ricardocabellov5.5

PV3D RC1 was released yesterday. Since yesterday I was planing to redo my 3dengine (kocka) with AS3, but after seeing how well PV3D is being developed I decided to stop my plans and use PV3D instead. It still needs a couple of things to be done, but by now I think I'll have more than enough.

Here it's another performance test to see how fast it goes and what can be done.



Grebble Ball with baked Ambient Occlusion
It's a shame those clipping issues, but hey, Playstation 1 had those issues too!

Hope you like it :)

UPDATE: For those people that want to try the model with their own engines (hello flash.fi ;)) and for the people that want more examples done with PV3D, here you have... the source files (PV3D classes not included).

It was supposed to be a 32kbytes compo, but only for the .swf. You was able to have an external .mp3. To be honest, I was expecting some prod with the music generated, but well, I guess the flashscene are now on the early days. Well, I know that Andre and other guy is working on this field these days, so maybe in a couple of months...

However, the quality of the releases is really good! Specially these ones:

* Beat
* Flint
* Alchemist

So, finally we're starting to see what Actionscript 3 is really able to do! After having said that I can say with any doubt... FUCK SDL! FUCK C++! AS3 IS MY PLACE! o/! ;)

Well, looks like yesterday Windows Vista was finally released. I thought it was already released, I guess the amount of beta's and RC versions that were out there confused me.

So, I woke up yesterday at 6pm or something (having a really weird sleep times these days) and after looking a bit the news I saw somewhere someone talking about it. it was shocking, after all the time that they were talking about the new version, I didn't saw too many people talking about it, I mean, again, probably it was because all those leaked versions and there was no real news at that point.

However, I was like, ok, let's see how Microsoft do the presentations nowadays. So, after checking the really bad usability of the flash on windows vista site, I went to see the video of Bill Gates presentation. And, oh boy... how can they be that bad? how can they be that ugly? how can they be that so boring? It starts with a rock band playing a reversion of a known tune. The singer is weird and is not always singing with the microphone on his mouth, so the sound goes on and off. Annoying!

Then, a very American voice introduces the Bill Gates (hilarious how american that voice sound ;D). So, Bill start speaking and it gets even more hilarious, didn't realised the voice he has, looks like he is still on the puberty years. What a voice, what a voice! Whatever he says can't be taken seriously. I can't believe how he managed to do all what he did just with what his presence inspire to the viewer.

Anyway, let's leave the little guy alone and concentrate on the show. Oh dear, who the hell is working on the style on Microsoft? Everything looks really wannabe. All those glows, looks like the found the glow option on Photoshop there! And now, just to see that I'm being serious with that I'm going to talk about a little detail that really looks bad but you don't usually see it.

It's called Kerning.

Check this screenshot out:





So, are you telling me that these guys spent a lot of years working on this new product, and probably spent a lot of money doing the slides for this presentation, and they didn't have time to fix the kerning? Whoever did that slide, he was able to put all the blending modes that photoshop offer, glow, shadows, and even inside gradient for the text. But, what about the kerning? In case you're wondering what Kerning is:






This is just another example of how Microsoft cares about little details. And there they are, talking about digital and showing how bad they use the digital resources. Kerning is something that you don't have time to fix, the fonts usually have the kerning fucked up (I don't know if that's because limitations of the format), so when you do any design, at the end you have to spend a bit of time fixing the kerning of the texts, specially if it's something for print. And you may say, that's just a little detail, it doesn't matter. Well, you think it doesn't matter, it matters for the designers, and it matters in your brain too, but you don't realise.

Well, that's it by now, I'll keep watching the presentation. It's the second time I try to watch it, looks like they're not able to stream the video on a decent speed. And as I say the content/presentation is extremely boring. Hope to don't have to write anything else about it.

I remember years ago, when I did threepixels' site. It had a oneliner, anybody could write there whatever they wanted. It was all so cool, and clean, no spam at all. By then I almost didn't know what spam was.

I wonder what would had been like if threepixels's site was done again, with the same code. How long the spammers would had started to fill that tinny box with url's and crap?

This site was starting to be like that. Looks like internet is becoming as dangerous as the real life. Having a inputbox on your site is like going out at night naked, walk a bit, walk a bit, and someone will use you, as the sapmmers try to use that inputbox.

Oh well, now, after cleaning the 500+ spam comments from the database, it was time to stop trying to figure out antiSpam systems by myself and use a package that other systems use: Akismet. With a bit of Sole's help and with this great Bret Kuhns class I had the system up and running in a couple of minutes.

Now I just have to wait and see how everything works. Sorry for everyone that submitted a comment to the site the last couple of months and that had to wait a lot to finally see it online! I hope this is over now.

These days I've seen 2 movies that are inspired in two very different hypothetic futures.



