Almasch

In my last post I wrote about my switch to Ogre3D and I did not post any picture. Shame on me. So far its not very exciting and you can only see a wireframe of a terrain and two trees.

wireframe landscape

The trees are a fast hack in blender and converted by OgreXMLConvert to the .mesh format used by the the graphic engine.

More about my never-ending-hobby-project. Last year in july I played around again with Ogre3D and now I finally switched my graphic development environment form Irrlicht to Ogre.

It was a hard decision between two good projects and there was also a big bunch of work connected to the change. But to learn something new is one of the major aims beside having fun and creating a game. Now the first basic application is running, many pages of documentation have been read, and I got some skills in Blender (but thats a different story).

The reason I took the workload on me to change the engine was to get a specialized  graphic engine with support for all mayor platforms (Mac, Linux, Windows). For getting a specialized graphic engine with many features, tools and a big community I “pay” the price to use third party tool kits for example input handling or window system.

If you are searching for a toolkit to visualize something in 3D, control the output via mouse or keyboard and navigate thru the virtual world without reading many sides of documentation and many writing many lines of code than the right choice is Irrlicht for you. Its easy to master the basics, clean API, runs on many platforms, compact all in one solution and has a very good render performance.

If you want a graphic engine which does perfect graphic rendering with high performance but nothing else than Orge3D is the right choice you.

After some holiday and the first weeks at work again the new year can start. Due to the first month is nearly over best wishes for the next 11 month.

At my workplace we have started an advents calendar with famous computer scientist. Every day I choose a new entry I prepare it in the night before and tonight my choice was Alan Kay. He developed Smalltalk and object oriented programming systems. One famous cite of him:

„I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.“

I started with C++ as first object oriented language, too, and was pretty sure its a nice language. Its still an very important language but now I have seen some more object oriented languages and know that there are much better solutions… Thats why I can give full acknowledgment to his statement.

The last weeks I spend some time with moving to a new flat. Now its done and I feel quite well in the new environment. It will be the start of a new episode in my life.

If you want to learn a new program language because of seeing new concepts or search for a new way to solve a problem which is difficult to implement in the language you are currently using. Give Scala a try!

t is a modern language which combines the best concepts of many programing languages and paradigms. You can program either object oriented or functional just as you wish  or its better for solving your problem. The language is very extensible and support you with mechanisms to add new functionality in libraries and you can use them like built-in constructs of the language. That make the language scalable and now you can guess where the name is coming from.

Before I enumerate all features of scala take a look at the homepage or read the book “Programming in Scala”. It is very good start into scala which covers all concepts step by step. You should  have already some experience in object oriented programming languages. Java would be great because you can skip some parts of the book. Otherwise you have to read a few pages more which is not really a problem.

Take a look a scala if you have some time. You will not regret it. (Beware that you will ask yourself  the question “why it is so complicated to implement…?” if you write code in an other language than Scala).

I must confess that I have found at least ten points in the following song which already happened to me. Please do not hurt while watching…

This performance “Nieder mit IT” from Thomas Pigor & Eichhorn is only in german language available. Thanks to Philipp Weißmann for giving me the hint to listen to this song.

Now I have enabled a simple spam protection to make it bots harder to add comments to my blogs. The reason is in the last week the amount of spam dramatically increased and it was not possible anymore to handle this problem with a blacklist of common spam content.

I don’t like complicated computer generated pictures which are so difficult to read that even humans will become problems to decipher them. That why I am using  a WordPress Plugin called Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin from Michael Wöhrer. The user has to solve a simple math equation which is easy enough that nobody should need a calculator for it. For bots it is hopefully  a big obstacle to solve 4+2.

So far it works pretty well and no unwelcome comment found its way to the moderator queue or even the frontpage.

Long time ago I have had a look at some 3D render engines and one of them was Orge3D.

Last time I tried Ogre3D it was only available as a beta version and after some tutorials and small test programs I have written I came to the conclusion it was not stable enough (but already very nice to handle). Because the Orge could not stand very stable on the ground I followed the Irrlicht.

Due to some links I came back to the Ogre website and was curious what has changed in the last years and tried to compile the source version. It works nearly perfect and the forum gave me the last hints. After 1 hour I have had a running version and could enjoy the demos.

Now lets play a bit around with it. Perhaps its a friendly Ogre….

You take care of your vegetables and removing all kind plants you never have planted. Having a blog is the same. The only difference is that the weed is called spam…