News archive
Another long break in updates caused by intensive period in life... I was very busy with:
- ...working at Reality Pump for 9 months already, writing tools, benchmarks, unit tests and engine additions. Project is big, lots of hairy code and strange dependencies, we're targeting multiple platforms. It's a challange and I like it :]
- ...finishing thesis - I did it! You can read it here, code is here - it's ugly as hell, but works. And there's even uglier obligatory YT video below. Anyway, the point of the thesis was to implement a deferred shading graphics engine in DirectX 10 and compare its speed to a forward one.
- ...moving homepage. Since my student career is over, I had to switch hosting from a university to a commercial one. I reorganized a little things in the 'backend' of the site and cleaned up other stuff. Ie. there's no more a lame frameset around whole domain which was disgusing the real domain - now all links point to real domain, look good and work fine. Btw the site has been hacked by Mauretania hacker team (!! lol) few days ago - they pasted some stupid scripts and announced death of Isreal - whatever :] I removed that shit in 5 minutes.
Admin
As Yet Another University (TM) project, I've coded little game in html5/javascript called Green Tanks Duel. It's for 2 human players and you can play it directly in browser over here. The keyboard mapping appears at beginning, I'll just point out that there's a gearbox and to ride you have to change gears. Game incorporates several realistic touches: tanks are much more agile at lower speeds (lower gears). Missiles fall down after certain distance. Also, tanks have more armor at front than back and sides.
To play in comfort, Chrome 9 and other browsers with fast JavaScript implementations are recommended (FireFox 3.6 unfortunately is not one of them, FF 4 should be faster). You can also shrink window size and refresh page. You can write your opinions and thoughts in comment-box below.
Inspired by Reg, I've finally implemented feeds on this site, using Atom 1.0 and they're fully standard's compliant (unlike pretty much everything else), yay :] Unfortunately, due to the way the domain is faked using frames, you won't see feed icon in your browser's bar - you have to click feed icon next to News headline. It'll be fixed in a few months when I change hosting.
You might ask: why not RSS? Isn't it synonymous with feeds? Well, as I learned while researching the topic, apparently not. Atom is better designed: has more features, is more extensible, modern and plays better with standards. Here's one comparison in English, and here's even better one in Polish. So, having a working syndication/feed system to which people can sign in, now I have to produce enough interesting and useful (personal musings do not qualify) content so that they'll actually start using it ;] Admin
Really quick news: we're preparing KrakJam 2011 - a local Global Game Jam event here in Krakow. It's going to be great, fun and unforgettable experience, for many reasons. If you want to get more details, visit its website www.krakjam.pl. Now I'm going back to my duties, since I'm main organizer of KJ and there's an awful lot of things to do and coordinate. See you at KrakJam!
My master thesis is waiting for better days :] recently I'm busy with other projects. One of them is Shader - game developer's student organisation at AGH. We started almost 2 months ago, we're after official innauguration coupled with tech talks delivered by real game developers from Krakow's gamedev companies. As Shader's chairman, I also made a presentation about UI design. Its content was very similiar to presentation I gave earlier this year at IGK, only there was less time (30 min). Here's a recorded fragment, slides and the article (IGK 2010 UI design) I referenced many times during my talk.
There's a project at studies where we have to do animation of 2 fighting knights. And so I learn Blender :] This new version 2.55 is really cool and neat. My primary source of information are video tutorials. Probably I watched dozens of hours of YT tutorials, and am slowly sinking in the strange and dangerous world of 3d graphics. Modifiers, constraints, compositor, subsurf, edgeloop and loopcuts FTW! UV mapping, head topology... brrr. OTOH, soft bodies, hair, particles, liquid simulations - in Blender they're very easy to use and powerfull. Right now I'm learning how the rigging process works, how to use armature, bones, FK/IK chain etc to start animating my first knight... and I can tell you the secret! He is going to be a barbarian. Conan, the barbarian.
