]Posted on: April 28 2016
Comments: 4When I have half an hour of free time, I sometimes use this to play Hearthstone, that free Warcraft themed card game by Blizzard. It is quite popular, having just reached 50 million players recently. The game was designed so that you either need to play a lot of games with characters or techniques you actually don't want to in order to earn virtual currency, in order to craft or buy more powerful cards you need in order to win against others. Or to simply buy the cards directly, using real world money. But ...
[Read more]Posted on: April 26 2016
Comments: 2A small new feature for the upcoming free update of CopperCube will be support for dynamic day-night cycles:
There will be a new open source / extensible behavior written in JavaScript for doing this, as well as an improved scripting API making this possible if you want to do this yourself. The existing implementation has been copied from my PostCollapse game, but it should be able to customize it easily.
I think this will open the possibility to create a lot more interesting games.
[Read more]Posted on: January 02 2016
Comments: 2In the comment section of my 2015 review post the question came up how I make money by creating software. I get asked this by quite a lot of programmers. So, if you are planning to develop and sell software on your own, here are a few tips about how to create a software business in 2016:
Creating the product is only 50% of your work
Since I'm working mainly on old-school desktop software and sometimes on games and websites, the most important step is of course to create a product which solves a proble...
[Read more]Posted on: January 01 2016
Comments: 1I want to wish all readers of this blog a happy new year!
As every year, I'm also using this moment for shamelessly offering some of my products for a big discount, for a few days:
You get CopperCube, WebsitePainter. RocketCake Professional, DiagramPainter, irrFuscator and EndTime at Home for -50% for a few days. Only from this page.
Hope you had a nice start into 2016!
[Read more]Posted on: December 25 2015
Comments: 6The year 2015 was quite eventful for me, both for the private and the business side of my life. Here is a short overview what I did in the latter part, in 2015:
I created numerous free updates of CopperCube, my flagship software product. Including the addition of realistic realtime 3d water, fog, and improvements of the WebGL renderer.
I programmed and launched a new website editor for creating responsive websites, and named it RocketCake. I risked the experiment and made if free. And People seem to...
[Read more]Posted on: December 16 2015
Comments: 2In the WebGL game I'm working on in my free time, Internet Explorer beats Chrome's WebGL game performance. Strange, you think? Here are the details:
Chrome 47 seem to have introduced a change which is causing Endtime at Home not to work anymore nicely. Try it for yourself: start a game, go forward for about 600 meters, and then turn your head quickly about 180 degrees. If 'lucky' you can even skip the "walk 600 meters" part. The game will nearly freeze, dropping to a frame rate of about one frame per 5...
[Read more]Posted on: December 13 2015
Comments: 0So I just wrote a small plugin for compressing the geometry of a 3d scene. It went surprisingly well: It achieved a reduction between 50% and 70% for some of my test scenes:
What it does is to merge vertices with similar attributes. I noticed that for most scenes, people don't need the exact vertex colors and normals, so vertices with the same positions and texture coordinates can be merged. This doesn't work with all types of scenes of course, but for some, they look identical, but have now a 70% smalle...
[Read more]Posted on: December 09 2015
Comments: 8Since more than 18 years, I'm developing and selling commercial software. I noticed quite a change in the behavior of the customers of my software, when it comes to support and problem resolution. To show what I mean, see the typical (shortened) exchanges I usually have with my customers:
2003 and before:
Customer: Hey, there seems to be a problem with your software. I tried for a few days now, and read all the documentation, but I cannot find a solution for $My_Problem$.
Me: Hi, just try $Solution$, ...
[Read more]Posted on: December 03 2015
Comments: 1DZone did a short interview with me, about Irrlicht, Game Engines and CopperCube.
[Read more]Posted on: November 28 2015
Comments: 5I don't have much spare time anymore, but when I do from time to time, I like working on my procedural generated post apocalyptic game, which runs directly in the browser (WebGL), and is based on my book. I just added a much improved procedural generated vegetation:
It looks much better in movement, but see for yourself (Chrome or Firefox recommended).
