As you may or may not have noticed, my latest intro won the PC 64k competition at Evoke 2009. Unlike my previous demos and intros, it actually featured a few effects that go beyond fixed-function rendering or per-pixel lighting. For all who are interested in how it works, I’ve written this small article that explains how each of the eight effects in the intro is done, as well as some general insight into the creation process of the intro.
Read more …

If you followed my works, you know that I like compact, single-file implementations of decoders for various media formats, and where such a thing doesn’t exist, I tend to write or at least port one myself. Now I’d like to add the third format to that list: Baseline JPEG images.
Read more …

If you think that I’m now going to write about the new iPod models, you’re wrong. Even though they would perfectly fit the headline, I think that everything that can be said about them has already been said already said elsewhere, so I’ll sum it up as follows: fat nano – ugly; touch – between the chairs; classic – couldn’t care less.
No, this article is about another product that was launched today: Paint Shop Pro X2. I absolutely love Paint Shop Pro, it’s my favorite image editing application. But since Corel took it over, quality seems to decrease steadily :(
Read more …

While testing my current work-in-progress demo on my brand-new Vista-powered and GeForce-8-equipped laptop, I noticed some really strange rendering glitches. Since this was the only machine where the bug occured, so I thought it would be some bug in my code that caused incompatibilities with that particular driver version for that particular chip revision or perhaps Vista. However, a friend had the very same problem on a GeForce 7 card, Windows XP and a much older driver than the one I use on my main development PC, which has a nVidia card, too. This meant that the problem needed some serious debugging :)
Read more …

During some random discussion with my colleague today, I rediscovered an experiment I did quite some years ago: MP3 compression of image data. This is, feed raw 8-bit-per-pixel grayscale image data into an MP3 encoder, let it compress it, and decode the MP3 file again. After some conversion (the decoder will always produce 16 bit signed output, but 8 bit unsigned image data is needed), a raw image file will result of this whole process, ready to be displayed with an arbitrary image viewer. Sounds simple, eh? :)
Read more …