Irrlicht Engine

I just uploaded the CopperLicht 1.0.3 release. It fixes a few minor bugs of the previous version. But the a bit bigger news that because lots of people asked me for this, I now added the option to get the full uncompressed source of the 3d engine ... [More] also if you are not a company, for a very small license fee. See license for details. The engine itself still is free to be used and will continue to be. [Less]

If you are a spanish speaking developer you might be interested in this: Cris-dlr wrote a lengthy .pdf explaining how to create 3D games using Irrlicht, irrKlang, irrXML and Raknet. Some of the tutorials are based on the Irrlicht Tutorials. My ... [More] spanish skills are still at level 0 unfotunately, but scrolling through that document it looks like a lot of work went into there. [Less]

Although CopperCube uses Irrlicht for rendering 3d graphics, I only made the D3D8, D3D9 and Software Renderer available in it. The reason for this is that CopperCube uses an older, highly modified Irrlicht version internally and back then, the OpenGL ... [More] driver wasn't able to render into existing windows. More and more new features were added to the supported drivers, and it became more difficult to support OpenGL as well. But recently, I sat down and started backporting everything into OpenGL, and on my local build it seems to work already: The great thing about this is that not only people who complained in the last years that irrEdit doesn't work under Linux using Wine, this will probably change once this feature is ready. Also, with OpenGL working in CopperCube, this will mean that I can port it to other operating systems such as Mac OS or Linux. [Less]

Updated to a new version of a library and everything worked fine. Well, except for this tiny little detail. Started debugger to fix it. Debugged strange, complicated code with foreign language comments and cross-platform #defines clattered over the ... [More] whole library, stepped through at least 200 files. No luck. Bug still there, no idea why. Read forum posts with similar problems. Studied the change log of the library. Nothing. Again, debugging. Again amazed by the amount of code my data gets pushed trough. Giving up, going to sleep. Next day: an idea. What if I put this flag into that function? Actually, I have no idea why I wanted to try this but it's better than giving up. Compiled. Started the app. Bug fixed. This happened quite some times now for me. It seems that somehow sometimes my subconscious mind solves programming problems for me during my sleep, and it tells me what to do, but not why. :) But I better don't think in detail about this. [Less]

Just updated to Opera 10.51. Very nice so far. But why do they need to completely redesign the whole user interface every release (this time, opera looks similar to Chrome)? At least it doesn't get boring that way. :)

In the last weeks, I wondered if I am simply too stupid to understand the strange statistics of my first facebook game, Darkness Springs. But now I think it *could* be facebook who is wrong: Yep: -1 total Users. So the programmer lacking math skills is not me at least. :)

Recently I've started working on this JavaScript 3D engine which I mentioned quite a lot on this blog already. It's quite a big piece of software, and before, no JavaScript scripts I wrote exceeded 300 lines of code, so I never really needed ... [More] JavaScript development tools. But when I started writing that library, I had to use them and I was surprised how good they are. Basically all major browsers today include tools to help you developing websites and their scripts, here is a short overview for people who also never noticed this: Opera Dragonfly Dragonfly is the development tool which comes with Opera and includes a great JavaScript debugger, DOM inspector, CSS viewer. Everything you need. Very useful: It's source code viewer has an incremental search feature, and there is an interactive JavaScript console. It even features remote debugging and has a large set of options to use. This is basically my favourite development tool, also maybe because it integrates into the browser and is not a separate window. Chrome, WebKit and Safari Developer Tools Chrome, and as it appears also Safari (and probably all WebKit browsers?) include JavaScript debugger, DOM inspector, all the standard stuff. But I was surprised to see this very useful utility in it as well: Chrome/Safari include a very neat JavaScript and Resource profiler, telling you which of your functions are the slowest. When writing a JavaScript 3D engine like I do, this is incredibly useful. The resource loading profiler additionally shows you how big all the files are your website are, and how long it needs to load them. Internet Explorer Developer Tools Since Internet Explorer is one of the slowest adapting major browsers out there, I rarely use its development tools, but it includes some surprisingly good utilities: It's all there: A debugger which even feels a bit like Visual Studio, DOM and CSS inspector as well as a JavaScript profiler. Too bad this browser doesn't support canvas or even WebGL. Why is FireFox not included here? Simple: FireFox doesn't include development tools by default, you have to download them manually as addon. I'm using Firefox/Minefield, and unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a working addon with the Minefield version I'm running when I wrote this, so Firefox has to be left out here. Summary All major browsers now include impressively mature web developement and debugging tools which can compete with the development tools of 'real' programming languages such as C++ or Java. Looking forward to see some more big applications developed in JavaScript. And I think this will happen soon, since JavaScript is also getting quite fast now. [Less]

Social news websites are sometimes very useful. But please, please! Don't put spoilers of books, tv series, movies etc. in the headlines of your posts. There is no way to unread them. In this case, i've just read a big spoiler of the TV series ... [More] 'Lost'. Come on guys. Some people live in europe. We get to see all series and movies up to one year later than you in the USA. Hmpf. :/ [Less]

I just released a new version of the JavaScript 3D engine Copperlicht, number 1.0.1. It now includes collision detection and the possibility to create custom materials and shaders. There are two new tutorials available showing how to use these, and ... [More] if you have a WebGL enabled browser, you can try out the collision test example here. For all those without such a browser, it looks like this: Since some people where interested in this, I also made it possible for companies to get a commercial license for this 3d engine, but of course the engine is still completely free to use and it will stay like this. [Less]

Im currently in the process of implementing collision and response into CopperLicht, the JavaScript 3D engine I recently released. It already works and you are able to walk around in a Quake 3 level in realtime, and it is also already possible to ... [More] walk up and down stairs: The problem is that collision is quite a quite CPU-intensive task. Systems today don't have any problems calculating collisions against thousands of polygons per frame, but doing this in JavaScript is a more difficult task: JavaScript is incredibly slow. I've used several tricks already (like you can see a bit on the lower left of the screenshot, CopperLicht automaticly created an OctTree for collision as it reports with the gray text) and it works very nice already in Chrome, which has an extremely fast JavaScript VM. But in FireFox, this is still not very usable, dropping down to about 5-10 frames per second. But let's see, there is still room for improvement. [Less]