Deutsche VersionEragon
I just watched the movie “Eragon” in my local cinema, and I was not impressed. I was not disappointed either. The best word to describe my feelings is probably “Meh”.
Archive for 2006
December
September
Interstate, Hubschrauber Continues
I had the special honor of making a kind of newspaper for IS82.com. The result is now published at http://is82.com/comment.php?comment.news.255. If you read the Abizeitung, which you probably didn’t, you would realise that I took the layout quite directly from there. Well, it’s my layout and I’ll use it however I want.
Windows Version really works
I had to remove the first release of the Hubschrauber for Windows quite quickly because everyone told me that it didn’t work for them. The reasons and solutions are rather arcane (at least for a Maccie like me), you can read about them at The Code Project. My new version should, according to Björn (thanks for testing!) work on Windows XP. So I now offer it for download again:
Testing starts
Hubschrauber is now available for download!
Windows-Version compiles
In the past, I made many promises about my game that I horribly failed to fulfill. Sorry about that. Of course, with this track record one might get the impression that my recent announcement to release a Mac and Windows version of Hubschrauber really soon might not appear as credible as I’d like it to be.
Tech-Demo complete
Hubschrauber currently only works on my Macs in development configuration. I have no way to test it, for example, on Intel Macs. The game also has the option of controlling it with mouse and keyboard, but I suck at controlling helicopters with mouse and keyboard in any game, so I cannot test that either. For these reasons, I need some unafraid testers who tell me how well my program works so far.
Comments working again
Just a short information: Because of a type, only the homepage got saved for comments, not the username. This is fixed now. Thank you for your patience and so on.
Suggestions for Helicopter
Last time I asked for suggestions for my new game Hubschrauber. Now I recieved a long list that a friend of my sister’s wrote. I won’t quote it fully because it’s so damn long. Main points are more choices, and more interactivity through traffic, fuel consumption and similar aspects.
Cars in German
So, I just came home from watching Cars in the german version. I had seen the movie before in San Francisco, and I liked it more there. In Detail:
Watch 'Cars'
If you happened to follow both my blog and my sister’s, you should have seen that she really loves Pixar’s newest movie Cars. You might have wondered why I didn’t say anything about it. Was it because I didn’t like the movie?
August
Comic Update
Since a very short time, I’ve got a Comic section. Now I’ve updated it, I’ve added a new page to the story “Boss Tournament”. For the next time, that’s going to be the last piece of this story, not because it’s finished but rather because I’m too lazy to pose so many figures all the time. Instead, I’ll now concentrate on shorter comics.
New Site
As you might have noticed, I completely redid the layout and technology of my homepage in the last two weeks. Now this project is finally finished. I did great work to make sure that all old links to anywhere in my site still work, but I also now have URLs for posts that one can actually remember. By the way, I also started calling this section here blog, because that’s what it is and always has been.
July
Inside a plane
I’ve been to San Francisco for the last few days and am going to write more about this soon (I aim for the day after tomorrow, but nothing guaranteed). I just wanted to post that I am right now sitting in an Airbus A340-600, equipped with WLAN, and surf the Web. I could not miss the chance to write a post at 1000 km/h and more than 10.000 m height. You don’t get to do that quite often.
Dreamfall - The Longest Journey
Notice that I talk about the german version of the game. Especially the packaging that I talk about is probably different in other countries.
Abizeitung!
When a class finishes the highest level of school in germany and gets the certificate that allows them to go to a university, there are a couple of strange customs associated with this. One of them is the so-called Abiturzeitung (the name of this certificate is Abitur), something between a journal and a book that appears only once, is sold to whoever wants it and contains profiles of the students, the various teachers, the various subjects and the funniest quotes by the teachers. I am not aware of a good translation or something similar in other countries (though I’m quite sure that there is something).
June
Passed my final exams
This post was made mainly to inform my friends, it might be rather uninteresting for others.
May
Various Updates
After weeks of work it’s finally done: My game works just as well as it did before. Cool, isn’t it? I do stuff like that more often than I’d like to, but I have to. The goal is always to create the infrastructure for other cool stuff that I plan on doing later. In this case, I now have the infrastructure to control any kind of vehicle, not just the default snowcat. To make this possible, all user-controlled driving is now controlled by Javascript code that I (or anyone else) can create and change rapidly. The supporting built-in code doesn’t differentiate between different vehicles, about anything can be controlled now (planes and helicopters will need much more work, though).
