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This is part because I haven’t had chance to listen to many MOD files recently and also because I’ve practically exhausted the top end of my personal collection and so the mod-buffer is empty and I’m struggling to find just one good MOD each week to post up.

I promise to catch up fully on the MOD Monday collection on December 6th.

Best regards,

Terry.

P.S.

To show my utmost apologies, please accept this image of the black pudding from Cadash:

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See also:

• MOD Monday #4 – “Goodbye” by U4ia (Jim Young)
• MOD Monday #17 – “Freudian Dream” by U4ia (Jim Young)

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I’ve always tried to upload the mod files that I find reflect what I personally love listening to and you’ll find me virtually playing on repeat.

However, after a whole year, finding these gems has become harder and harder. I’ve even been going through the entire MODArchive 2007 snapshot collection for the last year listening to music and I’m only up to E and while I’ve saved a little over 1,300 mod files from that massive collection so far, only a small fraction of those I want to listen to and then again, just a tiny fraction of those would I want to post.

While I’m trying to find mods to post, at this stage, some weeks, the MOD Monday posting may be somewhat deferred as a result of just not having something to post that week!

This is why I ask anybody who has a mod file they really like to tell me about it via e-mail or via comment so as to help me find some new music

Without further ado, this is “*cHarLeS aTLaS iS Me!!!*” by Bass System (Feborron).

There is little information on this author, so as always I implore the original author or anybody else with information to shed light on who they are!

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Heroes 3 HD – HoMM3 High Resolution Project

(Download)

This is a fantastic patch that allows you to run Heroes of Might and Magic III at pretty much any resolution that you desire. It even works fine at up to my native 2048×1152 resolution for me.

In the second image, you can see a small map practically being displayed at once at such a high resolution. I personally run the game in 1280×800 so that it doesn’t knock the shit out of my eyesight

As you can see from the images below, the game remains at standard Heroes of Might and Magic III size, you just get to see more of it. Excellent!

Update:

Newer versions of the Heroes 3 HD patch now have a built in no-cd feature and fix windowed mode issues with all colour depths.

32BitPatch (32-Bit Patch for Heroes of Might and Magic III)

(Download)

Personally, I like to play Heroes of Might and Magic III in a window without having to change the desktop to 16-bit and avoid the annoying 65536 colours limitation

This handy utility allows you to paly Might and Magic III in a window while also having the desktop remain in 32-bit colour.

Apparently this utility can be used in conjuction with the Heroes 3 HD patch from above, but it only crashed for me. I take it that it’s outdated, which is a shame. Larger resolutions in a windowed mode would be great.

Update:

This patch has been pretty well superseded by the Heroes 3 HD patch above which has this feature and much more.

Heroes of Might and Magic III: In the Wake of Gods

(Download)

In the Wake of Gods is a free unofficial expansion designed to allow the addition of scripts via the Event Related Model (ERM). Some of the enhancements that WoG brings to the table are much needed, basic features missing from the original game-play such as a “purchase all creatures” button, the quick combat option, etc. as well as some medium-level additions such as the Artificer, a new structure for upgrading, combining and changing items, new bonuses for artifacts, skills and so on, while other additions allow some fairly radical game-play changes, such as adding creature stack experience, a third level of upgrade for creatures, etc.

I must admit, the first time I gave this expansion a go, I really didn’t get on with it, but I was really looking for a new experience in HoMMIII so I ended up revisiting it. All of the features that WoG brings to the table can be turned off, and you may find yourself adding the features back in once you get used to the changes anyway.

Initially, the “WoG Options” is somewhat overwhelming (Part of what initially put me off), but take the time to give the options a quick read and you’ll soon have it all figured out.

Note: The Heroes 3 HD patch above also works with this expansion.

I present an HTML5 based Quake II MD2 model loader and renderer that I wrote to demonstrate file reading and canvases.

(Click Image to View HTML5 MD2 Renderer)

Notes

I used the BinaryReader which was refactored by Vjeux although I had to slightly refactor it myself as I had problems getting floats to read properly. I quickly wrote my own function for calculating the IEE 754 Single precision floats rather than modify the function as doing it from scratch was quicker in the end, either way, it gave me the result I was after.

I also made use of the MD2 file format specification document by David Henry because I’m nowhere near smart enough to remember the headers every time I do an MD2 reader

This demo will not work in Internet Explorer 8 or less. Use Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera. They are all far better choices.

The original music was by Adam Gilmore.

