February 11th, 2010
If you are looking for a cool sun effect (no pun intended) with flaring corona, you’re in the right place. This post isn’t about some practical sun in some shooter though: it would require some tweaking to make it useful in such context, as the animation is rather cpu heavy due to its massive corona noise textures.
No, this post is about combining cool PV3D features in order to achieve a nice looking animated sun. I’ve used the trunk of the papervision code repository, revision 851 (it works up to r910, after that a bug was introduced). Note that I’m no PV3D guru; I’m just sharing what I’ve learned so far.
This movie requires Flash Player 10
(note: this sun uses the skybox from the skybox tutorial)
Closely watch that corona for a while!
read on
Tags: actionscript, Papervision3D, star, sun
Posted in Papervision3D | 2 Comments »
January 30th, 2010
Yes, I play video games too. I won’t miss out on Mass Effect, which I think portraits a world almost as intricate as any good sci-fi novel (oh yeah I read those too, you should try A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge).
Since Mass Effect is going to be a trilogy (and more apparently), Bioware included a system that will use old save games as input for continuity in upcoming games, including ME2. Note that you’ll still be able to pick a different face and class.
Get your Mass Effect 1 save games at masseffectsaves.com
I didn’t know there would be an option to use ME1 save games as input until recently and I’ve deleted my save games a long time ago. No undelete program would find them. Annakie recognized this would be a problem and started a small site that offers various save games each with a different set of key choices made over time in ME1.
How awesome is that!
Take your pick as the list is growing fast and the website is becoming a popular hub for Shepards.
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Tags: Mass Effect
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
January 28th, 2010
Here’s a quick workaround for connecting and reconnecting a bluetooth keyboard (or any bluetooth device for that matter) in Ubuntu Jaunty and Karmic, even after rebooting. In short it’s a shell script that keeps connecting to your device in the background on a regular interval. Dirty? Absolutely. Does it work? Absolutely, no bluetooth configuration required at all.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: bluetooth, jaunty, karmic, keyboard, ubuntu
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
August 24th, 2009
Today I was trying to figure out how to exclude certain resources/classes from the war that was being deployed to my embedded server in Eclipse. I couldn’t find out how to do this in the Eclipse settings file.
Apparently, it has nothing to do with the source folder you see in the Project Explorer view, or the export settings in the Buildpath dialogs: instead you need to edit the Eclipse settings file “project-war\.settings\org.eclipse.wst.common.component” (viewable in the Navigator view) and modify the deployed source folders in there. Changes there do *not* reflect in the Project explorer (at least not with my version of Eclipse, Galileo). I’ve removed the test sourcefolder from there and everything was honky dory.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project-modules id="moduleCoreId" project-version="1.5.0">
<wb-module deploy-name="foo-war">
<wb-resource deploy-path="/" source-path="/src/main/webapp"/>
<wb-resource deploy-path="/WEB-INF/classes" source-path="/src/main/java"/>
<wb-resource deploy-path="/WEB-INF/classes" source-path="/src/main/resources"/>
<property name="context-root" value="foo"/>
<property name="java-output-path"/>
</wb-module>
</project-modules>
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Tags: eclipse, programming
Posted in eclipse | No Comments »
August 11th, 2009
Eclipse has the annoying little problem where Eclipse will copy .svn folders to the target/classes output folder and then complain about duplicate resources. After wading through some vague solutions, here’s a clear and simple post I found to solve this annoyance.
Make Eclipse ignore .svn directories
Window -> Preferences…, Java -> Compiler -> Building. Under “Output folder” add “, .svn/” to “Filtered Resources” (so that you get “*.launch, .svn/”).
It still works like a charm. Thanks Brian.
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Tags: eclipse
Posted in eclipse | 9 Comments »
July 22nd, 2009
Here’s a list implementation I came up with to enable true paged data fetching completely transparent to any user. It works independent of persistence layers, such as JPA implementations etc.
read on
Tags: java, JPA, JSF, lazy loading, paging, programming, richfaces
Posted in JSF/Facelets, Uncategorized | No Comments »
June 19th, 2009
Here’s a tutorial about a possible way to create planets and indeed Earth. I’ll briefly explain the main textures used and from then on go through the code step-by-step to explain what I did and why.
I had to tone down the size and fps, and leave out the bumpmap for this demo because my Opera browser was halting when I added the other images and clouds swf demo :P
This movie requires Flash Player 10
(notice the dynamic clouds and the glow around the globe)
On my core 2 duo laptop I get about 20-25 fps whith a slightly larger stage size and the movie set to 30 fps. Although the planet looks very nice to me, I also realize it isn’t very practical for games or other realtime simulations. To get better fps, you can remove the bumpmap texture, replace the realtime clouds with a fixed texture, user fewer segments in the spheres, zoom out more, or use lower resolution textures for land- and cloud materials. A combination of two or more of these suggestions should easily get you above 35 fps.
read on
Tags: actionscript, clouds, earth, game design, Papervision3D, perlin noise, planet
Posted in Papervision3D | 5 Comments »
June 15th, 2009
Here’s a small class I made for adding realtime updates to DisplayObject3D objects. This class allows for easy time-based updates instead of the traditional frame-based updates.
I use the convention of adding update methods to all (my own) DisplayObject3D objects, which then update themselves according to preconfigured settings (eg. passed in the constructor). I pass in a Camera3D and that’s it, let the objects do their own thing. I’m making use of this convention by extracting this update method to a baseclass which then can do time-based updates instead.
read on
Tags: actionscript, Papervision3D, real time updates
Posted in Papervision3D | No Comments »
May 29th, 2009
Many space shooters use this concept where you are the pilot that looks out from the front window, lasering down enemies for bounty, right. Ever noticed spacedust? It’s very subtle when it is used, but it adds to the realism of outer space, making the space feel less empty, less static.
Here’s how you can do that in Papervision3D, using ParticleFields. I’ve used the trunk of the papervision code repository, revision 851, but it should work with the last release without to much hassle. Note that I’m no PV3D guru; I just started to learn this stuff and I’m just sharing what I’ve learned so far.
This movie requires Flash Player 10
(note: space dust uses the skybox from the skybox tutorial)
Here’s how it works:
- divide space into a 3d grid and parts of the spacedust cloud on 8 gridpoints directly around the camera (the ship), we’ll call these dustpockets
- when the camera moves, dustpockets are removed and created to keep only the 8 gridpoints around the ship occupied
read on
Tags: actionscript, game design, Papervision3D, space dust
Posted in Papervision3D | 2 Comments »
May 24th, 2009
[RE: JSF – Still pretty much a steaming pile of donkey turd] – I was replying to Wille Faler’s post about why JSF sucks, when the comment was getting too large, so I made it into a post on my own blog.
JSF is hard to learn yes, but in my opinion it doesn’t suck as bad as Wille says. All the points Wille mentions can be solved by certain libraries or write-once reusable solutions (I’ve included my ‘magical’ combination of frameworks on the bottom). JSF is a diamond in the rough, you just need to make it shine.
read on
Tags: a4j, facelets, java, JSF, PrettyFaces, richfaces, seam, tomahawk
Posted in JSF/Facelets, PrettyFaces | 13 Comments »
