My name is Shrinker. I grew up with violent video games and became successful at school/university and at work.
There is a trend in Germany which focuses more and more on trying to make sure that youngsters are not harmed in the development of their personality through the media and computers in special, so there are worsening efforts to censor the internet and the media, despite almost every show on TV having nothing but murder in it. All the original versions of those famous games you have played in your lifetime are already forbidden in Germany, with replacements available on our market which not only lack all violence, but are often also unplayable or incompatible to the rest of the world. That trend is wrong in so many aspects, because the youngsters who are subject to these wrongful efforts get their games illegally and the adults end up as criminals because of content they can very well bear to see and play through. And that trend is entirely illogical because the games that are censored or forbidden must not be obtained by youngsters anyway, because they are not approved for youngsters. The right way would clearly be to tell parents to take care of their children, but for some reason, such obvious (and cheap) solutions are not pursued anymore. Shortly before 2011 started, a law to classify websites and all online content was stopped by only a small minority of our politicians. There were strict rules, restrictions, and big fines for all classifications and mis-classifications, and it would have applied to all online content in Germany. The only catch was that the classification required by the law could not be done by anyone, because the technical means outlined in the law were unspecified and did therefore not exist yet (and the recommended specifics were complete bullshit, very far from the reality again). But even though that law was rejected, there are already laws in effect which make our part of the internet suck. There are official media websites that must not offer their content between 8 AM and 10 PM German local time. Yes, you've heard it right: We have closing times for our internet. According to the verdict of the media and the politicians who work very far away from our reality, my actions are becoming more and more criminal each day. Some of the games and movies I have enjoyed are, by our laws, put in the same drawner as child pornography or Nazi propaganda. The difference, as perceived in the media and the law, between a standard German gamer and a pedophile or serial murder-rapist is becoming smaller each day.

Until I am convicted and beaten to death by a GeStaPo-like system, I will try to provide awesome tools for you through my website, for making content I am not allowed to see for games that I am not allowed to play.

It is ****ing awesome.

I think this has the potential to become the best of the series, both in terms of technology and overall gameplay feel. It is not just a step, but a 100 mile marathon sprint in the right direction. From the standpoint of messing around with beta versions, this one definitely sticks out compared to the others. Croteam and Sam, they both have matured. This is how I envisioned SS2 before that one turned out to be cartoony with an unpolished feel to it. What amazed me the most so far, I guess, is how Croteam managed to create the open spaces we are used to from their previous SS games in this new one. - But not anymore do the levels look very clean and pre-designed to do nothing but provide space for the enemies, but level design and considerations for building up fights go hand in hand here like never before.

Whoosh
Screw you, Duke, with your girly feet
Screw you, Gordon, with your scraper for the back
Yep - Toughneck in action!
Awwww

Forum thread about this

A really fucking long time ago, I found some bugs in ATI's drivers and reported them, but to date they still remain unfixed. Nothing is rendered when nothing's bound to attribute 0, there is a really bad issue with built-ins when you use inputs with uppercase letters, gl_VertexID doesn't yield the actual starting id, de-serialization doesn't work properly when using the std140 layout, rendering the shader binary cache useless AND SO ON. During my Finland vacation, my ATI-graphics laptop almost drove me nuts, and now, back home, I could compare with NVIDIA and figured it out: ATI's atan (arc tangens) functions yield garbage.
Here is an illustration:
NVIDIA, all symmetrical and proper.
ATI/AMD, OH LOOK AT THAT IT'S GARBAGE.
Workaround? Not pretty!
float a; if (d.y >= 0 && (d.y <= d.x || d.y <= -d.x) || d.y <= 0 && (-d.y <= d.x || -d.y <= -d.x)) a = atan(d.x, -d.y)-Pi/2; else a = atan(d.y, d.x);

So they now display advertisements in their installers and in their control panel? What the fuck? My idea of world peace involves purging all traces of ATI and their shitty technology. It is impossible for me to illustrate how much I despise them.

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?????
FUCK!

This little patch fixes the annoying delay before the actual mining of a block is started in Survival Multiplayer (SMP)
*NEW* YouTube video of the fix in action

After two minor versions for fixing bugs in 1.1.X, a new major version (1.2.0) of Imperator is now available.
This version comes with the ability to define strings with custom delimiters/quotation marks in the grammar, as seen in SQL (q'xyz').