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Not much to say except that this is a PHP script that loads an MD2 file server side (You have a choice between Quad Damage and Space Marine models). The script parses the data and outputs it to a GDImage as a wireframe model.

This was just for fun and I hope it doesn’t prove to be too heavy for my host’s servers.

You can update the model’s rotation manually or click the auto update checkbox to have it perform one complete 360 degree rotation.

Angle:

Auto Update:
(Do one complete 360 degree rotation)

Model:
Doom Space Marine Quad Damage ]]> http://www.terrybutler.co.uk/2010/07/26/php-md2-model-viewer/feed/ 0 http://www.terrybutler.co.uk/2010/07/21/darken-javascript-bookmarklet-update/ http://www.terrybutler.co.uk/2010/07/21/darken-javascript-bookmarklet-update/#comments Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:13:37 +0000 Terry http://www.terrybutler.co.uk/2010/07/21/darken-update/ This is just a simple modification of the Javascript bookmarklet called “Darken” by Gina Trapani. No idea if it had already been updated or not, but here’s the list of what I changed for anybody interested:

• Running the bookmarklet multiple times toggles the darken effect on and off! Saves refreshing the page
• Changed the colour scheme to green text
• Added hover effect for links
• Changed link colour and added underline to differentiate links
• Changed link visited colour
• Only uses the appendChild method as that’s all the Browsers I use support (Opera, IE9, Firefox, Chrome)

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javascript: (function (){var newSS, styles = '* { background-color: black ! important; color: green !important; }a:link, a:link * { color: green !important; text-style: underline; }a:visited, a:visited * { color: #7f0000 !important; }a:hover, a:hover * { color: red !important; }';var elemHead = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0];var elemCSS = document.getElementById("darkenCSS");if (elemCSS){elemHead.removeChild(elemCSS);}else{newSS = document.createElement('link');newSS.rel = 'stylesheet';newSS.href = 'data:text/css,' + escape(styles);newSS.id = "darkenCSS";elemHead.appendChild(newSS);}})();

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http://shop.ebay.co.uk/drake_tb/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=&_trksid=p3686

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This is the remixed version by Pirate Pete (Christian Privateer) to lengthen the song from around 23 seconds to 2 minutes 33 seconds.

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Links

• Hall of Light Database: Crazy Sue Goes On
• YouTube: Amiga Longplay [307] Crazy Sue Goes On

Here is “Craz” by Thomas H. Heldgaard.

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It had my mind crawling with thoughts from this episode and previous episodes.

1. While the MiB (Man in Black) talks about installing the Frozen Donkey Wheel, it’s clear that the group of people MiB was living with get wiped out before they get a chance to install it.
2. We have the really old image of the smoke monster as depicted on the wall under the temple where the smoke monster seems to be some form of guardian, but this honestly doesn’t  match the malevolent personality of the smoke monster as we see in MiB although we know that MiB uses people to his own end.



3. Given the hieroglyphs in the cavern where the Frozen Donkey Wheel finally ends up being installed, presumably by a new group of people of Egyptian origin, who come to the Island after the events in Across the Sea". These are presumably the same people that made the statue, the temple and the wall art above.
4. The diagram underneath the temple shows that these people were aware of the monsters ability to bear a human face. The smoke monster has a face.
5. The idea of the monster as a guardian is further enforced by the hieroglyphics on the door to Ben’s secret room apparently reading “to summon protection”.
6. How did Mother manage to wipe out an entire village of people by herself. This is what led people to believe she may have been Smokey.
7. It was pretty easy to initially speculate that Mother might have been one incarnation of the smoke monster, but on her death, she does leave behind a body. So perhaps not. Also note that she doesn’t seem to age either.
8. When the MiB enters the cave with the light, just before the smoke monster comes billowing out, we see the light dim.
9. The monster must carry the body out and dump it after it’s finished with MiB

I’m pretty convinced that the smoke monster, but not as we know it, has always been its own separate entity. The introduction of the MiB just tainted it.

As obvious as it might sound, the smoke monster probably _was_ the bright light in the cave which was turned dark as the MiB tainted it. Either the light turned dark / went out, or the light was merely blocked by the monster as it rose out of the cave. Maybe up until that point, the smoke monster was just a “tabula rasa”. A blank slate.

Is the image depicted on the wall under the temple (as in point 2) before or after the events in this episode? Somebody must have finished building that Frozen Donkey Wheel.

It’s good to finally see an end to the Adam and Eve story too.

I think the last three episodes have got their work cut out for them to wrap up all of our questions _and_ end the show!