Take a look at my first serious models, axe and sword:
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Admin
I started learning DirectX 10, as I'll be using it for my master thesis. Because of this, in the following year I'll be sharing here resources and valuable findings for people also interested in this topic. Right now, I'm on the very beginning and I can recommend unfinished book, written by few gfx programming gurus, that is available for free as wiki page. It's called (surprise, surprise) Programming Vertex, Geometry, and Pixel Shaders. From what I've read so far, it has book-like content, mainly theory that's explained in rather straightforward way. Targeted at DirectX 10, it contains some code and pseudo code to illustrate concepts, with a healthy dose of pictures :] Many people recommend chapter on lighting, written by Jack Hoxley, as a good treatment on the subject.
Recently, I used the free time of holidays and finished Terrain Edtior, the simple heightmap editor I wrote about in earlier news. Whole project (exe+src) can be downloaded from here TerrainEditor.zip (2.2 MB, zip, downloads: 116) or its description page. I also made short video clip, which shows some of Terrain Editor features and explains user interface. It's intended for auto-promotional purposes, as well as for learning the process of capturing video, editing it, synchronizing with sound, adding special effects, publishing on web etc. It's my third video, and the progress is visible :]
On a side note, I had great holidays so far, very relaxing and regenerating, there was much "integration" (as we like to call in polish the process of bonding with others) and rejoicing :D Slot Art was very nice and Woodstock was truly fantastic - I highly recommend those two to anyone, especially if you want to experience power of youth, peace, love & tolerance & "integration" from the first hand =) Quite recently I was also on third instance of Zjazd Tworcow Gier (I want to officially kill people from polish gamedev who don't use english names for geek events), I met there interesting people and had great time. If only presentations would be more informative and whole event would be better organized..
Recently I'm working on a university project: I'm supposed to code editor of heightmaps - I picked this topic because I think it's cool and allows me to get to know some new to me technologies (DX9) and concepts (graphics programming: modifiable heightmap, picking). Anyway, why I'm writing about this?
One of the tough decisions I had to face was choosing GUI tookit: WinForms, WPF, DXUT GUI, WinAPI, ..., or code my own? After some considerations I decided to try wxWidgets :] and immediately started looking on the internet for ways of embedding Direct3D context inside wxWidgets application, but to my disbelief, after a few hours I've found no ready-to-go code samples! Geez, one would think that such a popular and mature library like wxWidgets would have tons of examples on mixing it with currently most popular graphics API... unfortunately it's not true, and in great pains I had to combine together various pieces of code found on inet, to make it all work.
Eventually I made it: simple windowed application that can be resized, which embeds D3D context on which colored triangle is rendered; there's also a button which changes color of the background behind triangle as an example of UI code. In order to ease the life of other programmers, I release application's source code to public domain and you can get it at gamedev.pl NoPaste. I hope my site will get better Google Pagerank so that more people can find and use this piece of code =) If you find it useful, please leave a note in comments.
As another university project (yep, again pretty busy academic year), I made simple A* implementation for path finding, in C++, using my homemade simple engine SC. It's finished and was positively reviewed, so I've added it to my projects list, where you can see screenshots, download (obviously exe + sources) and comment it :]
Also, make sure to checkout blog of my friends from Bionic Nose, who are very active indie game developers.
During the last month I was on two gamedev conferences in Poland: Gameday 2010 (average) and IGK 2010 (was great). At IGK I had
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a presentation about GUI design in games (missing). I spent a lot of time preparing
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written article (missing), and then had little time to prepare the actual presentation (which as it turned out, could be conducted better). To my surprise I saw that the UI design isn't very popular with game developers, even though it's important to the success of game.
On a different note: If you're a geek, probably you are doing something while eating. You know, eating takes a lot of time every day and it's basically very simple task, that leaves your higher brain functions unoccupied, so why not give them some food for thought ;) Possibilities are watching films (rather instructional than entertaining since they're shorter), reading books or listening to audiobooks.