Version 1.1.0 of Imperator, the parser generator, is now available.
This version features proper C++0x code generation and, and this is new, Java code generation. Also, there is now an option for making the parsed result data entirely mutable, for those who wish to alter and re-save it.

This little patch fixes the annoying delay before the actual mining of a block is started in Survival Multiplayer (SMP)
YouTube video of the fix in action

There is a new version of Imperator available (1.0.0).
Imperator is a parser generator that is just good, at the input side (the grammar language is rather intuitive and clearly structured), and at the output side (the generated parser, which is trivial to integrate, yields a properly typed and clean parse tree with all location information available).
Currently, it works rather well for generating parsers written in C#, and C++0x support is already in there too. And soon there will be Java support, and a few other cool things.

• Introduced the Iteration X project tree
• There is now a news archive at the bottom of this node.
• Older versions of Accuracy 2 have been purged from existence.
• The initial version of Imperator is now accessible (fixed link).

An April fool's joke? Which impacts the game in a negative manner? Which is forced to every server and every client by the automatic update that can not be turned off? Which is removed in a subsequent update, putting a stop to all mod work that was done since then? WAY TO GO NOTCH!!! SCREW ALL YOUR CUSTOMERS :D MAYBE THE WHOLE GAME IS A JOKE, BECAUSE THAT WOULD FINALLY EXPLAIN WHY ITS PROGRAMMING IS SO SHITTY :D

This little patch fixes the annoying delay before the actual mining of a block is started in Survival Multiplayer (SMP)
YouTube video of the fix in action

I am now a Dipl.-Inf., one semester early, with an A for my thesis + defense.
At our university and chair, that is equivalent to a Master of Science in computer science.
Finally.

(8:56:42 PM) wubbaduckie321: hii
(8:56:54 PM) Shrinker142: yes
(8:57:11 PM) wubbaduckie321: sorry if i bothered you was just sittin here how are ya??
(8:57:23 PM) Shrinker142: yes
(8:57:36 PM) wubbaduckie321: {oh cool|ah cool|ahh|ah nice|coool|i c|welll} wanna {try|do|see|look at} something {real|really|pretty {fun|cool|easy|quick}??

In a Skype chat window, switch your keyboard layout to cyrillic and write a letter in cyrillic. That is too much for Skype, causing it to freeze.

Whatever 3D app I release next, I will officially only support Nvidia systems. I've reported an OpenGL bug to ATI/AMD half a year ago, and they confirmed that they put a constraint there which was not backed by the OpenGL specification. After checking it out tonight, I can confirm that the bug is still there. I've fiddled around with uniform buffers tonight, and it all simply worked on my Nvidia system... now I've put it on the ATI/AMD system - aaaand? Poof! It would not be so bad if it only happened to me once, as a generic programmer, but it happens ALL THE TIME, I can DEPEND on ATI/AMD NOT IMPLEMENTING OPENGL ACCORDING TO THE SPECIFICATION. So, yeah, fuck you ATI/AMD. Study the meaning of the term "specification" and stop claiming that you support the respective technologies, because you don't. My only wish is that you vanish. Even if I had a hundred Nvidia cards breaking down on me, I would still prefer them, because their drivers always work according to specification.

After they've blocked access to all foreign editions of CoD 6 in Germany some time ago, Activision decided to prevent activation of all foreign editions of CoD 7 in Germany right from the start. There is no legal way for a German to obtain and play the uncut, original version of CoD 7 inside of Germany. The only version that will be activatable in Germany is cut and features no other languages than German in voices and text. For that, Activision shall be the first publisher whose games I will try to avoid completely from now on. If you are in Germany and thought of buying that game, mark my words: Don't.

Someone let me know on YouTube that there was a problem with my conversion tool "MB2CDATVMF" with their VMF file, and now it's fixed. A new, fixed converter and a solutions and workarounds for problems and bugs can be seen on the Microbrush 2 download page.