JACK: You wanna tell me how we’re gonna get a bomb out of here?

RICHARD: The same way we brought it in.

JACK: I assume you don’t mean through the pool.

RICHARD: It’s a 12-foot long, 40,000-pound hydrogen bomb. No, not through the pool.

It’s a good question. How _did_ they transport the bomb?

Links

1. http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Follow_the_Leader_transcript

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I laughed so hard, it almost made up for the lack of definitive answers in the final season of Lost after waiting 5 years so far!

Oh, I’m just kidding.. Kind of..

I have made two pages. One page is for the First Person adventure games, and the second is for the Third Person (Point’n’Click) adventure games.

I hope to eventually add a gallery for each game.

I hope for the lists to be as comprehensive as possible, but currently there are many titles missing, including, quite possible, some of my very favourites! Even so, don’t hesitate to remind me of any missing games.

If you fancy using this in your project, be my guest.

I’ve already used PNGOut to optimize the image’s size. Bringing it down from 16KB to 11KB.

On a point of interest, the file size for a skyscraper (tall) version of the above image, even after optimization, was 16KB, 5KB larger than the wide version, which illustrates the extra capacity needed to deal with those extra rows and most importantly, the loss of optimization potential.

Here is an animated GIF version (8KB):

There are also other services that deal with this kind of thing for those interested (amongst others):

• http://ajaxload.info/

Have a great day.

Does anybody out there have any that they know of?

Here are a bunch of links to get started:

1. http://www.toheroes.com/h3maps/allied.htm
2. http://www.maps4heroes.com/heroes3/maps.php
3. http://www.heroesportal.net/maps.php
4. http://kristo605.tripod.com/heroes3/maplist.html
5. http://kristo605.tripod.com/heroes3/bestmaps.html

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Here is “Beams of Light” by Walkman (Tor Bernhard Gausen).

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The push to go open source is a good idea and besides the freedom to leverage existing and somewhat complex code, it would also allow my applications to prosper a little more than what they currently do.

I’m toying with the idea of commenting the current version of the Asura Engine Extractor and uploading it to SourceForge for any interested developers to be a part of.

Given that this would be my first foray into the world of open source development, I’m really just wondering what the interest will be like?

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Please go to the project page for more information!

It’s interesting to note that in the picture below, you actually see that prominent head of the “creature” would be and around about where the eyes would be, there are are multiple flashes.

( Click to Enlarge)

We have also seen from the Smoke Monster’s point of view several times now, and we definitely see flashes from this perspective too matching the image above.

( Click to Enlarge)

We also see the usual flashes in the body of the monster, although this offered nothing of any particular interest to go from.

While all of this doesn’t really offer anything spectacular, we’ve all basically presumed that the images within the flashes, such as in the encounter with Eko, were taking or reading thoughts, but as with the early encounter with Locke way back in the series, they can probably be “pushed” in too. I wonder if Richard not actually looking at the flashes makes a difference.

Check out the source code and take a look for yourself.

Download Source Code

This song is somewhat different to the majority of the songs I’ve posted so far in that it heavily features a piano. It also has a great bass line later into the song.

Also worth noting are the comments in the MOD file (also preserved in the MP3 in the ID3v2 comment tag). They are quite deep and thought provoking.

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It’s been a while since I’ve used XNA in any form whatsoever, so coming into XNA 4.0 with a half-cocked memory of what was what and finding out a great deal of it “actually wasn’t” was something of an experience.

I decided to knock up a quick and dirty missile game, and the first thing that was obvious to me is that I’m almost as bad of an artist as I am a programmer hence what looks like a total lack of effort on my part

The lack of orientation support for the Windows Phone 7 as of the moment is definitely an issue, meaning that you have to resort to various tricks to emulate this functionality. I look forward to that getting sorted out.

Visual Studio 2010 doesn’t seem too bad in all, although I wasn’t aware of a new feature that when you run your mouse over the left-column, it highlights the square chunk around the associated code.

Funny thing is, when you don’t realize this feature exists, just running the mouse past it darkens the block of code for a spit second, causing what seemed to me, like my monitor momentarily losing brightness and the ensuing dread of an RMA.

Drawing lines was a complete pain. Mixing the spritebatch and primitive drawing wasn’t a great idea, and also I wanted thick lines, which in XNA, isn’t really supported out of the box, so I opted for a rather hacky approach which seems okay.