As for me, I like to watch videos from the following internet portals and pages:
Inspiration
- Gametrailers - what's new and hot in gamedev
- TED - amazing presentations about plethora of topics
Fun
- Whoseline Is It Anyway? - improvisational comedy on TV, classic show
- South park - all the episodes of SP available to watch for free
Money
- bankier.tv - everyday news and stories from the world of economy and business
- TVN cnbc - more professional than above, but the UI isn't as clear and materials have a different character
Other
- Screencasters.Heathenx - high quality video tutorials for Inkscape
- Podkast.pl - big catalog of podcasts to listen straight from the browser
What do you do while eating? Do you watch or listen to some specific materials, or perhaps you just concentrate on eating? :) Please write down in comment.
Admin Quick update:
1. I'm organizer of KrakJam - local polish edition of Global Game Jam 2010, which is an experiment in creating innovative games in small teams in about 48h. Prepering such an event proved to be much more work than I anticipated, though things are going rather well and I hope that KrakJam will be success. Well, we're going to know pretty fast whether it were, since it starts next week in friday (29 January), so if you're game developer and wish to take part, don't hestitate to visit www.krakjam.pl
2. I'am training muay thai for 4 months already at Raczadam club and I LUVE YT!!!1 ;) Why? As a result of body conditioning, I gained endurance, practical strength, rock hard muscles, nice abs ^^ and because we're sparring at every training, I'm gradually getting better at fights. It also positively affected my mind - I'm calmer, more concentrated, and my confidence is sky high. Ladies started to take notice ;)
Btw if you liked Matrix, here's rather imaginative and well done video: The Meatrix
After about 3 weeks of mild work, hereby I declare my homepage commenting system done. It's rather flexible and secure (no, please don't try to hack it :P ), with cool admin panel and now that it's finished, I'll have time to do next thing on my todo list. Man, even though occasionaly sth gets completed and erased from it, continously I find so many new exciting things, so the damn thing is getting longer and longer every month :->
While working on the comment system, I've learned OOP in PHP, few new CSS elements, did some javascript and... found out the beautiful jquery library! I'm really amazed at the abilities of this little thing, coding style it promotes, simple yet informative documentation (rare treat), and last but not least, great looking homepage with good tutorials.
Currently I'm reading the very first Dune novel by Frank Herbert. The book is certainly different from other, more mainstream scifi stories, but also definitely captivating (but such an avid Dune2 player as me couldn't feel different), and the Dune universe is very thought and imagination provoking.
Btw, have you noticed how many great, classic sagas (not limited to books) use the element of royal family, prophecy of long awaited magic child who would become saviour/prophet, epic conflict between clans/races (from which one is clearly evil) prolonged for hundreds of years, secret assasain/women organisations, entangling of past, present and future in visions (sometimes caused by narcotics), super-humans who are able to perform incredible things/are amazingly well trained fighters etc etc. Witcher, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dune... is it an accident??
Last thing, I was asked by my acquaintance Andrzej Pasinski to spread some news about his current project, Oozi game. The team has experience in those kinds of games, so I'd say they'll create sth playable =)
I feel a little burned out after a year of constant (commercial) work (without a day off, pfff) and doing my own stuff after hours; fortunately it's only a few days before my contract with Playlogic times out. Then I'm coming back home to Poland and finally I'll be able to regenerate a little, before studies and next projects again fill my time in october. But in the meantime I took very short side jump 2 weeks ago by attending Fornost (here are photos) - and that was very good decision =)
AdminLast week I learned some film-making and did a Youtube video of Herbata Kto Ty Tak Kroliczek, one of my old games - you can watch it on the Games subpage. Don't comment or rate since it sucks and I don't need bad ratings ;-)
Anyway, I switched the priorities on Magic Pencil from technical ones to artistic - design, gfx, music - you know. The very first effect of this is coming up with viable story for game. Up to now MP was mostly a storyless game, like Tetris or Crayon Physics. Finally it has changed, yet continuing my tradition of mystery and suspense ;-) I won't reveal any info. Also, I've made up my mind and decided not to rush for soon release - I'll take my time with it and will try to create sth remarkable. Creating good games takes time, money, effort, time, time, time, and... did I already mention time? And time is the thing that I have the least of, especially now that I work full time at game studio.