Oh I forgot... I reported the GLSL bugs I experienced with my Ati system to AMD via the developer forums, and they are being investigated. That is kinda nice. What do we learn from this? Don't just rant about bugs, report them also! Don't fuck anyone :P

It seems to me now that Ati just doesn't draw any vertices if I make a draw call but do not give the shader any inputs. On my Nvidia system it works just fine: I infer all vertex positions from gl_VertexID, and not from any vertex attributes. And there is a known bug where when you have a draw call with a starting vertex other than zero, gl_VertexID still starts at zero on an Ati system, what the fuck? So, the only compatible solution I can fall back to is using a vertex attribute that behaves just like gl_VertexID on an Nvidia system. The only compatible solution is by using redundant data that should be absolutely unnecessary if the driver was implemented right. And I must not name the attribute so that when alphanumerically sorted, it would succeed gl_*, because then nothing is displayed either.
Fuck you, Ati.

So I had the problem that my stuff ran on my laptop, but not on the computer of a friend.
After all these years, there is finally a generic mobility driver for Ati systems available, named Catalyst Mobility!
My previous problem probably contained the use of some undefined behavior... might be that what caused it is not really a driver bug. After all, with this newest driver, my laptop is behaving just like that Ati system of my friend: It displays nothing with my shader at all. Now that I can recreate the issue easily, I can also look into fixing it!

After working with my both systems for so long, and now using OpenGL 3 to get stuff done... I can safely say that... ATI FUCKING SUCKS!!! Their drivers are horribly bugged - I've been tracking one of those shitty issues down all day where the name of a vertex attribute already makes a difference. That is so horribly wrong: I name it something with a capital letter or an a..f at the beginning and the data flow works all fine. I name it something that, if sorted alphanumerically, would end up after gl_* AND use the built-in variable gl_VertexID in my vertex shader, then there is no data flow. It all worked perfectly fine on my Nvidia system, of course. Some other technique I used works at regular framerates on the Nvidia system, but at unbearable framerates on an Ati system, NOT MY ATI SYSTEM THOUGH, BUT THAT OF A FRIEND! AND it doesn't even display anything for him! SAME FUCKING TECHNOLOGY, DIFFERENT RESULTS! GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH RAEEEEEEEG! I have never had anything where I'd have preferred one over the other, but since this day it is crystal clear for me that Nvidia clearly is the better brand. Their academic support and their bug-free drivers really do it for me. I've heard so many horror stories about bugs in Ati drivers, and could only hardly believe them, but now I know that they must be true. Ati, you fucking suck! Go to hell and rot! My next big project might not even officially support Ati systems, as they are randomly having issues that I can't reproduce! LOL!

Here it is, my all-3D 3D terrain editor!
You not only get to see the actual program, but also the study thesis that this resulted from. Have fun with that :D

Just finished OP-Center and OP-Center: Mirror Image by Tom Clancy.

I read in the news today that the uncut version of CoD 6: MW2 can NOT be activated on Steam in Germany anymore. Once again our country with its awfully terrible laws against violence in the media is causing paternalism where it's not necessary. Even if you are an adult, even if you've been to Afghanistan as a soldier -- you are NOT allowed to play the uncut versions of CoD2 or Saints Row 2. There is no legal way for you to do that. Also, whole game series like Quake are completely hidden from the Steam store if you have a German IP address.
I vouch for shutting down the internet.
FAIL.

BTW, without a certain import trick, you can't even play any Half-Life game uncut in Germany. No blood, no dead bodies, HL1 doesn't even have human enemy soldiers. I am annoyed beyond measure. Once when I installed a new game on Steam, it censored all my Half-Life games all of a sudden too. I can clearly see where this is going: Steam is becoming unusable as a gaming platform. Whatever program I release next, it will have an intro so bloody that the elder politicians and idiots who caused this kind of law start puking immediately!

Bite back!

A lot of stuff has happened in my life lately. Most notably, I moved out of the home I have been living in for most of my life, to become independent of all the family drama still going on, and I have started working on my diploma thesis, which will eat almost all of my time for the rest of the year and early 2011. It seems I can stand on my own feet now...

I have learned a lot in the making of Microbrush 2, and already started developing a new technological foundation for its successor, Microbrush 3. I also recognized a number of things I plainly did wrong in MB2, but already have some good solutions laid out to tackle the problems. Despite the diploma thesis, I sometimes still find a few hours to work on it...