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private void DrawLine2(Color color, float x, float y, float length, float angle, int thickness)
{
 
	spriteBatch.Draw(
		texWhitePixel, 
		new Rectangle((int)x, (int)y, (int)length, thickness), 
		new Rectangle(0, 0, 1, 1),
		color, 
		MathHelper.ToRadians(360.0f - angle),
		Vector2.Zero,
		SpriteEffects.None,
		1);
 
}

For the record, here’s a snippet for creating blank textures:

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public static Texture2D CreateTexture(GraphicsDevice graphics, int width, int height, Color color)
{
 
	Texture2D tex = new Texture2D(graphics, width, height);
 
	uint [] data = new uint[width * height];
 
	for (int y = 0; y < height; y++ )
	{
 
		for (int x = 0; x < width; x++)
		{
 
			data[(y * width) + x] = color.PackedValue;
 
		}
 
	}
 
	tex.SetData<uint>(data);
 
	return tex;
 
}

Hopefully I’ll make something a little more serious in time.

Here’s are the goodies:

1. MSDN >> Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP
2. Shawn Hargreaves Blog >> Breaking changes in XNA Game Studio 4.0
3. Windows Phone: Developer Home
4. MSDN >> XNA Game Studio 4.0
5. MSDN >> Windows Phone Development

Go to link #1 and download and install the tools, which include the following:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP
• Windows Phone Emulator CTP
• Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP
• XNA 4.0 Game Studio CTP

While installing, make sure to pour over some of the changes at Shawn Hargreaves’ blog. It’ll surely help any head-scratching from the transition from 3.x

I’m not sure how much help the MSDN will be, but given that there’s not as much information about XNA 4.0 out there right now, it’s amongst the best bet.

I hope to extract some of the model files and textures, probably of the Aliens, and have them rendered in either an XNA or OpenGL application.

This application allows you to test a website on IE 5.5, IE 6.0, IE 7.0, IE 8.0 as well as whatever version you currently have installed all from within the application.

Here’s a test showing Google with each version of Internet Explorer on a separate tab with the IE 5.5 tab selected.

This will certainly save a lot of hassle.

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Please see this page for more details and a download link.

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While it isn’t as obvious in the still below, the shape you can see toward the top-right is the shape of a human, specifically the lower half of the body.

Note: You can click the Image for a full-sized animated GIF version, or alternatively, you can click here for the full quality Animated PNG version (Doesn’t work in Internet Explorer! Use Firefox, Chrome or another up to date Browser).

Now, we’ve been led to believe that the Smoke Monster and the “Man in Black” (MiB a.k.a. Flocke (Fake Locke)) are one in the same. We’ve had Flocke essentially telling the viewers “I’m sorry that you had to see me like that”, referring to him supposedly becoming the Monster.

We’ve also seen in a previous episode the Monster scouting around the island, coming across Sawyer and then presumably changing form to turn into Flocke, pick up the machete on the floor and pay Sawyer a visit *.

It’s very likely that the Monster and the Man in Black are one in the same, but wouldn’t it be interesting if the Monster was actually just transporting the MiB around the Island instead of actually being him?

In the animation, we see that somebody is clearly being carried with the smoke. This is either just a hapless victim or the MiB (a.k.a Flocke) being transported.

* Nobody ever did say much about the multiple “strands” of the Monster floating around the Island all Evil Dead style. Presumably if the MiB _is_ the Monster, it means that he can be in a massive amount of places at once given the number of small black smoke clouds there can be.

I’m not entirely convinced the MiB is actually the Smoke Monster though. Given that we’ve never seen him change, it’s just the word of an untrustworthy character whose motives have been entirely selfish up until now.

It’s probably just another red herring by the show writers “as per usual for a change”.

On the positive side, at least my debugger actually tells me what’s going on!

On another note, I can play the 82M sound files although for whatever reason, the sound card refuses to close after it’s finished and I don’t get this problem with anything else I’ve tried.

Dealing with the sound card is pretty new to me still, so it’s probably just a dumb-arse mistake on my part.

Note: The MOD didn’t have any particular credits, either in the file name, title area or in the sample names, however, I sourced the information about who the author was from their profile at the Amiga Music Preservation.

From that page, we can see that I’ve posted up at least one other MOD file by this author.

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It’s still a bit rough and ready, but still very functional and supports many of the features that I initially set out to do, so for this, I’m very happy, however, it still needs a lot of polishing.

For that reason, I value any comments or critique you can throw my way and they will be much appreciated.

You can contact at me at the usual place.

