Today I received a blogging questionnaire again, so this time I’ll directly start answering without too much introductory text :)
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I didn’t update CENSORED for quite a while, but during the last week, I finally took some time to push the project further. The result is version 0.2.0, available from SourceForge since yesterday night. The new version is all about artwork support: JPEG or PNG files that are placed next to music files will now be shown on playback. This sounds simple, but in fact, this little feature took me about half of the time I spent for the whole 0.1 series. Alas, this has only partly to do with the complex data structures Apple tends to use – a good share of the problems I had was generated by myself …
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Believe it or not, 3DRealms is about to release a game Really Soon Now. And I don’t mean the kind of »RSN« they kept telling us for the last ten years – this time, they have released a demo of the game!
Of course, I don’t mean Duke Nukem Forever (DNF). I’m talking about Prey, the other vapourware product of 3DRealms. It’s been in the works since 1995 (two years before DNF was first mentioned!) and it’s finally finished. While development of this title was not as twisted as DNF’s, it’s nevertheless interesting. The project used a very, very ambitious graphics engine that generated stunning images back then. In 1999, development stopped for some reason, and in 2002 the lead programmer died. Development was then assigned to the external company Human Head Studios, who kept true to at least parts of the storyline.
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Up to now, the consequences of engaging in the social networking process called blogging – social networking – passed by me without any impact. Now I’ve been invited to join in the modern form of chain letters, and I don’t mean the pseudo-funny »forward this e-mail to get rich« type. Blogger chain letters (called »tagging«, as a friend just told me) are simply requests to blog about a certain topic and ask other bloggers to do so, too. The good news is that all relevant bloggers I know are concentrated in our channel, #s2000 (ever wondered where the domain name of this blog comes from? :) and after Ines, Uwe and Tokbela (beware of German language!) I was the last one to receive this invitation, so I don’t have to bug another person with this quite personal questionnaire …
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Testing, reviewing and ranting about Windows Vista Beta 2 seems to be all the rage lately. Normally I don’t like trends like this, but I’m into eye candy and wanted to see if the Vista Desktop really proves to be usable on my normal desktop system. And I had that 32GB empty NTFS partition on my hard drive that really needed to be filled :)
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As you may or may not already know, I use both Windows and Unix-like operating systems, both at work and at home. (I’d like to add OS X to that list, but Apple decided to sell the underpowered x86 Mac minis at ridiculously high prices, but that’s another story …) In the last few days, I had a fair amount of »fun« (note the quotation marks) with Linux, though.
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When writing a program for an iPod, the first and foremost thing to implement is, of course, sound. I, for one, did some of the graphical bells and whistles first, because that’s where my real business is, but today, I wanted to add a little bit of music. It was going to be a smooth ride, I thought, as iPodLinux’ native sound API is just plain and simple OSS.
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What does a geek do with his newest high-tech gadget? Exactly – he’s hacking and/or putting Linux on it! This weekend was the time for my trusty iPod nano to become modded, with the intention to run some self-written homebrew on it.
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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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