nulldesign // lars gerckens » Talk

First steps on the iPhone

lars — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:36:41 +0000

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…

Stardust particle engine + ND3D

lars — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:19:56 +0000

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.

SimpleTimer 2 updated

lars — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:23:06 +0000

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…

Issues with ANT and Out of memory error

lars — Mon, 18 May 2009 13:05:27 +0000

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!

ND3D – Reloaded

lars — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:03:29 +0000

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! :)

Even more updates…

lars — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:17:17 +0000

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 ;)).

Another ND3D Update 2

lars — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:24:44 +0000

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.

ND3D Updates

lars — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:15:48 +0000

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…)

SimpleTimer 2 – AIR 1.5 Hotfix

lars — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 13:37:59 +0000

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.

SimpleTimer 2 released

lars — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:39:04 +0000

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!

SimpleTimer 2 – Sneak peak

lars — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:24:30 +0000

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…)

ND3D & Flash 10

lars — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 09:14:58 +0000

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 ;)

3d engine website

lars — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:41:32 +0000

I just got a mail from Mr.Doob, he made a 3d line clock for the D///FEST 2008 website with my 3d engine. You can download the sources on the website:

Btw.: I’m planning to put the engine up to google code and continue working on it. It will stay lightweight, small and simple!

Create better beings

lars — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 22:13:24 +0000

It’s so much fun to play around with Spore’s creature editor. You can create almost every creature you can think of. This is my flying ostrichsnake. Over a 1.000.000 creatures have been uploaded to Sporepedia until now. I wonder what will happen when the full game will be released, can’t wait to see that…

Beautiful 3D flash site

lars — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:10:37 +0000

Just found this amazing site: The Eco Zoo. Really nice texturing and absolutely fluid animations. I haven’t seen any depths sorting problems, very impressive. I wonder if it’s Papervision or Away3D ;)