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Edit:

Check out a brilliant cover of Tomas Danko’s original–and pretty much a masterpiece in it’s own right–at this address under the file “I Miss You (Plastic Pop)”:

http://mordi.ziphoid.com/

Get the original SID by Tomas Danko here:

http://www.hardsid.com/s.php?Plastic%20Pop%202688

I’ve also added the ability to play the digital sound files as well as save them out as a wave file.

I’ve also added a rather exciting (and somewhat nostalgia inducing) feature which allows the PC Speaker sounds to be played and saved out as wave files, and I must say, from what I recall, it does sound quite accurate!

The information for this feature was found at the Doom Wikia[1] which led me on to information on Andrew Apted and Simon "Fraggle" Howard’s work on reverse engineering the file format[2]. Good work guys!

Here are a few samples as saved out by the Doom PC Speaker Effect to Wave feature:

• DPBFG
• DPHOOF
• DPTELEPT

Edit: Checking the original Doom under DosBox, it doesn’t sound quite as accurate as I had thought. I had initially thought about continuity issues of the wave between the notes as I don’t really do anything about that, meaning it’ll sound quite rough.

I’m not entirely convinced this is the only issue, but it’s only minor stuff to fix really, but I’ll just try and do a better job at emulating the old PIT (Programmable Interval Timer) PC speaker setup[3] and see how it goes.

Resources

1. Doom Wikia >> PC Speaker Sound Effects
2. Doomworld >> Doom PC speaker file format description
3. Wikipedia >> Intel 8253 (PC, XT) or 8254 (AT and later) Programmable Interval Timer

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These are the screenshots for the application thus far. Nothing special to look at, but somewhat functional.

The aim is to provide a window upon extraction to allow customization of how the files are extracted. Whether certain files are left raw, or perhaps converted to a file of choice.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking so far with regards to extraction in a few releases time:

• Maps
  • Have their raw constituent components extracted to a folder
  • Have their raw constituent components saved out as a single WAD file
  • Have the map saved out as an overhead automap view
• Graphics
  • Have the file saved out raw
  • Converted to a standard image file (.BMP, .PNG, .GIF, etc)
• Sounds
  • Have the file saved out raw
  • Converted to a standard sound format (.WAV)
• Music
  • Have the file saved out raw
  • Converted to MIDI, although I have no particular knowledge on this subject and I’d hate to source from somewhere else

A creature sprite resource from Hexen

A Weapon sprite resource from Heretic

A “flat” image resource from Strife

A patch image resource from Doom II: Hell on Earth

I now have the update facility working, I can parse the images (Sprites, Flats and Patches) properly and save them to a file, and the general WAD reading works just fine.

To the left is a quick mid-res mock-up of the icon to be used. I’ll probably change it a few times as the time goes on. The icons for the application will go from 8×8 to 256×256 at all levels of colour, 4-bit, 8-bit and 32-bit

I need to port over some code from an old C++ project for the map viewing, but this shouldn’t take too long.

In all, I’m quite happy with it. I do believe the hard bit is not the programming, but design of the application and how I present all of the features. That’s the bit that’s always bested me, I’m afraid to say.

I’ll post some screenshots soon and I can hopefully be critiqued!

So in the meantime, I want to upload a quick and dirty (Beta) version of this application, which after feedback via the Contact Me page, I will promptly update and keep updated with cool features, possibly along the lines of the following:

• Automap-esque map viewer
• Sounds
• Playing PC Speaker and Digital audio files
• _Possibly_ a custom built MUS player
• Sprites and Textures (Viewing and Conversion)
• MD5 and/or CRC32 facility for checking the WADs against a known database

Because of this, I’m adding an even quicker and dirtier auto-update facility so users will always be a click away from the latest version of the tool.

As always, I enjoy feedback whether positive or negative, so don’t hesitate to leave some at the Contact Me page.

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It’s located in the “Page” section on the right hand side under “Misc”.

Here’s a picture of the simple ROM file running as mentioned in the above page being run. I’ve only implemented enough to get this ROM working. It’s still missing quite a few opcodes, I’m not dealing with any of the interrupts, and so on.

Currently, I’m saving all of the image data to a simple buffer which I’m using a Device Independent Bitmap (DIB)to handle the rendering. There’s no rush to change this as speed really isn’t a factor.

If anybody knows who wrote this song, or the actual artist happens upon this post, give me a shout!

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It uses the premiumbeat.com free music player and was very easy to set up. Highly recommended!

Note: I’m aware that if you change the page, it’ll stop. It’s primarily for keeping the page open on a tab somewhere and just letting the music play.

