ricardocabellov5.5

Google Web Accelerator is back, and looks like is working quite alright this time, you can download it from here.

(Sorry, in spanish :U) Si algo nunca me ha gustado de la escena de gp32 en Espanya es el hecho de que fuese creada "gracias" a hardcore gamer. Por un lado si.. hay que estar agradecido, pero veamos, el plan, tal y como yo lo veo es el siguiente:

Tienes una tienda de videojuegos, creas una comunidad, compras el dominio, usas phpbb para los foros, noticias.. y tal.. Lleva su tiempo, lo se, no se crean asi como asi, pero es que si entras en la web de gp32spain veras que esta bastante lleno de publicidad de la tienda en si. Como he dicho, si, hay que estar agradecidos por crear la web/comunidad, de hecho yo compre la consola en la tienda que ponen anyo tras anyo (y sigo sin saber a que santo), en la supuesta only-demoscene bcnparty, pero no por ello hay que comer toda esa publicidad. La gota que colmo el vaso fue la noticia de "Campaña de apoyo a la scene: Chapas Hardcore Gamer". La idea era que comprabas una chapa con el logo de la tienda y parte de el dinero de la chapa se iba para los coders que como hobby hacen cosas para la consola. Esa era la idea, pero, llamadme mal pensado, pero ahi lo unico que veia era una manera como cualquier otra de desperdigar el logo de la tienda por ahi y ganar publicidad directa. Seguramente esta "tecnica" tiene hasta nombre, pero es que realmente parece que esten tratando como tontos a los usuarios. Lo curioso de ello fue que esta misma vision que tenia yo, se la expuse como comentario en la misma noticia, a partir de ahi estaban los tipicos usuarios que no eran capaz de abrir la mente y a la minima usaban mayusculas e insultos (realmente faciles de ignorar), luego los afectados que intentaban justificar como podian, y por suerte habian unos cuantos (algunos publicamente y otros por privado) que me apoyaban y que opinaban lo mismo.

Para que os hagais una idea, para la demoscene espanyola es como si Jan Carlo Mityorn aka Real Ice (es el primero que me ha venido a la cabeza...), que fue uno de los que llevo el tema de escena.org en sus inicios, hubiese usado escena.org para hacer publicidad de sus empresas/proyectos, y los usuarios no poder decir ni mu porque si la web esta ahi es gracias a el. Me parece una estrategia bastante patetica :S Y no es precisamente algo que piense hacer en ninguna de las web que llevo entre manos. Aunque de alguna manera, solo por el hecho de las ventas indirectas (y tambien por estar interesado en la gp32) el admin sigue manteniendo la web, inventandose nuevas estrategias y movimientos, mas que nada para que la escena no muera. Probablemente gracias a esto, la escena de gp32 en espanya debe ser de las mas activas, en cuanto a desarollo, en los foros tambien se habla mucho aunque solo un 10% suele ser interesante, el resto son emoticons y banners de fanclubs.

Por su lado no ponen mas que excusas de que la web se ha de pagar y tal y cual, pero bien que en gp32x no tienen mas que los banners de google, y dudo que les den mucho dinero (alguna prueba he hecho con ellos :D). Tambien te dicen.. si no te gusta, haz tu otra web.. ermm.. si, claro..

Pero vamos, en general este tipo de comunidades/webs suelen ser del mismo rollo, las crean cuanto antes para luego tener el poder de la fama y poner publicidad y sacarse una perras (vease pspupdates por ejemplo). Pero por lo menos en pspupdates no mezclan noticias de publicidad como si fuesen noticias, simplemente dejan la escena en el centro y a los lados los baners.

Creo que las escenas hay que dejarlas puras, y saber separar los negocios de este tipo de cosas. Es una pena.

Diskmags are dead. Well not all of them, thanks to the usual sceners pain is still alive.

I'm afraid I usually don't read diskmags, I download them, read 2% of it and delete them, mainly because I'm very slow reading and my mind just start thinking other things before ending the line. However, this time was different. I was surprised that on the news/rumours there was a note/link to my post explaining the truth about the minimalanimal movement, then I found some interesting interviews to uncle-x, xenusion, zoom.. then I was starting to feel tired and wanted to just stop my pain of reading and was when I've seen the interview to outraks guys, ocean machine making of.. ARGH! please! no more cool stuff!!

