TAGENIGMA LLC – Page 123 – The Development Blog of Tim Graupmann

April Snow

April 2 we awoke to a surprise inch of overnight snow.

Gimp has a [Layer Grid] plugin to handle slicing up an image into layers or converting layers into a grid. Simply copy layergrid.scm into the C:/Program Files/GIMP-2.0/share/gimp/2.0/scripts folder. The script can be executed from Scripts->LayerGrid… when an image is open.

[Gimp Scripts]

Emotive at GDC

Emotiv offers the latest brain computer interface.

Emotive displayed a closed booth at the GDC. This new controller operates on thought alone. [You gotta check this out!!!] The middle of [this video] shows off a new technology.

Pictures from 3D video at 21 weeks

Sector13 [Flame Trails]

Here is another type of explosion timer, the flame trail. The effect uses a set of billboards with varying alpha values.

Blender Ogre Import Script

[Blender] has an Ogre [import script] which requires [Python 2.4] to be installed. After everything is properly configured [Ogre] mesh files can be imported into Blender, edited, and exported back to [Ogre] mesh files.

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.

Sector13 [Explosion Timers]

I mixed in a little mesh data into the new explosion timer techniques. I added large gibs and minor gibs. The only thing missing is some flame trails.

Intel Game Demo Contest 2007 (May 5th-August 15th)

“Contest begins March 5th, 2007. Registration Forms must be received by July 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007. Community judging to determine finalists will begin July 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007 and run until August 1st, 3:00pm PST 2007. Executables of finalists must be received by August 15th, 3:00pm PST 2007. Winners will be announced at Austin Game Developer Conference on September 5th, 2007, and published on the contest website the same day.”

Visit the [2007 Official Rules ].

Jupiter Rings

Using GREYCstoration_win32.exe -iter 100 -interp 2 -restore img.jpg, noise can be removed. This is the result after 100 iterations.

The original image:

Sector13 [Hardware Occlusion Query (HOQ)]

I had a chance to document the process that I used to perform [Hardware Occlusion Queries] on the Ogre Wiki.

Image Denoising

Slashdot posted an article [ Open Source Image De-Noising]. This is an important program to remove the graininess from photos. From the demo pictures it looks like this algorithm works very well.

It’s amazing how well this tool works.

Source Image:

Denoised Image:

Sector13 [Explosion Editor]

For the last week, I have been creating an explosion editor that allows the content editors to name a series of timers to control explosions.

After the explosion is created it can be assigned to a ship.

Handheld Star Picture

This is what happens if you try to take a picture of a star without a tripod. This is a 30 second exposure aimed at a star while I tried to keep still.

Sunny with Snow

This shot is a little hard to capture for an amature photographer. The sun came out this afternoon and then the blue sky started pelting us with snow.

Snow Surprise

The snow started pouring down at 9am.

BSP

This weekend I plan on creating a [BSP file]. BSP files are commonly used for map arenas in games like Quake and Unreal Tournament.

VS 2005 SP1

Microsoft just released service packs #1 for [express] and [TSE] for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

Microsoft also released a new [DirectX for February 2007].

City of Villains

Tim and Linae have been playing a little of the game "City of Villains".

This is Tim’s Villain, a Matermind named Dread Command:

Snow Day

“Alright!” I took of a video with the camera while sledding the big hill. Watch [the video].

It was a bit of a technical feat to make this video. The camera records a MOV file. So I imported into QuickTime and exported as a AVI. I used Windows Movie Maker to put all the AVI videos together into a single video and output as a WMV file. I used the Divx Converter to convert from the WMV format to a DIVX file. And then I used Flash 8 to convert from a DIVX to a Flash FLV file that plays in the Flash movie.

Games of 2007

Early previews indicate the top games of 2007 will be [Bio Shock], [Crysis] and [Portal].

Wind Storm

We had a nice storm Thursday which knocked out power to one million people. Unfortunately, this outage also took my Comcast High Speed Internet connection with it. And there’s been so much news that I missed in such a short while.

Top news: Microsoft posted the December 2006 DirectX update which includes a peak at [DirectX 10].
Microsoft is hosting an XBox Live Arcade [programming contest].
If you want to compete in the contest, it would be handy to have an XBox Live Arcade compiler. You may find the [Express XBLA compiler] that Microsoft just released useful.
If you don’t know how to program the console that is ok too. Microsoft just released about how to program the XNA.
Microsoft released their [Robotics Studio]. Robotics Studio gives the programmer a handy library to do embedded system programming.

Usually people harp on Microsoft, but this week we can see some good news.

Sector13 [Hardware Occlusion Queries (HOQ)]

This week I’m working on stars and the lens flare effect that is seen when looking at a bright light with a camera. When drawing the star billboard I plan on doing a hardware occlusion query to adjust the intensity of the lens flares. The exact opacity of the flare elements will be based on how many star pixels are shown.