As an aspiring programmer, especially with a desire to pursue games development, ever since Christmas 2007 (and also every Easter and maybe the odd random time!), I’ve read Masters of Doom by David Kushner (Buy on Amazon UK or Buy on Amazon US ), a story about the rise of Id Software, starting from the childhoods of the two Id superstars, Carmack and Romero, all the way up to the Quake games and their falling out.

It’s an absolutely awesome, inspiring read and while I’ve read this book 4 times and it never fails to leave me unable to sleep and will always inspire me straight out of bed and down to the computer to get on with stuff.

I highly recommend reading the book if you’re even remotely interested in games development, or even just programming in general, as the talk of Carmack’s programming prowess in the book never fails to impress!

There are also a few other works that come to mind which have been inspiring to me:

• Pirates of Silicon Valley (Video) (Buy on Amazon UK or Buy on Amazon US )
• Triumph of the Nerds (Video) (Buy on Amazon UK or Buy on Amazon US )

Does anybody else know of any inspiring books or videos?

As it happens, I actually prefer the rendition of this song whilst played under the LineWars II game to the original MOD file because of how the synthesized samples sound in-game, but both are still fantastic!

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Stereoscopic Imaging

I went to see Avatar in “Real D 3D”, which was really good and obviously I had to have a quick read around into the topic of stereoscopic imaging and about the various types of polarized glasses, and a little about how the projectors work and whatnot.

While I’m not expert, it was quickly apparent that without some decent technology, I wouldn’t be writing my own 3D demos any time soon.

What I could find out was that the stereoscopy refers to method of recording and presenting a three-dimensional to create the illusion of depth and as you’ll see, in most 3D films, there appears to be two images superimposed on one and another, and for the best part, this is actually what it is.

The image that would have been shot from the left and right cameras are superimposed into the one image, and as a result, we have depth, however, that’s the easy bit, the hard bit comes when you need to separate the two images for each eye to receive the appropriate image.

The versions at the cinema use special projectors that project each image using a particular polarization, and when combined with the special polarized glasses, the light is blocked appropriately so that each eye receives only the correct image and from there on, we perceive depth much like normal.

My initial interest while watching the movie, before knowing anything about it, was to do a graphics demo of some kind which got reading into Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology, which sounded a lot like some old Wicked3D eyeSCREAM glasses I had some years back, whereby the game presents the left and right images in an alternating fashion (effectively halving your perceived frame rate) and the special glasses shutter out the left and right eye appropriately.

A graphics demo is out, but then again, the old Red/Cyan glasses might be worth a laugh to write something.

Indirect Lighting (Photon Mapping, Radiosity, etc)

The idea of indirect lighting has always fascinated me and for me is a must have.

I read into some tutorials and papers on Radiosity and I’m still in the process of mulling over that particular problem.

I’m not really after real-time performance, but just to be able to light my own geometry to create my own assets easily would be fantastic.

With regards to Radiosity, while there’s some great information on the actual algorithms, there’s not much on divvying up the geometry into the so-called patches.

Photon Mapping looked interesting as an alternative.

I’ve tried to find out how the early unreal engine (Unreal, Unreal Tournament), Quake II and Quake III managed to create their lightmaps with their editors to almost no avail also.

Hopefully by the end of Christmas, I’ll be more “enlightened”.. Wow.. That was almost as bad as BBC’s humour!

Here’s a rendition of the well known Tetris music by Beldoroon (a.k.a Dubmood) (Kalle Jonsson). Enjoy!

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My best excuse for not getting as much programming done has to be that I’ve given coffee a bit of a hiatus for a while just to get some of the benefits of caffeine back. Good for the health though! …

I’ve still managed to get the majority of the ray tracer working in a DirectX 11 Compute Shader (working on DirectX 10 hardware using CS_4_0), although I have some small issues that I can’t track down before I can release a screenshot that looks identical to what I already have put up, albeit at 100 times better performance

Unfortunately there are no recursive functions allowed in the Compute Shaders, which means that I’m going to need to rethink stuff like the reflection traces and whatnot.

DirectX 11 (and DirectX in general) is still weird to work with, but slowly, things are coming together.

On a side note, I spent some of today looking at the Quake source and thinking about how cool a DirectX 11 port might be.

When filling my RWStructuredBuffer with something easy to debug such as:

float4(1.1, 2.2, 3.3, 4.4);

What actually occurred, when checking on both the CPU and GPU (via pixel shader), was the following:

float4(1.1, 1.1, 1.1, 1.1);

The X or R component is overwriting all of the other components (Y, Z, W aka G, B, A)

It required a simple driver update from the current Windows 7 “Windows Update” drivers of 191.xx to 195.62.

