| Tuesday, 12/31/02 |
| Well only a couple more hours till 2003...i wish everyone a really HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! |
| Tuesday, 12/24/02 |
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And once again we write December 24. Merry Christmas everyone!!! 
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| Friday, 12/20/02 |
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Woohoo i'm done for this year! :) Happy Holidays everyone!!! |
| Friday, 12/13/02 |
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Ah, time flies by. Already 2 weeks since the last update. Anyway, my math test last saturday went very well (even tho lazy me didn't learn anything for it :)) and we should get the results next week. But i'm pretty sure i got more then the needed 40% :) Luckily it was the only test before christmas, so once again i can say university is so much better then school, since in my last school years i had 2 or 3 tests each week in december. On monday the people of the public traffic system in munich are going to strike, so the whole day there will be no subway, streetcar or bus driving in the whole city...pretty annoying, but monday's lecture is not that important so i'll just stay at home and have a nice 3-day-weekend :) well i haven't really coded that much lately, but i started reading Computer Graphics: Principles and Practices by Foley et al. It's a really good book and i can only recommend it. I mean nowadays everyone can build a 3D game or engine by using some API or graphics library, but i think the really interesting part is to know how these APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D work, and to understand how things like polygon rasterization, texturing, lightning, blending, z-Buffering, etc. are done, and the algorithms and mathematics behind it. So i think i'm going to code (parallel to the other stuff :)) a small software 3D engine. Not to reinvent the wheel. But to learn, because it's cool, and because i can :) |
| Saturday, 11/30/02 |
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Well actually i should be learning math for our big test in one week but instead i sat at the computer and played with fractals...wrote a little program to render mandelbrot and arbitrary julia sets and got some nice images, despite the fact that it's really hard to find a good way to color them so they look cool, so that i just experimented with a lot of formulas. But still, fractals are really cool and it has something to know after a great amount of zooming that there is a good chance that nobody else has ever seen that particular section of the fractal :) Anyway, since i still have way too much unused webspace here i made some images and put them up on their own page, which you can see here: Fractals page. |
| Saturday, 11/23/02 |
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Today was definitely cool...it was open day at the Technical University of Munich and they really had some cool stuff there. First we took a tour trough (or better said around :) ) a highly sterile raum where they produce and research chips. Inside it has only 1 dust-particle per cube-foot so it's understandable they didn't actually let us in hehe :) Then we went to the institue for computer science where we could watch a robocup game: robots playing soccer. And the AGILO-Team we could watch is the best german team and even internationally high ranking...but they still seemed a bit dumb hehe. Best scene was when one robot was dribbling the ball towards the goal and then suddenly turned around to shoot the ball at an enemy robot...hehe i guess there is quite some work left to do in this field :) Unfortunately we spent too much time then to watch the presentations of the institutes for mechanical engineering, astro- and aeronautics, so we missed the last tour trough the experimental reactor and particle accelerator..well it'll have to wait till next year :) Anyway, it was really cool to see the current state of technology live for a day :) |
| Tuesday, 11/12/02 |
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Well one of our tasks for this weeks homework was to write a SML function to convert a decimal number to a number of a given base, and i thought such a function was quite handy, so i rewrote it in C++ and added two more functions, so now one can convert numbers of given base to and from decimal numbers, and even convert between given bases. I think this comes in really handy, especially to/from bin and hex. Code is free of course, you can get it from the documents page. Hehe actually this is the first time i like the SML version of an algorithm more then it's C++ equivalent... 18 not nice looking lines in C++ and only 4 not nice looking lines in SML...but of course the C++ version is way faster :) |
| Monday, 11/11/02 |
| As promised, the ini/config file reader can now be downloaded from the documents page. |
| Sunday, 11/10/02 |
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And another week went past...and this week i actually had some better things to do then to code... :)
But at least today i fired up VStudio...i wrote a little config file reader for Tandorine..i think it's looking quite good so i'll propably add some more comments to the code tomorrow and put it up here on the page. |
| Saturday, 11/02/02 |