Told you so…
First, something unrelated: I wanted to stop moderating the comments two weeks ago, because it is actually as useless as all my friends told me. But right that day when I want to do it, I get flooded with about fifty useless spam comments (which, thanks to moderating, nobody but me ever saw). So it’s going to stay in for a little longer, although I might need to change the text explaining why I do so.
Vaporware and Stripes
Finally my final exams are finished. I don’t have the marks for all tests yet, but for the oral exam in history I got 15 out of 15 possible points, which is equal to a 1+ in Germany or A+ in America, if I understand American grades correctly. And now for something completely different.
April
Screenshots
While I am programming, a lot of screenshots accumulate. What you see posted on my homepage is only a small percentage of these, namely those that happen to get into my posts here. Now I decided to change this and show you more, to get you interested.
Experts and those who aren't
There are times when you just have to rant about something, and today’s the day for me. What I’m mad about is that there are so many people who believe to know about computer gaming, yet in fact they have no real clue. I’m no expert in this area, but I know more than surprisingly many of them, and how they can be so certain about something they clearly have no idea about, is sometimes driving me nuts.
Nice, but…
Tomb Raider Legend is a cool game, and worth the 36.95 € I payed for it. It would have been worth the 47.90 € I’d have payed for it if Amazon didn’t lower the price at the last minute as well, but you won’t find me complaining about that. The game was the first of the franchise to have a storyline that was actually interesting, the new moves were a lot of fun, graphics were really nice even on my old computer and there was a forklift truck.
And… finished!
While I’m writing this, the end credits of Tomb Raider Legend are rolling across the screen of my other computer. Well, actually they’re not, but they were when I was writing the german version of this article. For this game, I had to sit in front of my PC for the first time in a long time. The noise (the only interesting feature of my GPU is the larger-than-normal fan for better overclocking. Not that I’d ever do that, though), the clutter (my desktop’s a mess), it’s horrible. But anyway, once TLR is fullscreen I don’t see any Windows.
Offroad Diesel Locomotive
It won’t be long until I graduate from school, I’ve already had my last regular school day behind me. Some of my friends don’t like the fact that now, they won’t see how my game is going. In school, they could always watch me working right there (when I had my iBook with me). To solve this problem, I try to post more often from now on, showing more steps in between, including stuff that doesn’t work as I want it to. Considering that I’ll have less time for programming and posting due to my final exams, I guess it should even out to the usual level of activity here, but I’ll try to be better than that anyway.
Computer Games!
It is first of April, but I haven’t seen any good April Fool jokes. I’ve seen many, but none that were really funny or that I believed. The best thing I saw at all was Eisenbahn Kurier’s article on the german railroad reintroducing the third class, because that’s the cheapest solution to the inconvenience some modern electric railcars are causing. Of course, I believe that CMT’s claim to support Mac OS X is a bad joke as well, I’ve never ever gotten any video from there to run. But nevermind that, all following is not a joke.
March
Comments moderated
All comments on this site are moderated now, meaning that I have to approve every single comment before it gets displayed. The idea is that I filter out any illegal content.
February
PowerPC only with Xcode 2.2
If you’re a developer and found this via google, and your problem is that you get warnings saying something about cputype(7) -arch i386 and a linker error when doing a ppc-only release build in Xcode 2.2, jump right to solution, the explanation is just for some friends of mine.
Mouse with HIDUtilities sucks
I learned a lot of things in the past few days. For example, I learned that after a ‘Bend the line’ you always face inwards, so that if you already have two lines facing in two ‘Bend the lines’ will bring you back to where you started. I wasn’t the only one confused by this, though.
Quick issue about HIDConfigureAction
There are not exactly few, but neither really lots of people who know what HIDConfigureAction is. I’m quite certain that nobody who visits my site and tells me about it is among them. There is one exception, but as far as I know he only visited my site once and anyway, that’s not the point. In short: HIDConfigureAction is a function of Apple’s HID Utilities. You call it with a time and get, if something made a significant movement, the device and part of the device that caused this movement. This is useful and probably meant for games, where you click on the function you want to have assigned to a different key and then press that very key. Works like a charm, except for one big problem I just had:
Björn stealing my ideas
I’ve talked a time or two about Björn, a friend of mine and probably the only one ever looking at this site. No idea why he does so, I’m always bored to death here, but that doesn’t matter.
Change for Comments
Ain’t life wonderful: I never get any comments on my page and dislike this. On the other hand, when I do get a comment, I never realise this until the person commenting tells me (which defies the whole purpose).
January
Text, Railroad, Fullscreen
Always wrong: Just a few hours ago I posted in a forum that there will be no update before the weekend on this site. Well, who cares, I doubt that many people from that forum will go over here anyway.
