ricardocabellov5.5

I seriously envy this kid. Love the sounds he gets.

If you had 2 weeks of holidays in September you would probably get a nice apartment in a Sunny island at 5 min of the beach. I would too. But not this time.

Instead I will be going to a Reykjavik hotel for 15 days. Why Reykjavik? Because 15 days in a hotel in UK it's about £1,000 and in Iceland it's £300 (breakfast included)... and the flight from London to Reykjavik costs £200, so that's why.

The idea is to stay inside the hotel room with my laptop all the time (Carmack's style). Hopefully with no distractions. Although I won't lie, I'll probably do a break at some point and visit the blue lagoon... Still, I think I've never been 15 days isolated. I'm much more productive when I'm alone (like everyone else I guess). So I'm very much looking forward to it.

You may think that this is wrong. But you need to understand this... The list of ideas I note down every day keep growing and the fact that the daily life doesn't give me enough time to materialise 99% of them really frustrates me.

Right now I don't know what I'll be working on, need to go through the list of ideas and do a selection... maybe xplsv.tv v2, maybe an android game, maybe a javascript demo... I really don't know.

Any suggestions/requests you may have?

If you were wondering what was Shock / Collapse up to these days, the truth is that hasn't changed much. However, seems like he has moved to the dark side (the good one): open source. The good old chap, not only keeps doing amazing illustrations, but he has been working on a set of brushes and modifications for Gimp to make things easier when doing paintings in Gimp.

http://ramonmirandavisualart.blogspot.com/

Some weeks ago I did yet another chrome experiment for Instrument. In fact, it was a experiment I half started when I realised that with the css property -webkit-transform (and MozTransform) I could scale elements. So I ported my basic 3D engine to Javascript and I got it working in a few hours. But in the end I didn't finish that one.

So for this "second phase" I finished it, but this time using Google Image API. The end result looks like this:



Realtime version: Google Sphere.

Once I had this one done I got totally addicted to Javascript and wondered what else could I try. I have to say that the fact of being able to change the code from anywhere without having to recompile anything is priceless. I keep modifying the Google Sphere every week whenever I find new Javascript tricks, and to improve the movements a bit. The first iteration of the experiment used jsTween but found some problems with it (I actually don't remember what were the problems) and luckily I found JSTweener which with some modifications performed flawlessly.

Then I though about my good old DOF experiment with Papervision3D, and though how could achieve the same effect with Javascript. The trick is background offset. Just check this image and you'll understand :)

While working on this one I really missed the Hi-ReS! Stats because at the beginning it was going a bit slow with only 100 balls. So I ported the Stats to Javascript and thanks to this I ended up having 300 balls runing quite decently. This is how it looks like:



Realtime version: Depth of Field, 100% Javascript (debug).

Of course, you'll need Google Chrome (win/linux/mac) to see all this in full glory.

So, apparently, Javascript is able to move a bunch of pixels these days. Next thing will be to render a actual polygon.

PS: Should I say that the sources are available? ;)

I could watch this site for hours.

Some weeks ago Vectorpark released a incredibly cute little game called Windosill. At first you had to download the game and play it on the desktop, paying $3 to play the second half of the game. Which I happily paid as I'm a big fan of this guy.

Now the game can be played online. It's one of those games with not too hard puzzles that make you feel good (aka clever) at the end of every stage. Also, technically, there are so many thing I don't know how were done. There is still magic on the flash world :)

What are you still reading this? You should be playing the game already.

EDIT: As vectorpark himself pointed out on the comments, for the online version it's still $3 to play the second part, it didn't pop up at me because I already paid for the desktop version. Anyway, it's well worth it!

Composed for the escena.org renoise 2 competition #2

Download the renoise file

Composed for the escena.org renoise 2 competition #1

Download the renoise file

Click to see bigger.

Somehow, the film Choke made me buy four Chuck Palahniuk books last Christmas. I'm usually really bad on this, I buy books but I don't read them, mostly because I read very slowly. But thanks to Chuck I'm gave it another try. After fully reading Choke and Fight Club (2 books in a year it's a record already) I was now reading Masters of Doom which Andreas recommended and lent (thx!).

If you played Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom back in the days, you'll want to read this as it explains how they were done. Pure nerd-gossip.