Problem fixed.

I’ve decided to finally learn DirectX after all these years of using OpenGL and a portion of time spent using XNA, which has been a decent intermediary to give me a bit of background on Direct3D (Change from right-handed to left-handed matrix, changing to GLSL from to HLSL, etc) and my first DirectX 11 project will be biting off more than I can chew by using the compute shaders in DirectX 11 to accelerate ray tracing.

It’ll be refreshing to be working on something graphics programming related that is current and isn’t catching up on something that happened anywhere from 5 to 20 years ago, which has been the case right up until now. At least as far as DirectX 11 goes anyway.. Ray tracing on the other hand, is like a plethora of graphics programming techniques, in that the algorithms and/or concepts have been around for years, but only now are they becoming a possibility in real-time rendering.

As far as the compute shaders go, they are quite a different experience and will take some getting used to. I hope to post some progress over the next week or two.

Happy listening!

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(Click to Show Full Size)

(Click to Show Full Size)

A few details:

1) The texture isn’t mine, I merely found it via Google Images with the term “wall texture” and it has the filename “Wall_Texture_by_shadowh3.JPG”
2) There’s still a problem with the corners of the grids having a weird fringe. It’s better than it was, but still not right. Haven’t tracked that down yet, but have some ideas
3) The somewhat hybrid mix (Courtesy of XNA) of performing the ray casting algorithm and then using the hardware to render (i.e. the column strips as Lines, plus using the hardware to render the correct strip of texture, which is all nice and filtered) is arguably making using the ray caster seem futile. Depends on how you look at that one I suppose. I think it’s neat
4) A bit of “FYI”. John Carmack’s article on how he wrote the iPhone version of Wolfenstein 3D is what really got me wanting to do this. Many thanks to him for the unrelenting inspiration!

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Here’s an image of a single reflective sphere in the middle of three other spheres of various colours with lighting and shadows:

Here’s a quick look at all of the spheres featuring reflectivity and how they look when recursively casting off one and another:

Of course, it’s still very much some ways off the high quality rendering that ray tracing can be known for, but it’s a good learning experience all the same.

Given that the majority of speed is lost in blitting the columns to the screen in traditional ray casters, I decided to render each vertical strip as line primitives in XNA. It’s not a shabby use of the hardware, although I’d love to take a crack at writing a shader based ray caster sometime down the road.

I gave a quick performance test, although nothing too extensive but I did run it at 2048×1152 (amongst other oversized resolutions) and it managed to fulfil the synced 60fps, which was nice to see.

Here’s a look at the basic ray caster in XNA:

As for the ray tracing, I’ve not made too much progress and for the moment, I’m just performing intersections with a plane. I hear it only gets harder from there

Another detail; given that I’m working with a plane extending in just the X and Z directions (Facing +Y), I’m also hacking this slightly for test purposes due to the fact that I’m clamping its size at 64 units in the X (-32 to 32), and 64 units in the Z (-32 to 32) in order to give the plane some shape.

And also a look at the basic ray tracer in XNA:

Again, I’m using XNA and except this time, I’m doing something a little different to the ray caster and I’m modifying the content of a texture and just drawing that texture to the screen with a SpriteBatch. I never said I was after performance.. At least not just yet anyway!

Read more about the MOD collection on that disc and more here.

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Here is Binary Sound by Rez (Christophe Resigné).

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It’s something a little different this time. It’s a shame the excellent bit in the last 27 seconds or so doesn’t make more an appearance throughout the song.

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This is a song that was also on the March 1995 What PC? Cover CD and therefore I’ve had this song for many years and it’s still one that I love to listen to!

This is “Magical Towers II” by JS (Janne Salmijärvi).

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This is another song that caught my ear on my travels through the MODArchive. It’s called “Alone in the Castle” by Unison (Sébastien Gallot).

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It’s designed to be a comprehensive database for portable devices (PDAs, Netbooks, UMPCs, MIDs, Notebooks, etc) listing detailed specifications.

The plan is to implement an advanced search engine to help users locate a specific portable device from broad details such as screen size, weight, down to the most minute of details, such as processor type, chipset, graphics, wireless and wired network support, touch screen, swivel screen support and so on.

I hope everybody enjoys the site. As time goes on, it shall feature an increasing amount more content. So make sure to keep checking back!

