Author: tim

Netgear sucks too much

I’m starting to notice that Netgear stuff is trouble. The Netgear wireless cards are dangerous. I’ve seen my CPU at 100% several times. My desktop started locking up after working flawlessly for ages without the Netgear card. I’ve seen Netgear usb cards overheat and disconnect. And my Netgear router has started attacking my wireless computers because somebody in the neighborhood or at Comcast has Vista. I posted some of my issues on the [Microsoft Channel 9 MSDN forums]. I think my next plan of attack is to replace all my Netgear junk with Vista certified gear. I can’t have my equipment overheating from wireless network death pings.

Sector 13

“ECD Systems, involved in anti-piracy and copy protection software, has announced the [top 20 semi-finalists] for its second-annual [Independent Game Developers Showcase], with the winners due [to be announced] on ECD’s stand at next month’s [Austin Game Developers Conference].

The semi-finalists were determined by popular vote, with the list now handed over to the Indie Showcase’s judging panel for final determination of the three runners-up and the grand prize winner…”

Sector 13 is a semi-finalist in the general category out of 140 other applicants.

The COLLADA format

It appears there is a lot of hype out there for the new COLLADA format. There are COLLADA plugins for Max, Maya, Blender, and Ogre. So it looks like this could be my new favorite format. The COLLADA Wiki lists products that support COLLADA along with links to plugins.
[http://www.collada.org/mediawiki/index.php/Portal:Products_directory]

Simply install ColladaMax and ColladaMaya to install the export plugins for Max and Maya:
[http://www.feelingsoftware.com]

Looks like I’ll be filling [some bugs] against ColladaBlender:

[http://colladablender.illusoft.com/cms/]

There appears to be a COLLADA plugin for Ogre as well:
[http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Ogre_COLLADA_Plugin]

Investigation

For the past 4 weeks, I’ve been hearing helicopters flying overhead. I finally went out to find out why. It turns out the county is logging the cliff side using helicopters. I’ll have to get a closer look when the weather turns better. I’ll snap a close-up then.

Modo Import/Export Script (Ogre3d Mesh and Ogre3d Mesh XML)

As far as I’m concerned the top artists tools that I have access to are Modo, ZBrush, and Blender.

The only reason that I use Blender is that it has pretty good import and export scripts to Ogre. I’ve seen faces, normals, UVs, and bones export perfectly out of Blender. That said I can’t really model in Blender. The interface doesn’t like me. And I haven’t found very many video tutorials on Blender to describe all the things you can do with it.
http://blender.org

That said, ZBrush3 is coming out May 15th. I expect it’s going to be cool. However Pixologic probably won’t provide many details on their SDK, so I don’t expect an importer / exporter soon. They have awesome artists post video tutorials and they have a decent community. ZB2 only shows one viewport at a time, I don’t like that.
http://pixologic.com

And then there’s Modo. Probably not as well known as XSI. The Modo interface is plenty easy to pick up. Luxology has over 3GB of video tutorials on every aspect of the modeling tool and they give out the tutorials for free. Modo supports as many viewports as you want to add to your layouts.
http://luxology.com

I prefer viewing models in Modo, detailing in ZBrush, and exporting with Blender (only because I have to).

Anyway, I wanted to enhance my pipeline by importing/exporting to Ogre directly from Modo. I now have an import script that runs inside Modo that can handle verteces and faces. I plan to convert it to an exporter. You can follow my progress in this thread.
http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=16386

http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=216011#216011

Beef Up Your Wireless Router

Josh Kuo posted an interesting [blog entry] describing the open source project [OpenWrt] and then he details a list of Linux services that protect the network. OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for embedded devices. Essentially I plan to use this to load extra usb drivers in my wireless print server to load two 500GB iBooks. That way I can have a wireless-mirrored storage system to keep all my files safe. I should also be able to load drivers for a wireless usb quick cam and possibly drivers for a scanner. Maybe even drivers for a USB hub could be loaded. If that happens I can connect more than two devices to my Netgear wireless print server.