I'm also using this to actively test CopperCube's WebGL 3D engine, and to improve it here and there. Works nice so far, with the next CopperCube updat...
[Read more]Posted on: November 26 2015
Comments: 0After 2 public beta versions, I just released RocketCake 1.0. It is the responsive website designer I've been working on recently, and it is free to use:
There is also a professional edition which costs 39 euro to keep funding further development, but you can basically do mostly everything with the free basic edition. It is also available now in the Mac App Store. Feedback was very positive so far, and people really seem to like it.
[Read more]Posted on: November 04 2015
Comments: 5I hope someone will reserve a very special place in hell for the designers of XCode. About once a year, you are focrced to update to the next XCode version, although the current one just works perfectly. And after upgrading, something usually stops working. This time, the buttons in XCode for verifying and uploading the project were simply disabled / grayed out. No hint, no message, no error. Just a grayed out button. No mention in the documentation. I now wasted hours of work just to find out the reason fo...
[Read more]Posted on: October 16 2015
Comments: 5From time to time, I get bug reports like this:
Your software doesn't work anymore since yesterday on my system.
So... what software does the user talk about? He didn't select any product from the list (he choose the default, 'other'). But I am currently selling a handful of products. And what does he mean with "doesn't work"? Does it crash? Doesn't it do its job anymore? Does it do it in a way the user doesn't expect it to be done? And what happened 'yesterday', which caused the change in behavior? Did h...
[Read more]Posted on: September 25 2015
Comments: 0I just released CopperCube 5.3, it includes quite some new features such as fog rendering, much better Blender .blend import, experimental FBX support, WebGL and Android improvements and more.
The unusual thing is that I am giving away CopperCube Basic edition for a 50% discount now. Crazy, I know, it is a bit of an experiment.
A detailed list of the changes in version 5.3 can be found here. It is a pretty nice list, and I'm quite happy with it.
[Read more]Posted on: September 23 2015
Comments: 2In the beginning of this year, I blogged about the air-to-water
heat pump which is taking care that all the programmers in my office have it warm in winter.
It is now running for more than one full year, so I have some more data to show: The graph below shows the temperature and the needed electricity. It also contains the electricity needed by the full building, but at least 80% is used for the heat pump:
Easily to see that if it gets cold outside, the needed power goes up quite a lot. It looks ...
[Read more]Posted on: September 11 2015
Comments: 3It's a bit embarrassing, but although CopperCube is already in version 5, and now about 7 years old, it still doesn't support fog. (Well unless you add this by writing your own shaders). But fog is a pretty cool feature, especially for the lightweight targets like WebGL and Android. So I started adding this:
It looks very nice, especially when used with terrain. Works also with the reflecting realtime water, I didn't even have to change a line of code for that, interestingly.
This new feature - fog - w...
[Read more]Posted on: September 10 2015
Comments: 2Achievement of the day: Made a big C++ library compile on Visual Studio 2005, although it uses lots of features of C++11 . Learned a lot about C++11 details that way.
[Read more]Posted on: September 09 2015
Comments: 0So last weekend, I watched "The Thing" on Amazon Prime, thinking that it is a remake of the original "&The Thing" film from 1982.
It has been many years since I saw the original movie, so I was confused about all the people speaking Norwegian, and the discovery of an alien space ship, of which I was sure it didn't happen in the original movie. Also, the main character was female, suddenly. I was pretty pissed by then, assuming this was again a pretty poor remake with lots of changes in the plot, "just ...
[Read more]Posted on: September 04 2015
Comments: 3I just released Beta 1 of RocketCake, the free responsive website editor. The internal beta test went pretty well, and I am happy that the testers loved that editor. If you just want to design a ready-to-go website without the need to code anything, it seems to be working very well for now:
You can download the editor from its website, but keep in mind, it is still in Beta. No major bugs are known for now, and it seems to work well.