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Oh well already more then a week since the last update and again i have no new content for the website :) But soon there will be new Tandorine pics...i hope to get the texture mapping code done during the next week so i can show at least some more interesting spheres hehe. I'm also happy about the ever growing visitor count: October brought five times more visitors then the first 2 months the page was up...right now about half of my visitors come from the gamedev.net forums (and i hope you enjoy your stay here..without any evil green ati slime ads :) ) and the other half comes from google (this proves once again the superiority of google over all other search machines :) ) I'm also sorry for all the people looking for raytracing tutorials who were sent here by google and didn't find any...but it's not my fault and perhaps one day i'll write one :) |
| Thursday, 10/22/02 |
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Well the first week on university is already over, but it's been pretty cool so far. The sign-ups for the exercise-groups accompanying the lectures have been online and i was really lucky and was on the web shortly after the sign-ups opened, so i got into those groups at the best times (only 30 minutes later that group was full already:) ), and now i have no lectures or exercises on wednesday! Only a 4-day week, that's really cool :) On another note: i just read the news that Boeing revealed it's latest secret from Area 51 (and it's got a really good name) : The Bird of Prey. That thing looks really cool, like out of a sci-fi movie...and those stealth abilities aren't bad either :) Wish i could fly such a thing :) |
| Monday, 10/14/02 |
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And already the first day at the university is over :) It was quite cool, we have some really sympathetic professors. And this evening i already got my access-number to my account on the uni-servers. 300 MB on a SuSe linux box, on which i can even host my homepage with unlimited traffic..i'm definitely going to use that once i want to put some bigger files up for download here :) Well unfortunately the first lecture begins tomorrow at 8 (which means i have to get up at about 6 in the morning), but the professors want to change that so it will only start at 9 from thursday on. Hehe sleeping a hour longer would be cool :) |
| Sunday, 10/13/02 |
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Well that was it. Holidays are over :( In about 12 hours my first day at university will begin...i'm really excited now :) The worst thing is that i'll now have to take the train and subway to get there, which means i'll spend 90 minutes in such a crowded thing every day :( But oh well, at least at the uni i now can finally learn what interests me and i dont have to take all those boring lessons i had in school anymore. But i think it will be cool and i hope to meet some cool people there too :) |
| Friday, 10/11/02 |
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Yesterday i began working on a game again! It's a boardgame that will be really easy to play, with almost no rules, but quite some depth, like chess. I also plan on implementing a 'Tournament' mode (something new for a board-game, eh? :) ) where you'll be able to play against the computer for points. I hope to get an online highscores page together then, but first thing right now is to implement a computer-player with different difficulties. This game won't take long to complete, so check back soon :) On an other note: I can't believe more then 3 months of holidays will be over in 2 days. Time goes really by way too fast. And on monday will be my first day as a university student. Luckily it only begins at noon so i can at least sleep long one last time :) And on thursday there'll be a freshmen-welcome event with food & drink, 2 DJs making music, and everyone will get a free backpack with 'starter gear'. Can't wait to see what that will be :) I guess uni will be quite cool, although the prospect of having to get up at 6 every morning isn't nice :) |
| Saturday, 10/05/02 |
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Well i haven't done anything worth showing during the last 2 weeks, but after finding out that they will teach us SML/NJ at uni i learned that language during the last days and...well i hate it :) As a C++ coder i'm used to have the power over every little thing and now this SML comes on and doesn't even have variables or loops...you have no power at all, you can't optimize in any way since the interpreter handles all memory and lower-level stuff. It's worse then Basic :) I really find it stupid that they'll teach us a language that is absolutely useless and has no value at all in the real world...IMHO just because it's so safe that you can't write a program that crashes the computer in it doesn't mean it's better to teach it to people who have never programmed before. But oh well, i'll have to live with it...and if i'm lucky they'll get to a real programming language after the first 2 semesters :) |
| Tuesday, 09/24/02 |
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Well this really sucks...i'ts 10pm here and outside it has a whole 1.5 degree Celsius and it's SNOWING!!! And i got 3 more weeks of summer holidays! They even played 'Last Christmas' on some radio station today...how messed up is that??? And tomorrow morning i have to go to sign-up at my university, which means i'll have to get up at 7am, go outside into this horrible cold, spend 45 minutes in a overfilled train and then stand at least one hour in line for the sign up. I really can't wait to be home again tomorrow noon :) |
