First steps on the iPhone

Here are the results of my first tries with ObjectiveC + Cocoa2D + OpenGL. Feels nice and pretty fast and I like the “strange” look of the ObjectiveC language. I implemented a small particle system based on a CocosNode with OpenGL, 10000 particles moving with a decent framerate! Second I ported an existing fluid solver to ObjectiveC, there is a lot to optimize, that’s why it’s running only at 30 fps. I like experimenting with this platform, more to come…

2 comments | Posted in Talk, iPhone

Stardust particle engine + ND3D

Allen Chou made a beautiful and pretty fast open source particle engine named Stardust. Just have a look at the examples, you can customize the output in various ways via xml configuration. So in case you need an easy to use particle engine for your next project, I suggest you take a look at his engine. He also added an extension to use it together with my ND3D engine.

Add comment | Posted in Talk

SimpleTimer 2 updated

I found some time to give my timer a small graphical rebrush. The application icon and the logo itself has been updated. Now it looks a lot more beautiful in the dock. I also added an alternative bright skin in case you don’t like the dark one. The calender is now zoomable if you didn’t already noticed and timers running less than 60 seconds are not counted anymore. The next thing I’m planning is to write an importer/exporter for the database that let’s you easily migrate all your timer data to a new computer. So long…

2 comments | Posted in AIR, Flex, Talk

Issues with ANT and Out of memory error

Finally my macbook arrived and I got everything set up and started working (Yes, I switched finally ;)). In one of my projects I have to compile a large flex project quite often, so I use ANT directly in the shell.

On Windows it was never a problem, but in OS X I always got: “java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space”. After quite a journey through the depths of the web I found the place where to increase the memory size and I thought that’s might be interesting for you:

Just create a file called ant.conf in /etc (Use sudo to create the file) and paste this line: ANT_OPTS=’-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m’ Done!

Add comment | Posted in Flex, Talk

New example by accident

This is what came out as I was testing to implement a custom renderer in my engine (The sources are available in the google code repository).

(space = fullscreen = more fun)

3 comments | Posted in 3D, Experiments, Flash 9, Source

ND3D – Reloaded

Hey there! My little 3D engine has made a lot of progress the last couple of weeks. I added some stuff Katopz made and Philippe (Flashdevelop Team) contributed a lot as well. Thank you guys!

New features are:
- Interactivity. Meshes and materials are clickable now.
- New Materials: BitmapMaterial, LineMaterial, Pixelmaterial and Wirematerial’
- A few new 3D Objects: Ground, Box, Line3D
- Fixed 3DS and MD2 Parser
- Predefined 3d scene for faster development

Go and grab the newest sources at google code.

(Click me, I will dance for you!)

Big thanks to Richard for the little animated fella. (He just told me the poor little guy is named: Cchhhrkrrpffschnurps. Bless you! :)

7 comments | Posted in Talk

Even more updates…

Good news everyone! It seems like Katopz from sleepydesign doesn’t need no sleep and added some really cool features to ND3D: A LineRenderer, FileMaterial (so you don’t need to manually preload your textures) and some modifications to support JigLib (an open source physics engine). See the examples on his blog. I will add everything to the repository the next days (Give me some time, I need sleep ;)).

2 comments | Posted in Talk

Another ND3D Update 2

Here is another update for ND3D: Keyframed MD2 Animation Meshes. Thanks to Katopz from sleepydesign (Sorry it took me so long to add it). An example is also encluded. Go! Update your repository.

1 comment | Posted in Talk

ND3D Updates

Hey folks, it’s been a while since my last post and my last update to ND3D. Philippe Elsass from the Flashdevelop Team sent me a useful update for my engine. With this update there is now support for alpha transparency in bitmap textures and the MeshLoader is able to load an parse 3DS files. It’s all available via the google code repository

Have fun.
(I’m working on an efficient way to get interactive materials working, hang on…)

3 comments | Posted in Talk

SimpleTimer 2 – AIR 1.5 Hotfix

Hi there, I just uploaded a fix for the SimpleTimer. With the new AIR Runtime version 1.5 you weren’t able to restore the minimized timer. That’s fixed now and should come to you via auto update.

2 comments | Posted in Talk

SimpleTimer 2 released

Good news everyone! I just released the first version of my new time tracking application. You can find the download, description and everyting else under Projects -> SimpleTimer 2. The version count is 1.0.1. I hope it’s nearly bugfree, since I’m using it for quite a while now. Let me know what you think of it!

7 comments | Posted in AIR, Talk

SimpleTimer 2 – Sneak peak

As I mentioned, I’m working on version 2 of my little time tracking tool. Completely rebuild in Flex, with a lot of new features: Detailed tracking reports, CSV export, idle timeouts, autostart and more… Here is a screenshot of the current state.

(It will get public within the next weeks…)

8 comments | Posted in Talk

F10 Astro Blackhole

The Flash 10 beta player is out for a while and I found a few minutes to try out the new native 3D effects. You can get quite nice and fast results out of the new API if you only want to display flat 2D planes in 3D-space:

(Space = fullscreen, Download source, Flash Player 10 needed)

4 comments | Posted in 3D, Actionscript, Experiments, Flash 10, Particles, Source

ND3D & Flash 10

Katopz from sleepydesign took my 3D Engine and implemented the new triangle drawing features for Flash 10 into the renderer. You can see the results here: ‘drawTriangles is faster?‘. In this experiment the result isn’t much faster (drawTriangles seems to be quite slow), but in bigger scenes you could reduce the tesselation of your geometry, because drawTriangles distorts a bitmap the real way. Thanks Katopz for this test! I’ll have to set up my Flexbuilder for Flash 10 now ;)

2 comments | Posted in Talk

Upgrading to Flexbuilder 3.0.1 (or where are my charts?)

Today we upgraded our Flexbuilders to the newest version, the update didn’t come with the built in auto update of Flexbuilder, so I had to de- and reinstall it. Done that, opened one of my projects, continued working and realised that I couldn’t dig into the charting sources anymore (F3):

After quite a search and a clean install on a new PC, Jens noticed a small message in the status bar of the builder after entering the serial number: “Extracting chart sources”. The rest was easy:

1. Quit Flexbuilder or Eclipse
2. Delete your serial information (Look for a file called ‘license.properties’ in the Flex installation directory (C:\ProgramData\Adobe\Flex\license.properties on Vista, /Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Flex/license.properties on OSX))
3. Launch Flexbuilder, re-enter your serial
4. Done, the chart sources are available again.

Maybe this becomes useful for some of you …

5 comments | Posted in Flex