According to the MOD’s comments, while not just being a good tune, it was designed to test the implementation of the player by being as complex / tricky as possible to play.

This is “Ode to Protracker” by Asle (Sylvain Chipaux).

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In the end, after several attempts, I found KMG Dynamic Volume 20, a plugin for Winamp that seeks to soften out the variations in the volume.

No more jumping for the remote every other scene

Warhawk, originally by Rob Hubbard and this fantastic rendition by Anak (Kasper Höglund), is an absolute gaming music classic.

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Also being a big fan of who is clearly the protagonist of the show, John Locke, I’ve decided to throw together some of his best bits for prosperity’s sake, starting with the excellent “chin-wipe-grin-chuckle” moment, for want of a better description.

Note: Click the image above to load the 4mb GIF animation. It will take a while to load but I optimized it as best I could from 7.5mb.

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This is “Never” by Ghetto (Heinz Brasch) who at the time of writing this song, was known as LCD.

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If anybody knows the author, please leave a comment below!

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This is Impact 7 by Moby (Frédéric Motte) and I first heard it on the March 1995  What PC? Cover CD.

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There is also a slight variation of this MOD as found on the Amiga Music Prevention (AMP) page:

Download MOD #2

I’m a big fan of MOD/S3M/IT/etc music and generally any tracker-based music, especially that with a very synthetic / chip /etc edge to it.

Here’s one of my favourites, “Selector Tune” by Jellybean (Vegard Myksvoll):

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I’ll add a post detailing the exact reason once I’ve got things back up and running.

Update 17/08/09

Up until the 11th of August, I had been with 3IX for going on four years, and while they’d had some security issues, downtimes and so on, it was never really enough to justify the process of upping and moving host.

However, around about the 6th August, my website went down, the next day, I e-mailed them only to be told that it would “We are aware of the issue,we are facing the server read only issue on the server. We are installing a new OS on the server and copying the data over to the new disk. All the service on the server will be fine shortly.”.

Long story short, this was 11 days ago and while some of the problems are resolved, the SQL databases on that site still don’t know what day it is, and the data is irretrievable, practically rendering the site useless to me anyway.

To make matters worse, while they’d replied to my first e-mail with a bag of lies, they then ignored the next two regarding the subject.

I did manage to get some contact out of the 24/7 live chat facility, and after having been put on hold for over 10 minutes, in a so-called “instant” messenger, while they apparently “reviewed” the entirety of my question, which happened to be a monstrous three words long; “Website. Doesn’t. Work”.

Again, I received some crap about how it’d be fine in 1-2 hours, and six days later, it’s still not fine.

I proceeded to send a fourth e-mail to merely tell them that I was disgusted with their service. This also got no reply, but then again, who can really blame them? At this point, they were on a roll, and it would have surely been a shame to ruin that kind of momentum by giving some semblance of customer service.

I’m now with HostGator and very happy so far. I shall remain with them for the foreseeable future.

I’ve included the demos for the games and the music in the original Creative Music File (CMF) formats.

Check out the pages in the right-hand menu for more information.

Great work. I wish those guys did more with this _exact_ style. I love it. *hint-hint*

Here’s a sample of one of my favourites, “Breakdown, Do it Again”, based on the Jungle theme from the classic NES game, “Metal Gear”.

So far, I’ve got a working prototype for a deferred shading setup with normal mapping:

Deferred Shading with Normal Mapping

I also have basic shadow mapping, but I still am yet to include it in the deferred shader. However, here’s what the basic forward lighting shader looks like at the moment:

Basic Shadow Mapping

This functionality will soon be imported into KnightEdit and the lights will be very easy to place, making for rich, well lit scenes.

We both have the same passion for graphics programming and the same desire to pursue game development, and have done for quite some time. We both weighed up the options for applying to a games development company, but decided to take the harder, riskier option to trying to start small and see what we could make for ourselves.

In all, I now hope to use this blog to add various random thoughts, things that interest me and hopefully when I have dry spells, people can shame me into getting my arse in gear.

I do have plans on fixing and updating _some_ of the tools I have around the site, as well as adding some new ones. I have also toyed with the idea of updating OPN64 and WinProcInfo, although the amount of processors to add to both utilities feels like somewhat of an insurmountable task, especially given the amount of so-called real work I need to get done these days.

On a side note, here’s a Dungeon Keeper 3 Petition a friend linked me to. If it took more after the style of the first Dungeon Keeper, I’d love to see it in development.

More to follow soon!

http://www.terrybutler.co.uk/projects/