However, what was the actual reason for me to write this news update, is the fact that European Union has banned the import of Canadian fur from seals. Now, that is a GOOD thing since overwhelming >90% of Canadian seal furs were exported here to UE, and now this big market will be closed what should end the slaughters; let's hope other nations will follow the UE's example. Thank you UE for doing the obvious after years and years of social pressure, ehh. Big politics and big money == stinks corruption.
Now, onto the next frontier. China and dog/cat fur trade... again fur trade. Don't watch this film if you're a wimp or ever had a dog.
Finally I've got a concrete concept for Magic Pencil's gameplay, and I'm relieved since the game won't be a simple copy of Crayon Physics. Nononono. I will spare you details... for now. Also recently I have implemented visual layer system and spring physics (quite stable) into the game, both very important, and made many other miscellaneous improvements - so there's some good progress regarding MP.
Btw, if you speak polish, I ask you to watch this film:
Admin
Last week I took part in IGK 2009 - annual polish game programmers conference. As usual, I had great time, this year afterparties were even better, the sunday one being especially great. I prepared a presentation which went rather ok, the slides can be downloaded from the new IGK page above. As always, I took part in compo, our team made game Don't Kill The Babcia, you can also download it and read about it in the IGK page.
AdminHi, this news is short: I added a page with private photos (boring) and am still working on Magic Pencil, which has been changing shape / style / topic / gameplay lately rather rapidly - it's not possible (again) to fit in current deadline since at work we're hitting milestone this week, and so for the last few weeks I haven't been sleeping well :-/ (the good thing is that I'm becoming much better programmer in the process). But there's hope, as Magic Pencil 1.0 now is really really close to being released in next month.
AdminIt's been a long time since last update - but I have important reasons for delay:
I bought HP Pavillion dv7 notebook (suffice to say it scores 4.7 / 5.0 on Vista's benchmark). That's my first notebook, and yeah, unfortunately was stupid enough to install Vista, which never works as you expected - every day creates new problems and challanges. I encountered almost everything - from such trivialities as incompatible programs, to dead/dying internet, sometimes no sound at all apart from Winamp, serious partition errors (which after restart magically disappear!), to rare cases of bootup errors. Overall SLOWNESS of this... "thing", drives me crazy. Right now I'm still struggling with internet randomly dying after an hour or two when browsing in Firefox (Google suggested that's a well known problem - but nobody suggests how to !@b$%#f4 fix it), and programs randomly stopping for few minutes (whole system continues to work, only processess that I'm using currently stop responding). I hate the word "randomly" in such cases, which makes problems even worse and difficult to solve.
Probably I can't fully blame Vista for all of this - are those HW compatibility problems? However, if XP could run at the same hardware without any problems, not eating so much RAM and being that PITA, why Vista won't do the same. I think that with every new generations of OS we should have better, more stable systems - not worser. Anyway, what's better in Vista? The system UI looks better and is more intuitive (after getting used to it and forgetting old patterns from XP). That's all, I can't - from the top of my head - tell you what it does better than XP. In such case, what's the point of switching to Vista? Are there any compelling reason for this? For me, after using XP for years, and Vista for months, there's one big NO for V. I want my XP back. Unfortunately I don't have time for reinstal right now, and I even heard that on some laptops it's impossible to erase Vista since then other OSes won't work (hardware chip checks for its existence or sth), so I'm stuck with it for (at least) a few months...