I will try to post progress reports regularly in the Microbrush 3 Steam Community Group, so this time you can follow the development of it more closely.

The study thesis has been graded, got an A. Hooray! :D
(Just like in the exam before that :D)

Last friday, I delivered my study thesis for marking. I intend to publish it here too when i got my mark: The whole document (in German, sorry, guys), and along with it the program, an all-3D 3D terrain editor (you know, from heightmaps to terrain where you can carve holes and tunnels everywhere!) I am going to work almost every day at the moment, to accumulate a lot of hours for my benefit later (for when I write my diploma thesis), and at the moment work is rather interesting too. And... I am searching for an apartment, to move out of this ugly little town, away from family trouble, away from everything. If all goes well, the move will already commence in July.

There is a new Microbrush 2 version available.
It seems that the conversion tools did output the wrong file format version, that is now fixed.
Remember: If anything is wrong for you, there are plenty of ways to report that to me... :)

There is a new Microbrush 2 version available.
These are the changes:

• improved the visibility of the mode indicator by adding a background to it
• added mode indicator texts for almost all instantaneous functions
• added display of grid tile size when changing the grid resolution
• added Overlay.ModeIndicator.BackgroundAlpha, Overlay.ModeIndicator.BackgroundColor and Overlay.ModeIndicator.InfoDuration properties
• added Grid.Cells.CellDisplaySize for specifiying the displayed measurements, set to 16 for Valve Hammer units
• removed unused property range settings from the file format
• fixed small errors in the file format specification

Among other things, the grid size is now displayed properly to you, and the displayed measurements are Hammer-like by default.

Just finished Sean McMullen - Eyes Of The Calculor.

• Passed last engineering exam (fuck, that one was difficult)
• Read: Sean McMullen - The Greatwinter Trilogy Part 2 - The Miocene Arrow
• Been on a short vacation
• Still working on my study thesis

... and to continue the funny tradition of announcing something on the first of April:
I am working on curved patch meshes with 9 control points, like seen in id's Tech 3 and Tech 4 engines (Quake 3 and Doom 3 branches) for Microbrush.
I have created a little programming language named "BTPL" (Base Tuple Programming Language, yeah, very creative) which has strengths in very consistent, simple but powerful syntax and native handling of tuples and strings and dynamic arrays and 3d vectors and so on. The language is thoroughly specified and I'm using it to develop and archive algorithms already, which is a goal I failed to achieve with Accuracy 2. This one is even suited for use as a programming language for high-level gaming APIs, since there is a technical means to pause program execution and let a custom handler modify the program stack at any point in whatever way desired.

Happy first of April!

In Windows Vista, in the Windows Explorer, you can go ONE DIRECTORY UP by pressing ALT+UP :D That's exactly the Backspace behavior from Windows XP's Explorer. So much time wasted clicking the parent directory in the address bar, finally over! :D

New font, alternative camera controls that don't require the fly mode!
You can find it here.
YouTube - Microbrush 2 (2.1.4) New Stuff

My mother cut contact with me because I stayed in the house when my father and his girlfriend moved in. All efforts to re-establish contact with my mother have failed, she doesn't care at all anymore. Maybe all her promises from the past were just tactics. My study thesis is progressing bad. I am a good programmer, but a bad writer. My father is pushing me to move out around the time I will be in the middle of my diploma thesis, and the date is strangely moving further backward in time every time he talks about it. That will be a problem I don't know yet how to cope with. There are two important exams to pass soon. I can only start earning enough money once I have graduated. I can not afford free time anymore. The perceived work pressure is constantly increasing. Seems I am not getting enough sleep anymore.

I just recently finished reading Souls In The Great Machine by Sean McMullen.
Next to read in The Greatwinter Series: The Miocene Arrow

Here we go again. There is so little time since the last release because in that release I added a bug, a bug which I now fixed.
On top of that, the conversion stuff is now much simpler.
Again, you can find it here!

This version brings a bugfix for an inaccuracy problem and a few changes that have to do with my study thesis :)
You can find it here!