Idiocracy
From the director of 'Office Space', creator of  'Beavis and Butt-head' and others... The movie shows a very stupid future were, in instance, a clock on a big tower (something like the big ben) was swapped fr a digital one and it even was blinking on '12:00'. Hilarious! It also shows one of the movie on that time where you only see an ass for 90min. I've sometimes visions of a family watching altogether the TV where the only thing they show is a shit, just there without anything else... I have those visions when I watch TV with other people and I see them so concentrated with whatever they show.




Children of Men
Feel like more real future. If you enjoyed Half-life 2 you'll love some of the action scenes of this movie. I have to say that I was quite impressed about this movie, didn't know anything about it when I saw it after watching it and doing a proper imdb'ing I was again surprised when I read who was the director. The movie is cool, but the final sucks.



Anyway, which future do you chose? I think the one on Idiocracy sounds more probable. Just watch the television, everyday is more commercial and dumb. It's also funny that on this short review of both movies, I had more to say about Idiocracy than Children of Men. You would probably say that you never heard of Idiocracy, that's because Fox didn't want to do a Trailer, or even a Poster for the movie. It was released 2 years after it was done, something similar happened with Office Space too. Apparently they didn't want to release the movie, and in the end it was a real success when it went to DVD.

These things increased my interest for Mike Judge's work.

Right... What you're about to see is not a trick, it doesn't have any photoshop action on it (although I've used it for converting the screenshots from tiff to jpg). I know it's hard to believe it (at least it was to me) but what you're about to see is a real mix between MacOS X and Windows XP.

(Click on the images to enlarge).



Yep, that's right, MacOS bar on the top and Windows (without changing the skin yet) on the bottom. And check out the dock, Windows applications are being integrated there too. Should I mention that there is no Mac version of Winamp?

Wait wait! there is even more!



Again, this one is even more awesome. What you see on the screenshot is Photoshop 3 beta running under Windows which is also running under MacOS. And REALLY fast.

Wow, that's amazing, a shame that Windows 3D acceleration doesn't work (YET!).

There is even one more cool thing to mention, using this mix you can drag&drop files from one window to another (like from MacOS window a XP one).

If you wonder how is this possible.. just check the latest beta from Parallels (Coherence mode). And, of course, you need an intelMac.

So, yeah.. guess what I bought today ;)

PS: If you want to see how a video of how Parallels work, check this out.

PS2: I forgot to say something... Window shortcuts work!, WindowsKey+E is something I'm too used to! :P

PS3: There is even one more thing! With this beta version you can use directly the WindowsXP you installed with bootcamp (so no need to create a new image). That means that if you don't need 3D acceleration you can easilly use Parallels. And in case you need, let's say.. watch a Windows demo, or maybe produce one, you can go back to bootcamp/XP and you still have there all the data.

Here you have another experiment with Papervision3D... Enjoy :D
(this time is only 19kbytes... :P)

Should I say anything else? What I did seems quite ovbious so.. well, that's it.

That's right, the flashplayer that goes with Flash 9 Public Alpha just doesn't show the bytesTotal real value, the value is always 0. It compiles everything fine tho.. Don't blame Adobe for that, that's what 'beta' means.

So, well, now you know, I hope I'm the only one that lost that much time with this thing. So, compile with the public alpha and then try your stuff with the systems/browser flash player.

After this guy released his custom firmware the battle is over. I had a fight on my desktop between GP32 and PSP, PSP won so I sold GP32 and bought a GP2X to battle again. And after that firmware, the battle is over, GP2X died, it didn't last more than 2 months. Anybody wants a GP2X? It can uhm.. well, do things, it doesn't have wireless but, hey, it's fun! yeah.. the opensource platform.. doh..

I guess that's the main point because it didn't lasted to long, it lacks wireless, I believe that if it had wireless it would had a great success, open platform with wireless support... very interesting. But a closed platform hacked with wireless support won, and even doesn't use the wireless very well... yet.

Anyway, that custom firmware mainly lets you play to old PSX games on your PSP and also execute homebrew easily and also backuped .ISOs from PSP of course... I'm really looking forward to find Ghost in the Shell for PSX [video1] [video2] somewhere and play on my PSP. That will simply rock because the PSP version sucks :P

I may keep testing a bit the SDL stuff on the PSP if I find the inspiration some day, I'm well out of coding in C these days.

It's 8mbytes big so It will take a bit to load. And someone will ask... Why is it that big? Easy:

20 frames * 6 sides = 120 frames
120 frames = 120 textures
1 texture = 512*512 pixels

Well, it's amazing that Flash can handle all this that well! :D



View PV3D Panorama Animated

PS: To the people that has post a comment recently, don't worry I didn't lost them, I'm just re-doing the comment-moderation system Sorry about that.