So, time to share the pain ;)

UPDATE: Btw, was really cool to see that just with only one edition, Playboy Mansion Party is already on the bestparty charts. Well done mates!

The adventure starts again! :S Is this time going to be the last one? More information in the next posts! ;)

The legend is back! The guys of lionhead (best UK game developers imho) released the 2nd part of that game that addicted me so much years ago!

Say WOW!

I just modified the website, the blog/news is now the homepage as I update it more than not the porfolio.

Also, If there is anything new on the porfolio I should let you know from here. So that's why.. If you find a broken link, please, let me know. :D

Looks like latelly I'm doing quite a lot of flash stuff. I'm doing almost every weekend improvements to phodoob (used in mrdoob and spring) for the admin section and also the optimizing the viewer, but It still have a lot of bugs :(.. I'm trying to do it for anyone as quite a lot of people did ask me to release the files so they can use phodoob for their galleries.

This weekend was a bit different, I have been studying 3D transformations/matrices and all that boring stuff ;) And trying to understand the theory by my own, and first using a base code done by gargaj I was adding the code to draw triangles and also I did an ASEparser with PHP (woow! ;)), but later I found another base code that was working much faster than the original one so I decided to implement it. And then added some more features. The result by now is that:

Knot + Backface culling + Flat Illumination + Hypnoglow (with zsorting fucked up) \o/

As you can see, flash just die after drawing 400+ polygons :( The next I will try to do is instead of drawing vectors, use the latest Flash8 BitmapData feature, so I can draw pixels in an object and create the 3D drawing pixel by pixel, but I think that will be even slower.

Some may know that some weeks ago I was testing again osx86 on my laptop. I didn't have time to report the status of the "project" yet...

As I said previously, someone kind of "hacked" tiger osx86 so is quite easy to install it in any pc. Since the last try I did, the people did like a SSE3 emulator so now you can run Rosseta, that means that doesn't matter if the program was compiled for OSX or for Tiger, everything runs now (Itunes, Photoshop, even Reason!! (quite slow tho :P))... At this point I started to wonder about using Tiger OSX86 instead of Windows.. but I'm afraid I will have to wait a little bit.

The next step is doing drivers for ATI/Nvidia cards, so you can have the 2D/3D Acceleration, and also I can have my lovelly 1920x1200 resolution screen properly, as know is just stretched :(

If you want to know a little bit more about the progress for those drivers, check out these links:

NVIDIA Driver effort ATI Driver effort Discussion about the Drivers ideas

Ok, I was wrong. The firmware downgrader (from 2.0 to 1.5) for PSP was released a week after to the one I said ;). There was a lot of gossip on it, there someone called yoshihiro that was saying he did it, and others saying he didn't and blah blah.. "WHATEVER!! i just want the downgrader!" I thought..

So, I waited until the final release of it and tested it, and wow! it worked just fine. Hours later I was downloading a pack with a lot of retro machines emulators and minutes later playing very happilly Final Match in the pc engine emulator.

At this point I just didn't find any difference between PSP and GP32, I was using PSP for the same thing I was always using the GP32, but in that case with a much better screen (better contrast). So, the next step is get a bigger memorystick (1g sandisk) and then I will be able to play to a backup version of wipeout o/!

Then, going back to the gp32, probably because that PSP scene menace, and also because GP2X is going to be released soon, makes that latelly the scene is starting to really develop good stuff for the machine, i mean 3Dengines, 3Dgames, blah blah.. As an example, check out that, and that. So the scene is looking really nice again.

But, just writting that post I found that memon /moppi just released psp flower demo (port of Assembly Invitation 2004). And also, yesterday I received at home a UMD disc with Spiderman2, as I registered as soon as I bought the psp in yourpsp site.

Looking good man! looking good!! ;)

Somehow, I just found today these series of demo-DVDs that abyss are developing.

Looks like the videos on it have really good quality (thanks to kkapture). I'll try to check them out this week. The selection in some of the volumes are too commercial for my tastes. But hey! It's always good to have demos on DVD in hi-res!

Download them from here:
Demo or die! Vol 1.
Demo or die! Vol 2.
Demo or die! Vol 3.