| Saturday, 09/21/02 |
 I finally put the first images of Tandorine up! Only the very basics are implemented yet but the project includes already 3700 lines (900 of which are comments!), but that's mainly because of math/utility/bmp stuff i didn't write exclusively for tandorine. Anyway, i'm happy that i can render some spheres now! :) Next thing to do will be to implement a better camera class that allows free positioning and changeable field of view. After that i'll have to implement some more primitives and texturemapping. |
| Monday, 09/16/02 |
| Attention to everyone who downloaded the function parser: There was a little bug with asin/acos/atan not returning degrees after calling SetModeDeg(). The files on its page are updated now. Thanks again to David Hyde from www.dplot.com for pointing that out :) |
| Saturday, 09/14/02 |
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I'm getting lazy hehe..already 10 days since the last update. But i began working a bit on the raytracer, i dubbed it 'Tandorine' cause it sounds cool and kinda unique. Ray-Sphere intersection and phong lightning code are working fine, and now i'm at implementing support for multiple colored light sources. As soon as that's working i'll upload some images. On another note i'm really happy of the reactions to my bmp tutorial...got some nice compliments and according to the server logs it gets almost more hits then the rest of the page together hehe. But it's really these things that make me feel that i created something useful which helps some people out there, so i'm happy :) I also tried my luck again at writing a poem, and again it turned out to be a bit gloomy in a Poe style. You can read it here. |
| Wednesday, 09/04/02 |
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Yesterday we've been to the 'Freizeitland Geiselwind', the only Theme Park here within a 3 hour's drive. We had nice weather and there were not too many people there and it was a really nice day. The park is of course nothing near the big american theme parks, but at least it has a Boomerang. I've been on it half a dozen times and it's really cool...only annoying thing are the screams from all those people.. :) To relax i've been on the Breakdancer and Swinging Ship about a dozen times each..really cool when there are almost no people in line. They've also got an Enterprise there, but it really wasn't that exciting...and for some reason a bunch of 10 year olds was riding all the time hehe. |
| Saturday, 08/31/02 |
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I was writing some code for the raytracer to load and save bitmaps and it really wasn't that easy since there are no really good tutorials about it and the .bmp format is not exactly all that user-friendly. It took me quite some experimenting and watching results in a hex editor before my code's output was identical with that of Paint and PSP. And since every couple days someone on the GDNet forums asks how to load/save bmps and my page needs some more content i decided to write a tutorial that deals with saving/loading bmps and shows how to convert between bmp image data and usable RGB buffers. You can read it here. I appreciate all comments of course. After all this my first real tutorial :) |
| Thursday, 08/27/02 |
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Nothing new about the raytracer yet, but some page updates. On the projects page you can now find my reworked template double linked list class. Then i put my old Isometric engine on the page. And to make some more use of my mySQL database i added a new feature to the page: random quotes below the logo at the top of the page. |
| Monday, 08/26/02 |
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Wow already 3 weeks since the last update..time goes by too fast if it's summer outside :) I haven't done any real stuff lately but this will soon change.. :) I have taken a good look at non-realtime photorealistic rendering...i didn't understand all of the underlying math ( integrals over the hemisphere and that stuff ), but soon i'm gonna have lots of maths in uni so one day i'll understand the theory too :) The things i have taken a deeper look into was raytracing, radiosity, pathtracing/monte carlo raytracing and photonmapping. While radiosity is a nice preprocessing step for realtime rendering i think it's not the best for photorealistic rendering since it's only good in modelling diffuse light, but unable to produce specular highlights, and thus it's not suited for scenes with shiny/metallic surfaces. A pure raytracer is of course the opposite, it excels at specular light interaction, reflection and refraction, but doesn't model diffuse light interaction which makes all renderings look 'hyper-real' and only allows point-lightsources which is unrealistic too. Pathtracing and the different Monte Carlo raytracing techniques solve the problems of pure raytracer and radiosity processor since they solve the global illumination problem for both diffuse and specular light interaction, but they introduce noise in the rendering and to achieve quality pictures they need extremely