Yes, I know, more comics … Thesis was finished this morning, so more interesting stuff to come!
For now, enjoy this great comic which came with the Team Fortress 2 mac update. I think it’s great how people using (traditionally) different systems can play on the same servers now.
Also, the porting of the Source engine to OpenGL is exciting. The benchmarks still result in sub-par performance compared to native DirectX on Windows, but the fact that a big game developer is making a big move to an open standard is interesting. It’s hard to find specific info on how they do it, but they seem to use some kind of emulation layer which maps DirectX-calls to OpenGL – Okay, this is oversimplified, but the point is that it’s not native OpenGL.
This also means that that Steam is coming to Linux, and with that, even more developers might be interested in releasing games on the 3 main PC platforms (Win/Mac/Linux), and thus using OpenGL as a standard. And yes, a Mac is a PC. It’s a computer. You operate it, it’s on your desk. That’s a personal computer. Case closed.
There’s been a lot of fuzz about a recently a new service called OnLive (also see Rock, Paper, Shotgun article) which claims to be able to stream high-end videogames to subscriber’s systems, thus eliminating the need for a ‘tricked out system’ and the need to upgrade every year/month.
There’s a lot of scepsis about their claims, because input latency + connection latency + server latency are a lot of hurdles to take. Gamespot video behind the cut. Oh, and it’s from the guy who brought us Quicktime.
If there’s one thing I’ve always envied console users for, it’s the universal system compatibility. You buy a disc, pop it in, and performance (I’m ignoring TV quality here) will be the same for you and other players you encounter.
Not quite so for a PC gamer. I’m sure everybody is familiar with the so-called minimum requirements for a game. This brings me to the first problem. There’s a huge ambiguity over what is acceptable as game performance. In game A, meeting the minimum requirements might be good enough to actually load the game into memory and gaze at a slideshow of half-baked pictures, while for game B, meeting them might result in a fluid – although low-end – gaming experience.
So here’s my proposal for what a true minimum requirement would have to look like. Continue reading »
So, the new academic year has started. I’m following a Master in Computer Sciences now, option Human-Machine interaction. I’ve got a bunch of interesting new courses (Computer Graphics, Distributed Systems, Compiler Construction, …), but the workload is getting pretty heavy. I’m also organising events for the improvisational theater group I’m active in, Preparee.
So I’m going to do the very thing I think is a landmark in laziness: instead of writing out paragraphs and paragraphs about the tidbits of interesting things I’ve found in the last few weeks, I’m going to sum them up. That’s right. Yes, Dave, I’m afraid I can do that.
I’ve been using Drupal a lot for the Preparee website. It’s quite complicated to get started with at first, although the module system is a bless. It was hard to get things running, since we opted for drupal 6.X, and a lot of modules still don’t have release candidates for the 6 series. Especially the Date module had some problems, but with my little project living against the dev-release line, I helped to debug it.
World of Goo is the best indie game I’ve played in a long time. It’s a physics-based puzzle game with a unique art style and tremendous music. It’s quite hard to believe this is a two-man project. I try to avoid using the phrase Bedroom Programmers here, since it tends to sound quite homoerotic.
A project I saw scrolling by on #thepiratebay.org on Efnet caught my attention a couple of weeks ago. Flox is an enhancement on several existing traditional P2P techniques.
“Flox is a technique in development which will identify the same parts from similar files and download those when needed. This will certainly increase speed, for slightly different files. This will also make the technique to strip off metadata from media files obsolete, since Flox will do it universally for ALL sorts of files, whether they have ID3 tags, ApeTags, or something completely new.“
The current development draft contains some very interesting stuff about palindrome pattern file splitting and hashing. I’ll surely get my hands on this when I have the time.
Some interesting bits up at Google Code : it’s my second Radiohead-related post this week, I know. For the recording of the House of Cards video clip they did not use any camera’s. Yes, that’s right. Instead, they used specialised hardware that can register 3D geometry at a very fast rate, and manipulated the information – not only in post-capture processing, though. You can see in the making-of video how they distort the 3D measurements by using reflective surfaces or water.
From a free-software point of view, this project is pretty interesting too: by using the Processingprogramming language and the data sets (a singing Thom Yorke and a lot of captured architecture) people can remix the video. It’s no straightforward task, but if only I had the time, I’d give it a try …
Today I read about Erik Nordenankar, who did a pretty cool thing: he developed a GPS transmitter with elongated battery life, put it in a shock-proof closed case, printed out very detailed instructions (places and coordinates) and handed the lot to the world-wide delivery company DHL.
By using the acquired data from the transmitter he could set out a trace of the case’s journey afterwards. To say it in his own words, he used the briefcase as a pen, and our planet as a canvas. The result is amazingly detailed, although it’s a bit pretentious to throw bags of (sponsored) dollars around to paint the biggest self-portrait ever made.
I would have gone for a crudely drawn fallus (testicles left and right of the african continent, shaft crossing the meditteranean sea, ending in the Scandinavian area). Just to see the looks on the sponsor’s faces.
Yes, I know, more comics … Thesis was finished this morning, so more interesting stuff to come!
There’s been a lot of fuzz about a recently a new service called 