There isn't a Mac OS X version yet, but work has started for this alr...
[Read more]Posted on: August 28 2015
Comments: 4I've been working a bit on optimizing speed and memory usage of my not-yet-released free responsive website editor. I'm quite OK with the result so far:
Yes, that's right: the editor is using nearly 3 times less memory for editing a website then Firefox needs for merely showing the website! And it only contains a bit of text and images, no JavaScript or any other fancy stuff. Wondering what the Firefox devs did there.
[Read more]Posted on: August 21 2015
Comments: 4A few months ago, Google decided to also rank websites based on if they work well on mobile devices. I looked shortly into that, trying to see how much work it would be to convert my software website to a responsive one. After a bit of playing around, I decided that this would be too much work for now.
But still, it itched me, and figured out that a lot of people probably have this problem too.
So I took my web editor WebsitePainter and - for testing - extended it a bit to allow responsive website desi...
[Read more]Posted on: July 18 2015
Comments: 3So I finally was able to code a small update for Endtime at Home, the game I use for prototyping new features for CopperCube. It now has a realtime day/night cycle, you can make light using a flash light, torch or match sticks, there is now a UI, a world map, and more:
You can try the game out directly in your browser, if you have Chrome or Firefox. I hear it also runs nicely on the iPad, in Safari. Maybe Apple finally fixed their WebGL bugs.
The same scene at sunset:
It should run fast even on slow...
[Read more]Posted on: July 09 2015
Comments: 5You don't get back much for creating open source software, but at least, sometimes it gives you a very good feeling:
And makes you laugh sometimes :)
[Read more]Posted on: June 19 2015
Comments: 3I've written a lot of websites during the last nearly two decades, and know pretty much of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other web technologies because of that. But there is usually always a situation where I have to scratch my head and wonder how or why a browser is lay-outing a specific part of a website the way it does. And confusingly, why in the world other browsers are doing it in the exact same, weired way as well.
I recently had to implement a big part of CSS 2's visual formatting model for a new com...
[Read more]Posted on: May 07 2015
Comments: 3So, CopperCube is now available on Steam:
It was quite an interesting journey until there, and also interesting seeing Steam from 'the other side', as developer, opposed to previously, as gamer. I may not talk about any details, but I definitely expected something a bit different. :)
CopperCube has a launch discount of -20% applied to it on Steam, which still works until tomorrow, Friday 8th of May. To be fair, I also made this discount available to the non-Steam from our website, which you can get he...
[Read more]Posted on: April 30 2015
Comments: 2It appears to me that recently, some developers have gone nuts. Like the ones sitting at Google. They don't seem to be interested in backwards or forwards compatibility, and are pushing out this incredible crazy development dependencies. As example, see below what I spent half of this day doing: I just wanted to debug CopperCube's Android client code on a newly bought phone. Should be easy, with a ready to run and working development environment, right? No:
Me: trying to debug my code by hitting the ...
[Read more]Posted on: April 22 2015
Comments: 3Last week, Valve sent me a friendly mail, notifying me that CopperCube has been greenlit.
That's pretty neat news!
It will take some time making CopperCube available on steam, because this involves quite a bit more than just uploading the app there, but
once this is done, maybe a few more people start using the game engine. This would be pretty nice, because then, I would be able to
allocate more resources to continue developing even cooler new features for CopperCube.
I'll keep you updated on ...
[Read more]Posted on: April 15 2015
Comments: 4Software projects are quite often compared to other scenarios, like building a house or a car. I've often heard the claim that time estimates, planning or defect management are so much better in those other areas of engineering. But they are not true, in my opinion.
How many programmers do you know, who ever did some "real world engineering"? If you are a software developer, have you ever built something with your own hands? During the last 5 years, I've build a lot of stuff which was not software, and I...
[Read more]