Irrlicht Engine

Just received a quite unusual mail from an Irrlicht user: Can I use the irrlicht in my own product for business? I am not going to read the licence for that, i am lazy. Woha. Irrlicht's license is about one of the shortest in the open source area. It's about 5 lines long.

As Google just announced, they are basically stopping development of the O3D plugin and rewriting it for WebGL. I received a few mails [ok, there were only two ] trying to bring this to my attention and asking me about a comment on this. So here you ... [More] go: When I started developing CopperCube and its WebGL 3d engine CopperLicht, choosing WebGL (and Flash 3D) as 3d rendering technology, some people commented that I should instead go with the then newly announced O3D plugin instead. I didn't do this, believing no new browser plugin would ever have a real chance unless it is named 'Flash', and it seems as this was a good decision. The result was that CopperCube was the first sophisticated tool for creating WebGL content and a lot of people are happy it exists. And as it appears, now also the Google Team behind O3D realized that plugins is not the way to go and that WebGL is the future. Admittedly some people seem to be quite angry that they abadoned the O3D-plugin project suddenly and started to reimplement it. Of course the first WebGL version of O3D is still slow, but as you can see for example at the Demos of CopperLicht, 3d engines using JavaScript and WebGL can be really fast if optimized a bit. I bet the O3D team at google will achieve better performance as well in the near future. So I think this is a great and important step for WebGL and they the O3D team did the right thing. WebGL is getting more attention this way, it gets more popular and it gets more support, resulting in more developers starting to use it. And this is a great thing. [Less]

Just fixed a bug causing CopperCube to crash at startup when no DirectX 9 is installed on the users system. Embarrassing, because the program also works without D3D9 (falling back to D3D8 or OpenGL). Luckily, only some very few people still live without DirectX 9, as it seems, otherwise I had noticed this earlier, I guess.

Developing an indie game? Need some publicity? Maybe Pixel Prospector is for you. Looks nice, clean and useful.

I just released a new version of the JavaScript 3D engine Copperlicht, version 1.1.0. A pretty cool new feature is character animation. CopperLicht now is able to display and animate skeletal animated characters: You can try the demo here. ... [More] Remember, CopperLicht is a WebGL 3D engine, and WebGL is not finished yet, so your browser only supports it when you are using a development browser and enabled WebGL manually. There is also a new tutorial explaining how to do character animation in CopperLicht. After the recent added collision detection, this was the last main feature missing. So, basically, this means it is now possible to write whole game with that 3d engine, like for example first person shooters running on websites, without plugins. Now we only have to wait until WebGL arrives in end user browsers. [Less]

Yay, Bienen und Blumen, the free german online dating site we are running as side project now has more than 10000 male users: Suchergebnisse von 1 bis 10 von insgesamt 10007. The female user count is *slightly* lower, but it's the same ratio as ... [More] most other free and honest online dating pages have. This is not only nice because it means the page is still constantly growing but also because it feels nice: a lot of happy people write to us that we helped them finding finally a partner, which is quite rewarding. Similar to creating open source software :) [Less]

Just wondered why the performance dropped strangely. The framerate of a CopperLicht scene just dropped from 40 to something between 3 and 10, both in Chrome/Chromium and in FireFox/MineField. Reverting my recent changes didn't help. Strange. A ... [More] short look at the notification icons next to the task bar clock then revealed the problem: Virus scanner running. Argl. [Less]

I recently hadn't that much time, so I only have played it for some few hours yet, but here is a game recommendation: Torchlight is a quite nice and entertaining game. It's basically a Diablo III clone - which feels a bit odd since Diablo III hasn't ... [More] been released yet - but it has everything Diablo 1 and 2 had and what you would expect from version 3. Everything in the game feels very familiar: Portals, how you level up, skill trees, the weapon/armor/item system, sockets, magic, identification scrolls, shortcuts, the user interface, how the quests work, etc. Except that Torchlight doesn't include a multi player mode [which I would try to ignore anyway to not to get addicted ] I'm not sure what I would expect more from Diablo III, so I can recommend this game. Best 20 € I've invested this month, so far :) [Less]

A study published three days ago by the faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the Leiden University (Colzato et al.) found that 'Killer Games', what our politicans call First Person Shooters are making you more intelligent. Our findings ... [More] support the idea that playing FPS games promotes cognitive flexibility. It's quite interesting to read, it seems that you are training a lot of abilities of your brain by planning strategies and reacting to fast events in these games. [...] videogame experience enhances cognitive flexibility in general Nice read, the PDF is available as well. So time for another round of MW2? :) [Less]

Woha: Android running on iPhone. Not sure if this is useful, but interesting at least :)