Version 2.1.1 of Microbrush brings a lot of changes and additions, among them: A hierarchy system, almost complete VMF conversion and manipulation (Yes! Entities, displacements, all that stuff!), more visual aids, properties associated with primitives, and a lot more.

With this release also comes a new source code release of the API to manipulate Microbrush 2 scenes and VMF worlds. Try it and manipulate or generate scenes or VMFs! The API is written in C# and it's really easy to use! Don't you want to be the first one to make an awesome maze generator for Half-Life 2? :D

For a complete changelog, more images, and downloads, head to the project page.

Video Tutorials by Scott 'Sythen' Baker!
Microbrush 2 (2.1.0) Modelling 1 (1/2) - Building
Microbrush 2 (2.1.0) Modelling 1 (2/2) - Road
Enjoy!

It's here!
Join it to get updates directly and stuff :)

Replying to private messages which are many years old, especially those full of flames :-D

I want to represent and preserve point and brush entities from VMF files in MB2 scenes. Apparently, surface-based properties don't cut it, so I'm working on properties that are associated with brushes AND also a brush hierarchy. When things work according to plan, I can map point entities to simple cubes placed in 3D space (in accordance with their origins) and just dump all their properties as key-value pairs in a string property. Brush-based entities will consist of a dedicated brush with the original entity attributes, and a few normal brushes attached to it in the hierarchy, which should be enough to allow for brush entities made of multiple brushes. Displacements, map settings, etc.? For now, I'll probably just store them all in plaintext format in brush faces and special entities. If this works out, MB2 could retain ALL information from a VMF during conversion. But here I have to keep some things in mind, like not losing the faces associated with a cubemap entity... hrm.

When I drove to the university this morning, there was a big Bundeswehr vehicle/tank thing driving in front of me. From the back it looked like some kind of generator, made of four modules which had the same camouflage... When the vehicle took a curve to the right, leaving my lane, in the direction of the military airport Rostock Laage, I got to see the side of it, and it looked very familiar from CnC: Generals... After a confirmation of reference pictures online, I can say: OMG, it was a mobile anti-air Patriot missile launch system :-D

Here's a new version of Microbrush 2.
Various users reported that their config file was busted after drag and dropping a scene file onto the exe file, which is, btw, not the intended way to do it. MB2 tried loading its resources, like the font, from the directory it was started in, but erroneously loaded the config from where its exe was placed, not the target directory. When you drag a file onto any executable in Windows, then that executable is executed in your user's documents directory. Normally, you need some kind of batch file which passes the first argument as ("%~dp1") after changing the current directory to its own directory via (cd /d %~dp0).
You can exploit this resource-finding behavior of MB2 to use the same executable with different configs: Just create multiple links and set different starting directories for them.

Anyway, in reaction to popular demand, this new version also contains a cylinder tool now. And for the sake of completeness, I added an arbitrary scaling tool too. To the people with feature requests I reacted positively to: No, I have not forgotten them, they are just resting on my todo list for now :P

Thanks for hosting me, Scott!

Thank you for the many years of hosting my website and those of a few friends, it was greatly appreciated.
R.I.P.

At the beginning of this week, I finally got my study thesis topic. It's all about persisting, manipulating, and rendering multi-layered terrains in realtime. I was given this whitepaper as an entry to the topic, it's an interesting read: Arches: a Framework for Modeling Complex Terrains

My fellow Sythen is now maintaining a customized release of MB2. It comes with an installer (the original is portable) and maybe soon with custom scenes and color schemes and graphics.
Check it out here.

After more than half a year of work, I can finally present you the first public release of Microbrush 2.
Imperator has undergone an update too.

So, when the game is released and I buy it, I only get a censored version which has reduced blood levels and the removed ability to blow the heads off zombies, right? DO NOT WANT.

