growing trees

I like Darwinia a lot. That's a game you *have* to try if you haven't done it yet! I could not resist to start making own procedural graphics stuff :) The web is full of nice tutorials and explanations how this is done. Recommended to read : new science. Very big fat book but contains useful algorithms and nice pictures.

<3 OpenGL

Listening to Boards of Canada and playing around with OpenGL ... Mirror-effect is done by simply copying the whole framebuffer as a texture (glCopyTexImage2D) and blitting one quad with a slight drop of blue in it. Flares are nice, I think I'll write some kind of intro/demo when I have more ideas :-) BTW Texture used in cube is from one of my favourite anime movies .. Laputa : Castle in the sky.

sauna

Visited Porvoo in the weekend. Very nice city! Apparently cats over there like sauna quite much :-)

xrandr -o 2

Wanted to note here that screenrotation is possible with 770 hardware (without speed or memory loss). Let's hope to see this candy soon in MAEMO releases :-) Thanks to Mallum for telling me howto fix mouse coord rotation!

tileset/tilemap editor

I just realized that I have to finish the mapeditor before going any further with my platform-game ... making a good editor is a bit boring but it will surely have profit on level design and better gameplay ... just wanted to note that platform-project is *not* dead :-) Going to sleep ..

770 as a controller

This morning I bought new Edge magazine and noticed there's a picture of 770 but it has a analog stick on it :-) Pretty nice mockup, it was designed as a controller for Nintendo Revolution console.

Check out the '770 controller' picture here :
http://img75.imageshack.us/my.php?image=revcontroller5rm.jpg

And rest of the mockups :
http://www.4colorrebellion.com/revolution-controller-mockups

Actually 770 could be nice gamecontroller for some x86 strategy game, a controller with a screen, this is what Gameboy Advance can be used for some Gamecube games.

platforms

Here are some screenshots of platform game I've been working on. Graphics are taken from a nice c64 animation site http://www.abc64.de/ since I've got no graphics skills myself. Big space below is caused by blogger layout, I don't know why.

Oops, did I say that?

OK, now that I've been playing 'Dungeon Siege II' a bit more I can review a bit more. The rpg-feeling is starting to fade away and the game reveals it's true nature, which is Diablo2-style hack'nslash orgy. The environments, characters and the plot is very nice ... but still ... you end up smashing thousands of monsters which happen to stand right in your way. Magic spell effects are really nice but lacking voice variations. When you kill 1000 monsters with same spell making the same voice it really starts to annoy you :-/

Learning to fly

Rotating starfield, rotating cubes and ship ... points, lines and a quad - simple is beautiful :)

Those of you who like old videogame/demo music, put these to your 770 favourites :

http://kohina.com/
http://scenemusic.net/
http://www.slayradio.org/home.php

Turrican!

Mmm? What's that? Hatari - atari emulator running Turrican II on 770? Yes, that's what it is :-) Runs fine but yeah ... controls are a bit sucky... you cannot really play it since it's fast paced especially on later levels. (hatari was ported to 770 by my workmate Eero)

Turrican II has been my favourite shootemup for a long time. It has very cool weapons and graphics. Especially I liked the amiga version (haha this could be actually a nice opportunity to start new flamewar between amiga and atari again ...), all true Turrican fans should also remember that there's a new one, T3 released 28 August 2004 for Commodore 64 by Smash Designs ... http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=14321

3D

Yesterday I experimented a bit with TinyGL (software implementation of 'most important' opengl commands) and Nokia 770. I modified TinyGL to open window in fullscreen mode. Wireframe objects were running fast and I am planning to make a 'asteroids' clone using this, lighting and shading produced problems ... framerate goes down like cows tail, I'm not sure yet is it the floating point calculation or blitting speed in general but I will investigate it. Patch will be submitted here when I have something nice done :-)

Stoned!

A word of advice : if you ever happen to meet a greater abyssal basilisk, do not look in to his eyes ... it will turn you to stone. We had some great adventuring during the weekend and my thief/ranger character raised one level! :-)

Playing a different role

I've been playing 'Dungeon Siege II' quite much lately, nice game! There's lots of things oldschool roleplayers will recognize familiar. For example discussions between own group npc's (Baldur's Gate etc..), you can take a pet as one character in your group (Nethack) ... by feeding stuff to it, it grows and becomes a stronger ally, teleports (Diablo2 style) .. no need to travel again that same route ... except most of the subquests are made in travel routes made for the major quest and you notice often to be *again* in that same area. Nice game anyways, it feels like a real rgp adventure ... You can even pause the action by hitting space and think again! I've been waiting that feeling since Baldur's gate 2. I liked Neverwinter Nights aswell, but something just wasn't right about it, I honestly don't know what. Next weekend I will play some AD&D with friends...

First post!

Hello there,
I have thought evil thoughts about blogging for a long long time but now eventually decided to start one :-) This blog will include at least some coding tutorials, my opinions of music and movies etc .... propably works as a personal diary aswell, but I'm trying to avoid that.

I bought "Children of Dune" dvd in the weekend and watched the first episode ... it was quite nice, don't expect cool computer visuals though. If you have read dune book(s) I recommend to watch this one.

http://imdb.com/title/tt0287839/