I installed and dual boot with Ubuntu 8, unfortunately it also has it's glitches - due to incompatible audio hw, so far it's been impossible to hear any sound from speakers. Out of the box you get only 800x600, which makes it hard to do anything, and other things are impossible (ie. too big windows). For bigger resolutions, you have to download proprietary drivers. And for 2 months wifi didn't work because of buggy net drivers, and only recently after kernel upgrade it started working, so I could download updates and drivers. Then, after month of working, after system update, some essential component has been removed and wifi stopped working. Grrrrr. Since there's no use of OS without internet, AGAIN, I'm stuck with Vista... Aaaaaaaaa!!
Ok, sorry for the ranting, now the important stuff:
I moved to Netherlands to work at Playlogic on Unreal3 powered AAA game. Yup, that's neat. Moving and getting organized at place took me some time. Ok, in fact I had 1 month taken out of normal, productive life. Couple of times even I had the luxury of not knowing where I'll sleep next night - at hotel, company(?), or maybe somewhere outdoors... yeah, there are problems finding cozy apartment in Netherlands! they should do sth about it I suppose ;-). Luckily now things are going smooth and steady, and I'm prepering for more serious projects.
Magic Pencil, my current project of choice, is developed using Kaizen principle - every day a little better. Unfortunately I'm already sitting > 8h at work coding, and when coming back home, I have more satisfying, less killing-yourself-doing-stuff things to do. Yet rest assured - (I hope) it will be released this year (if I had a dollar for every time I made such statement...).
Hmmm, that was a little more like a blog post than typical news on my homepage :-) but I really had to rant this stuff out of me. I feel better now. Anyway, it's my vanity/home-page and I can do here anything what I want!! see: oufdrjksdfeijkl fderuhkjsdefojklsdefikljg desk;oasfwkljgsdikljsdflksdfzkjldsf ;-)
Luckily I finished examination session and have holidays! what means more free time for myself and various projects.
Recently I bought new domain (www.hubert-rutkowski.pl, you know, www.koshmaar.pl is a little... unprofessional ;-), added google search for this site (see top right corner), started blog (not about myself, sth more ambitious, I won't tell you where it is since it's anonymous), made another SDL_config release, am still working on Magic Pencil, and made submission to Intel game competition! Also, I finished working at Nibris, and I'm prepering for another serious job in another game dev company.
In earlier news I complained about some uncompatible extensions in Firefox3 and uncompatible theme Noia2 Extreme. Well, after little googling I found official Noia2 for Firefox3, Fire Gestures which replaced uncompatible Mouse Gestures, and the Nightly Tester Tools allowed me to enable belowed HitAHint even though it hasn't been updated by it's author. Nice!
Yesterday was the Firefox 3 download day... obviously I also downloaded new FF though the servers were really overloaded. Everyone's reviewing FF3 so I won't bore you with Yet Another Review, I'll just comment that I like new features and miss Noia 2 Extreme theme and some uncompatible extensions.
Currently I'm in the middle of an examination session and I'm really really really busy learning all of this stupid, boring usual stuff... however, I'm also quietly working on THIS! :-)
Last week I took part in fifth edition of Polish Game Programmers Conference. As usual, it was pretty fun, informative and learning experience. My team participated in programming competition, we scored 3rd place with game Heaven Under Earth and won material prize.
Being in experimenting mood, I decided to create my first Youtube video. And here it is! If only the playback rate could be more smooth...
I've added Articles section, where I'll put all technical, non-personal text. Currently there's only one, but highly developed article about Firefox extensions - I worked on it for few weeks, it's really huge, and I recommend you to at least give it a look. I updated Developement section and wrote introduction for My games. Also, I've made my own rating system, which you might see in aformentioned article. It uses CSS for star highlighting, PHP for vote counting and some javascript - and it's really cool ;-) As a quickie I fixed some html quirks and now main page is valid w3c html transitional. With time I'll fix other subpages and css to have the same status.
