I’ve licensed the Torque engine from GarageGames. It is nicely structured (in C++), includes a complete scripting engine and is multi-platform. The Direct3D renderer is simply and OpenGL wrapper, though (which is what the TSE update seems to be about, but that is in the very early stages) and the terrain only seems to support a single tile.
In any case well worth the $100… Now the only thing left is to actually make a game with it! 😉
In the past 58 days I’ve gotten 9738 viruses via email. The list consists of 37 unique types, mostly NetSky, Bagle and LovGate variants. If one assumes 50 kilobytes of traffic per mail, then that’s equal to approximately 475 megabytes for two email addresses. And then there’s all the rejected mails with invalid recipients and / or senders (not to speak of smtp attempts). 🙁
TR/Proxy.Webber.H
W32/Bagle.P.1
W32/Parite
W32/Xorala
Worm/Bagle.AA, AA.HTA, H, Htm.11, J, K, O, Z, Z.VBS
Worm/LovGate.AE, AH.2, AH.3, W
Worm/Mydoom.F, H
Worm/NetSky.#1, AB, B.1, C, C.4, D.Dam, K, O.2, P, P.Expl, Q, Q.Pk, T, X, Z
Worm/Sober.G
Worm/Zafi.B
I had an extended romp through the newly opened (in England, France and Germany that is — not really an “European” launch) iTunes music store. It is now obvious to me why there is quite a bit of buzz about it. The prices (and more importantly the terms of use) are fair, the selection is decent (by far not perfect — especially the omission of independent labels hurts. Also some artists only seem to feature a subsets of their albums); but what is IMO most important is the ease of use and the excellent integration with iTunes: It is actually fun to buy music. To proove the point, I ended up buying Natalie Merchant’s “Ophelia” album (which I found via the “Thick as Thieves” track in my library)…
It seems that Marcel Holtmann’s work on the Bluetooth-side is making nice progress. The bluez-userspace package (which was updated last week in Debian-unstable) now natively supports BT-HID devices (i.e. mice and keyboards). So far, I had used a self-compiled cvs-checkout of bluez-libs2 and -utils2 that provided the necessary daemon that got the mouse working. To get the new package working, I compiled a patched Debian 2.6.6-mh3 kernel (which is really easy to do thanks to the packaging system / support scripts), rebooted, “inaccessible root device”, remembered to use --initrd for make-kpkg and all was well.
I just hope that Marcel’s patches make it into the next official kernel (2.6.7)… 😀
From a post on GD-Algorithms I found out about Gish, a sort of physics based 2D-jump’n’run. I’m not quite sure whether it’s worth the $20 they’re asking, but the demo is interesting to say the least… Good fun! 😀
I’ve uploaded vStrip and the Wavelet Kompressor (upper right corner). The old links (at least from the imported Blogger entries) are probably invalid as they were relative to a different site-structure.
Update: Actually went back and fixed the links from the blog. They should work now…
After the easter holidays, I took 4 days off but then used most of those to refurbish the ceiling in a flat in Hannover. That didn’t stop me from picking up a new toy: a Sony Clie UX-50 Palm PDA. Having owned a Palm before (Sony’s first, the Clie PEG-S300 IIRC), the transition was easier for me than for Alex and Patrick who have only used Pocket PCs before. It is a very nice machine, good (bright) screen, surprisingly usable keyboard, bluetooth and wireless LAN (which eats up the battery rather quickly).