long. Unfortunately i've got no supercomputer and i don't want to wait a whole hour to render a simple sphere so that isn't the way to go either. But now there seems to be the perfect solution: Raytracing with photonmaps. Photonmapping does all the diffuse light effects like colorbleeding, soft shadows, makes area-lightsources possible and even creates caustics while the raytracing does the specular lightning for shiny/reflective surfaces. I have written the basics of a raytracer in the past, so now my plan is to make a working raytracer with texturemapping, antialiasing and the nice stuff and then implement photonmaps...that should work pretty well and i'll soon begin posting my first rendered images here and add many more during the development (given that i actually do get this far with the renderer :) ) |
| Friday, 08/02/02 |
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Well sometimes i'm really lucky...last year i wrote two stories, put them up on the old HP, posted them on two story forums, and had the files on my harddisk. And then, a few months ago, i had to format my harddrive and didn't back them up. At the same time my old HP was deleted since the host stopped it's free webspace service, and both story forums had been deleted meanwhile. So both stories (and i had put a lot of work into them) were lost. But then, yesterday i accidently stumbled upon this page: The Web Archive, and out of curiosity i entered the URL of the old HP...and it was really there! Three complete backups of my page. So if you ever have your page deleted and no backups, check the archive :) Anyway, since i have the stories back now, i put them up here. |
| Tuesday, 07/30/02 |
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Yay! Today i got the response to my application from the Munich University where i want to study CS next semester and i got a place! I don't even have to come in to make a test! Woohooo! :) I also updated the page a bit: you can now find a small collection of my C++ Tips/Tricks in the documents section. |
| Saturday, 07/27/02 |
| As promised, the Noise Generator is online, along with it's full source (even the evil MFC interface stuff :)) |
| Friday, 07/26/02 |
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Well now this is the stuff horror stories are made of: First scientists record mysterious sounds that seem to come from something living deep in the oceans that has to be bigger then any animal known to man, and then a few weeks later this 60 feet squid that seems to be a different species than the other two known giant squids, washes up at Australia's shore...makes you really wonder what awaits us in the depths of deep sea chasms like the Marianas Trench. Let's just hope it's not the same things that dwell in antarctica :) |
| Friday, 07/26/02 |
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Well i still had problems connecting to the server the last days
but hope it's going to be ok now. I have just noticed that my guestbook won't accept german umlauts 'ä, ö, ü'.. when i built the thing and tested it on my machine with apache for windows it made no probs... but the webserver is running linux, and that doesn't seem to like german hehe. Anyway it's fixed now. I'm currently working on making the source of my perlin noise generator readable and will put up the thing later. |
| Wednesday, 07/17/02 |
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The server the page is hosted on was down for the last few days but should be stable now. I reworked the documents section a bit, so now, while not much more content, it looks better. I also put up the Links. And the big update: I put the Function Parser back online! Some may remember it as Mindfly Function Parser..it's announcement on flipcode brought me 2000 page hits on one day :) Meanwhile i have reworked it a bit and it is now 100% error proof and won't crash anymore when you try to evaluate "hello!" or something which is not a mathematical function :) |
| Wednesday, 07/17/02 |
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I changed the layout of the page a bit. I added the 'recent updates' field below the nav bar. I will put the links there every time i add/update a page or make something available for download. The counter now looks neater too :) |
| Tuesday, 07/16/02 |
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The Guestbook is up!
Well i don't really like those free guestbooks available on the net,
since they are slow and clustered with banner-ads so i decided
to write one myself...gotta love PHP & mySQL :) anyway, it's not thoroughly tested and may have some bugs but at least it's fast and clean..so go post something :) I also put a contact and about me page up. |
| Wednesday, 07/14/02 |
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Runicsoft.com has gone online! My old HP (mindfly games) is no more, but soon i'll put the stuff you could find there up here, including the function parser. For now i'm happy to finally have my own domain :) I also got a mySQL database and full PHP support now, and plan to write a news posting system soon, but for now my counter is the only thing that uses the database. None of the links in the navbar do work yet, but i wanted to have the main page up before i add content. Also the design is not final yet and could change often during the next time, so check back often :) |