Last thing - in the bottom right corner random quotes appear - some are funny, some wise and some lame, but all were the reason for me to smile (in amazement?), and I hope you'll feel the same.
It's been a long time since last update... a year or so ;-)
Lately I've been working on one big commercial game title that's going to be released for next gen console, catching up with examination session on uni writing bazzilion stupid projects, bought shiny HP Pavilion w2207, took some dance lessons, been pursuing one girl, coding often 12+ hours a day, as well as doing all the usuall stuff like drawing and guitar playing... That was really exhausting, unfortunately it's not finished yet, though I should be free again in 3 weeks, and so you then can expect new things and projects on this site.
In the meantime: done some minor tweaks to this site, added few sketches, improved admin interface - nothing important.
- Added PhysicsSimulation project to Other projects.
- Integrated AntTweakBar nicely into Sculpture Clay 2. It is used over simple wrapper. Very nice lib so far, recommend it.
- Alpha version of Bad Dreams logo. See it and read what others think of it.
- In the meantime I did some minor updates here and there to this site (ie. news archives).
After nearly 1 month of intensive web programming, finally I can reaveal my new homepage! Is uses PHP pretty extensively to automate content management - adding news, projects, links, galleries, uploading files and pictures, presenting stats etc. It's my first experience in programming web pages, up to now I was using either pure HTML or HTML + very limited subset of PHP, and I'm really positively surprised with how much power it gives into hands of skilled webmaster. And, thanks to the Dreamweaver CS3, it was really nice experience - it automates a lot of tedious things and has usable interface, though many things could be improved (ie. shortcuts!!!). In the future I'll be definitely researching the subject deeper.
OK, so far we have the old content with new look, but after some time, after getting up to date with my other projects, I'm gonna add new stuff.
Btw, It's the end of summer holidays for me - tomorrow first lectures at uni... but I'm not really sad - I had the time of my life during those holidays, I'm relaxed and exploding with positive energy. Yeaah, this is going to be really interesting year.
Tomorrow I'm going on a trip to Benelux, I'm gonna be away for a week. Lately I've been working on a new homepage (it's gonna be online within 2 weeks) and learning to touch type on my new Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 by Microsoft, as well as playing guitar, singing, drawing, reading books (Alice in Wonderland, Paradise Lost, Moby Dick) and watching films(Hange'm high, Gone with the wind, Poszukiwany poszukiwana, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, For a few dollars more). Great holidays so far :-)
Yeaah, finally - holidays. Last month I was doing student internship, working for a game producing company (on a top secret project for USA govermment ;-)). Now I have real holidays. I spent some crazy days at Tolk Folk (here's my report, only in polish). Next week I'm going to spend some even more crazy days at Woodstock, and after it, I'm immediately coming back to home. During next week, I won't have access to computer... which is good :-)
AdminLadies and gentlemen, at last, Nurgle edition(tm) of Sculpture Clay 2, my private engine, is out! I have totaly underestimated the time needed to write this piece of code and last few days of finishing spent in middle crunch time, but hey, that's how it usually happens. Before further upgrading of SC2, I'm gonna write some physics tests for my upcoming game (which also changed work title to No Bunnies Attached but sssh, I didn't told you). But now, finally I'll have some free time to catch-up with my studies, rest from computer, work on some smaller project and most importantly, seduce some girls ;-)
AdminLast week I took part in IV Polish Game Programmers Conference. It was pretty fun: lectures were interesting, talking with people was inspiring, whole organization was rather good (though there were few mistakes) and game contest was really teaching experience. You can read my coverage of this event here: Relacja IGK 2007 (sorry English folks, it's in Polish) and see some crappy photos of mine here (or take a look here for better photos, shot by organizers).
I'm still working on Sculpture Clay 2 engine. My initial estimations were bad, still there are at least 3 weeks of programming in order to finish 40% of it and proudly call it "Slaanesh edition" ;-)
I have to go now, I have train to home in an hour. Wish You happy Easter, guys and gals :-)