Okay, here I tell you now step by step what I did to get Hammer to work with HLS and also get shot by a big turret.
1. Download the official Half-Life: Source fgd here: http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Half-Life_Source.fgd
2. Edit that fgd, search for monster_miniturret, copy that part and make a monster_turret (by simply removing mini in the entity class, model, and so on) -- I don't know why Valve left that out...
3. Start Hammer with any game... maybe it's best to do that with "EP1/Half-Life 2" in your SDK target platform selection.
4. In Hammer, go to Tools/Options/Configuration, Edit the configurations and add a new one, name it HLS or something along those lines.
5. Make sure the paths in that configuration match those where your HLS is installed, and add the modified .fgd-File you have.
6. Close Hammer and Steam altogether and find the GameInfo.txt in your HLS\hl1 directory.
7. In that text file, set the application ID at the top to 360 (HL1SDM) or 280 (HL1S), I can confirm that 360 works well. If you omit this step, all Hammer viewports will be all black.
8. Start Hammer with your new config selected in the SDK platform selection dropdown, make a room and add a monster_turret, set its autostart flag to true. Note that you can use the HL1 textures by entering "halflife" in the texture window.
9. Compile the map from the Hammer dialog, but do not run the game from there. Instead, load the map from the game's console.

SGU is the best Sci-Fi series I have seen since Battlestar Galactica: The Re-Imagined Series. I can only recommend it.

void test1(int x)
{
}

(function<void(int)> func, int context) test2(int context)

(function<void(int)> func, int context) test3()

void main()

test1 is called with x = 5.

Favorite scripting language feature checklist:

• easily integratable
• bytecode and optimization
• easy data input and output via interrupts
• comfortable tuple type with optionally named elements instead of structs
• easy to use function pointer type
• unbounded type encapsulation
• very accurate and consistent syntax error reporting
• independence of the target platform

(int x, int y) z;
z.x = 5;
It looks so simple...

I just installed Half-Life 1: Source and... it is censored. Fuck. This stupid censoring is already going as far as the weight put on gamers by too heavy DRM. When will games become playable again after install?

YouTube - Microbrush 2 2009/Q4 - Newbie Menu
Microbrush 2 Project Page

The Telekom is doing a really good job messing with my internet connection. When we extended the contract, internet broke. When we do nothing, internet breaks. When they send a technician, the line is broken. When they send another technician to check where the fault might be, the line is not broken, but it is a problem in their office. I got a call a few days ago from an employee that the internet has been fixed again. Thank god, ISDN works again!!! But what about DSL now? Nowadays I am spending more time offline than online because they are messing up so often, and in every single instance so far it has been their fault, theirs alone... bah.

I finished our first run of Resident Evil 5 this evening with my brother. While playing, we already heard the fire siren going and emergency vehicles driving around. When I headed home, there were fire trucks obstructing my normal route, as there had been a small fire where they dispose of the flowers at our graveyard, at our church. I asked around to get some info on the case, and it turns out that the locals noticed the smoke and called the firefighters. There was also a man standing by who turned out to be one of our direct neighbors. A part of his hedge had been set on fire too, in very close proximity to our property. I saw a hole of approx. 4x4 ft. in his hedge. Then I went home and woke my mother, who was sleeping in the winter garden, and showed her the hole outside. There, our neighbor was already coming with a few policemen, and I gave them a heads up on a metal fence segment that was knocked down and bent over at a building standing next to our property. My mother went for the owner of that building and brought him to the scene, the police recorded everything and took some photos, and they noted down details from my ID card too, because I gave them the heads up on the fence. Exciting, or rather, that was pretty fucking close. I just hope the arsonist will stay away from our property. Update: Later we found another hole in his hedge, which was a bit smaller. There was a car parking behind the main hole, so it was close for them to not get their car set on fire too. I also heard today that they also set a part of the new bell tower of our church on fire. Everyone seems to know who is responsible for all the mess, it's the 2-3 kids who burned down an old abandoned restaurant here too.

• Aced the compiler construction exam too, none left for now
• Mother is preparing to move out
• Father is preparing to move in
• I must make a small game for university
• Less than a month of continuous job work left before the tough academic work starts
• Slowly preparing Microbrush 2 for a first release

It is amazing how much my father changed to the better, on the surface at least. My mother is confusing me more and more every day. Now to make Sythen produce a few MB2 tutorials...

Now I am one of the few who read that novel too. I can only recommend it, it is doubleplusgood, disagreement is crimethink. Last oral exam for now on friday.

