id software is at it again

Siggraph paper about their new texturing algorithm. Way cool. Now that engines are almost up to rendering every last blade of grass and every pore of my skin the question becomes: who's gonna model/paint all of that? Reconstruct reality? I predict an interesting future for a blend of procedurally generated content and real 3D data acquisition. Play games on google earth or the procedurally generated Fuel? Mix! Augmented reality! Fun ;-)

Wanderung im Karwendel und auf der Zugspitze

14 Tage.

Battle at Kruger

Action, Thrill, Supsense - and all without special effects.

Dabbling with Flash/ActionScript

For a couple of years now I have the outlines of a webgame design lying around. Working title "Operation Survival - humanities last stand". It's supposed to be a persistent multiplayer online game involving tactical fighting to defend the earth from alien invasion. It's a bit more involved, but I won't go into that right now. Anyways, I have been playing with various implementation ideas and wanted to show you one that ultimately got discarded.

The idea was to have an animated battle in space with two motherships facing each other and launching fighters/rockets/lasers at each other. Controls are indirect, with the player specifying target types (mothership or enemy fighters) and the AI duelling it out. Fighters have flocking behaviour to fly in formation.

The game design calls for something more "down to earth" so to speak, so while this prototype might eventually have become fun it's not suited for this particular game vision.

If you wanna play with it go here [2025 update: SWF has long since died ;-/]. Launch some fighters by clicking on the round brown mothership targetting icons in the lower left (the energy bars were meant as an auto retreat threshold - once a fighter's energy drops below that value it tries to escape back to the mothership). The white fighter type will follow your mousecursor around to test the flocking algorithm.

Zugspitze Hike

We went hiking on the Zugspitze 2 weeks ago. Richy put some fotos online here: http://picasaweb.google.com/Greadle/20090501Alpen?authkey=Gv1sRgCOm17tzJ-ITSYA# We went through the Höllentalschlucht which was still officially closed due to large amounts of snow and ice and bridges still being taken out for the winter.

OGame

I have started playing OGame a couple of days ago. Apparently it's one of the biggest browser games with around 2.000.000 players. It's a bit dull so far but maybe we can make it interesting - join me in universe 57. I'm already thinking of ways to automate it, a habit which got me kicked out of the last browser game I've tried - my AI was getting too good too fast and the admins took note ;-) Anyways, either we'll have fun playing or we start an AI war...

Average US home has more television sets than people...

The average American home now has more television sets than people. That threshold was crossed within the past two years, according to Nielsen Media Research. There are 2.73 TV sets in the typical home and 2.55 people, the researchers said.

In the average home, a television set is turned on for more than a third of the day — eight hours, 14 minutes, Nielsen said. That's an hour more than it was a decade ago. Most of that extra TV viewing is coming outside of prime time, where TVs are on only four minutes more than they were 10 years ago.

The average person watches four hours, 35 minutes of television each day, Nielsen said.

One new Nielsen finding — that young people aged 12 to 17 watched 3% more television during the season that ended in May than they had the previous year — is a particular relief to TV network executives.

For a few years, Nielsen had been finding that TV viewing among teenagers was flat or even declining, a trend blamed on the Internet or the popularity of electronic games and other devices.

Numbers from 2006 - I can only assume it has gotten worse in the meantime. Ouch!

Maps of my bicycle tour in 2004

Halvar on DifferDeluxe

Our latest baby is about to be released:

http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2009/03/diffing-x86-vs-arm-code.html

I'm a proud parent ;-)

I hate Vista!

Argh. The law of leaky abstractions at work. In a misguided attempt at making user's life easier Microsoft introduced aliases for "c:/program files" and other critical windows folders in Vista. This way localized versions of windows (e.g. "c:/programme" ) should be able to deal with badly written programs that have the install destination hardcoded and don't account for regional naming differences. It's an ugly hack to fix an ugly problem. However, the frickin fix doesn't even work. And when it fails it fails badly. I currently have a program I can neither uninstall nor reinstall (it's installer silently fails and rolls back). Worse: it isn't even possible to delete it manually. I can delete it from c:/programme but if I then copy a fresh install to the previous location I get a "cannot overwrite c:/program files/bla" error. Ok, try to do it with administrator privilidges in Safe mode: no deal! The fucking thing is undeletable.

Now the best thing is that the program we are talking about is Mozy - my backup solution. It installs a service, a shell extension and a file system monitor. Things that are often characteristic for malware. I had tried Microsoft OneCare as an antivirus solution some weeks ago and that decided to interfere with mozy. Now although I have long since uninstalled OneCare mozy is still crippled - hence my rant above. Even better - OneCare cannot simply be installed like any normal piece of software, no, it forces you to uninstall any other AntiVir solution you may have already had and to top it of: you actually need to download a removal tool (!!!) in order to get rid of it again. This is fucking ridiculous. If it wasn't for Visual Studio, which is great and which I am using on a daily basis, this would have been the final straw for my emigration to linux.

So fuck you Microsoft for providing me the disservice of this hidden "convenience" folder aliasing Anti-Feature.

"Verschrottungsprämie"

Armes Deutschland. Pro Kind 100 Euro, pro Auto 2500 Euro. Wenn das eine Investition in die Zukunft sein soll will ich in dieser Zukunft nicht leben. Sagt doch einiges aus über die gesellschaftliche Wertschätzung - des Deutschen liebstes Kind - sein Auto.

Herdentrieb hat schon recht:

Was soll zudem dieser Fokus auf die Autoindustrie? Warum überlässt man nicht den Verbrauchern, wie sie ihr Geld ausgeben? Der Markt für Autos ist im Grunde gesättigt – wir brauchen sicher andere Autos als bisher, aber ganz sicher nicht mehr so viele wie in den vergangenen Jahren. Nehmen wir einmal an, dass jeder, der einen Führerschein hat und fahren kann, auch ein Auto besitzt. Das kommt bei 41,2 Mio. zugelassenen PKWs etwa hin. Bei einem Durchschnittsalter des Bestands von acht Jahren ergibt sich eine durchschnittliche Lebensdauer der Autos von rund 16 Jahren, was wiederum bedeutet, dass der jährliche Ersatzbedarf ein sechzehntel von 41,2 Mio. beträgt: Das sind im Gleichgewicht 2,6 Mio. neue Autos pro Jahr. Da deren Haltbarkeit ständig zunimmt, dürfte die Zahl in Wirklichkeit sogar noch niedriger sein. Warum sollte es eine Katastrophe sein, wenn sich die Neuzulassungen auf diesem Niveau einpendeln. Im Jahr 2007 waren es noch 3,15 Mio.

Abgesehen davon, dass jede andere Branche berechtigterweise eine ähnliche Förderung ihrer Produktion verlangen könnte, macht es aus ökologischen Gründen keinen Sinn, die Leute zum Autofahren zu animieren. Sollte das Konjunkturpaket nicht auch eine Umweltkomponente haben? Ich plädiere erneut dafür, die Mehrwertsteuer für einen Zeitraum von drei Jahren um drei Punkte zu senken, damit die Kaufkraft der Haushalte wirksam gestärkt wird, und im Gegenzug die Steuern auf den Energieverbrauch dauerhaft zu erhöhen, mit einem Nettoeffekt von 15 Mrd. Euro für die ersten drei Jahre: Die Umwelt würde sich freuen und die Abhängigkeit von Energieimporten würde sinken, abgesehen von dem kräftigen allgemeinen Nachfrageschub, den die steuerliche Nettoentlastung auslösen dürfte.