In the last few days and weeks, it was rather hard to escape one »important« news: Tomb Raider: Legend, the seventh installment of the legendary Tomb Raider computer games series, is finally there. All the news media praised the game for its great graphics, story, controls … whatever. Finally there is a worthy successor for the venerable parts 1-5, after Core Design did most of its job wrong in part 6.

I decided to give all this hype a reality check (a playable demo of the first level is available). Read more …

As promised in my post about writing 4k intros, I’m now digging a bit deeper how my 4k (actually 3.5k) intro Origami 3.5K was made. I’ll start with a »end-user« FAQ that covers some of the artistic and organizational aspects. The rest of this article will be very technical. Maybe the information isn’t directly useable in other projects, or maybe my solutions aren’t the optimal ones, but I hope that anyone who is going to do a 4k intro soon finds at least part of the information useful. YMMV.
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A few minutes ago, a friend came up with the idea of a XML-based checksumming tool. This is another great example of immense over-engineering in the XML world. I won’t go into detail about when to use XML and when not – I just want to establish some basic rules:

1. If you come up with a XML-based solution for your problem, think again.
2. If, while thinking it over thoroughly, you didn’t find a better solution, ask other people.
3. If these people also don’t find a better solution, ask people who don’t even know XML how they would solve the problem.
4. If no one came up with a satisfactory solution that didn’t involve XML, use XML.

It’s the day after Breakpoint, so it’s party report time :)
This year we had a great party again, although the weather was bad so we couldn’t do the traditional Kakiarts/Deranged barbecue. The organizers did a great job at keeping everything running without major problems. Compo delays were minimal and even though there were problems during the compos itself, these weren’t tragedies either. (A WordPad-driven PC Demo compo is actually quite a funny thing.) I didn’t notice any major issues with drunken sceners, and the toilets were acceptably clean throughout the whole party. The only thing we missed really badly was a fast competition, because we had several quite good ideas, but no use for them. Hanging around the whole time, doing nothing but waiting for the next compo to start, isn’t exactly what we wanted.
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Now I’m almost done with the functional part of my 4k intro (read: all the tricky stuff is working, and there’s still lots of space to add new stuff). I’ll use this occasion to summarize some of my findings. Maybe someone else will find it useful (but I doubt that :) – I surely do, so this is also some kind of reference for myself. So here is KeyJ’s little TinyDemoWritingGuide. It’s targeted towards experienced C programmers. Not everything here may be completely true as I’m a beginner in the 4k field for myself.
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From the programmer’s point of view, 4k and 64k size limited demos are particularly interesting, because these types of demos rely much more on code than on data. And of course, there’s the sheer fascination of really cool graphics and excellent music in such a tiny amount of space. Programmers appreciate size limited demos the most, because they know how hard it is to get the code so small.
I’m no exception: When I first saw major 64k masterpieces like Heaven 7 or the product, my jaws dropped considerably further than those of my non-programmer friends, because I knew that 64k is really not much space.
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Today, I finally took the time to download and test-drive the Kororaa Xgl Live CD. This is a Linux live CD made for the sole purpose of showcasing Xgl. And, what can I say, it does that job great. They even packed the latest nVidia and ATI drivers on the CD, so it works accelerated on commodity hardware without requiring to download and install the drivers first. Only two minutes after booting, I got a nice, clean GNOME 2.12 desktop that didn’t look special in the first place. But clicking a menu or opening a window starts to show the difference …
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I just released MPUI 1.1.6. This is mainly a small bugfix release that only adds very few features. The next big step will be the rewrite of the options/configuration system.

For those who are interested in helping with MPUI (besides what is written on MPUI’s website), I do have two other tasks left to do:

1. This is for everyone: I need lots of example files to test with. If you have small (~10MB max) media files in exotic formats (mkv? nut?), with exotic configurations (17 audio tracks? embedded subtitles?) or exotic codecs (vp6? snow?), please make them available to me. Do NOT send me e-mails with attached media files unless I ask for it! In particular, I could need auxiliary subtitle files in all those ugly formats that exist (vobsub? ssa? whatever, I don’t even know them all). I do not care about the content of the files (porn? :), as long as it’s no illegal stuff.
2. I could need help from someone who is good at creating icons, pictograms and all that stuff. I’d like to replace the minimalistic MPUI icons with nice and modern true-color ones. If you have some experience in painting or drawing images at 16×16 pixels and would like to improve MPUI’s looks, please send me an e-mail so we can discuss the details.

During my school time and in the first years of university, I used to play computer games about as often as I did programming. But with the age came the seriousness – if I do play today, it’s mostly one of the classic games I fell in love with years ago. The only exception is the tiny amount of about two single-player 3D shooters per year, not only because I like the genre but I also want to see how the graphics improve over the time. So it’s not surprising that there are almost exclusively »triple A« titles on my agenda: Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Quake 4 and F.E.A.R. are the titles I played over the last two years. You may have noticed that one important game is missing: Far Cry. I always wanted to play it, but I didn’t have a decent graphics card back than and hence, I somehow missed it when it came out. Now I do have a strong enough PC and last month, I finally found – by accident – a low-price re-release version in an electronics store. However, I didn’t (and still don’t) have much time to play, but yesterday, I decided that if I don’t have time, I have to take it.
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Exactly one month ago, I released MPUI 1.1.4. The first bug reports came in only one day after the release, so I planned that 1.1.5 shall be a bugfix release some days later. For reasons I can’t remember, I missed this date. This may be in part due to the fact that my TODO list grew, no, it exploded because of countless suggestions I received. In addition, there were the preparations for the CLT that left almost no time for other stuff.

In the time that was left, I started to implement the lesser features (as in »requiring the least time to implement«) on my list. If I hadn’t decided to draw the line today, development of 1.1.5 would have continued forever, I guess.
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