I just finished reading it, and I liked it very much from beginning to end. It has a very consistent story, with a very good sci-fi foundation. And, omg, I just found out that it is just the first part of a trilogy! :D

"Well, there is not much to discuss. We're giving you an A."
Okay, I wasn't so good with the proofs, since it already took me a long time to understand them in the first place, but it still was enough.

Yesterday we had quite a severe power outage at work (actually, the whole town had no power). I walked around the different sections and floors, to see how the outage impacted them. The magnetic door locks failed so those doors shut, the security alert rang, the battery back-ups were beeping from every other office, the fountain outside stopped working, and even the toilets were too dark to use! The main server room was the busiest place, of course! There was a stream of warm air coming from it, and technicians ran around and fiddled with those monstrous, beeping machines.

After the exam today, I went to have lunch at our diner (tasty!) and then went to the customs office to pick up a package. It's been quite a long time since my last time there. At home, I decided to relax outside with a book ("Spin" by Robert Charles Wilson) until I ended up falling asleep in my chair. Then, and that was sooo cute, my dog woke me up, by simply resting her head on my side. A few minutes later, the sound of two Bundeswehr jets broke the silence. They caught my attention, and I saw them maneuvering in circles in opposite directions. Once it almost looked as if they were about to crash frontally... they were very close. That must have been some kind of air combat training.

Oh my, oral exam tomorrow. Artificial intelligence, 2 semesters, 30 mins. Cross fingers.

Dear FSF, why are you coming up with such a ridiculous campaign now? Do school children really need to be able to browse all the OS boilerplate code that runs their computers? I think not. There is neither enough time nor enough knowledge at that level of education. Free software is nice, yeah, but... but this is so ridiculous I can only ridiculously repeat myself! Maybe your Windows bashing would have worked better when Vista and all the new technology was just being introduced... :P
Dear Microsoft, thank you for your continued effort in making my work easier, thank you even more for Visual Studio, and for C#, and for making everyone who doesn't have the patience for installing a free operating system capable of computing and programming quickly, and I say that without irony. :D

Here, another YouTube video! :-D

Ladies and gentleman,

...

I now have a stalker! :-D

Our last conversation began like this: "Hey!" "Heya Shrinker, how is Microbrush 2 today?" When I claimed that that program doesn't exist, he immediately sent me photographic evidence, and it was clear from the pictures that instead of having a porn collection like any normal person, he hoarded footage of that imaginary program! Unbelieveable! Anyway, such a an obtrusive stalker really deserves to be linked to from my links section.

Here, I posted something on YouTube again :D
It's a little shorter this time, ... and it's very depressing how little of the actual programming effort is visible in new features :P Damn work under the hood...

My mother is just ruining my grandpa. He is now spending sleepless nights over the whole situation, and visited us this evening to talk with her, even though we told him that that's a stupid idea. Expectedly, she was drunk, and now that she found out that my father played a part in the new car I buy too, she is totally exploding on me. Duh, it's not my fault that I have two parents, and that he has proven sane, and she ... blah. I just wish she'd move out and give way for him moving in with his girlfriend, even if he kept all of his odd behavior before the splitting (of which many things were due to the stress in their relationship), it'd still be much better than with her now. ... walking a difficult path here. Moving out is too expensive.

The hate is in my mother. It knows no boundaries. My father approached us with the willingness to make clear decisions about the future of the family, decisions such as 'who gets what' and what kind of support to expect in the future. He even came up with concessions he'd be ready for in case my mother manages to talk normally with him. But she just couldn't concentrate on the now, started yelling at each of us, about things of the past, and is now making short-sighted plans again. Our support for her is fading. I am at a point now where none of that shocks me anymore. All these announcements of moving out and stuff, it is boring now. She acts like there is an audience clapping their hands every time she makes a remark about her former husband, but there is none but me, and I rarely pay attention anymore. She said my father envies how well we managed to live here without him so far, said that he certainly hoped for something else. I couldn't resist laughing about her, as "managing it" doesn't quite describe the shit that's been going on for the past months. Once again she says she'll move out... well? It doesn't make a difference for me anymore. Maybe my father moves in with his girlfriend... so be it. Next year I want to have my diploma thesis at hand, the key to standing on my own feet!

Well, it sucked. There was a sketch and there were measurements. When I was done constructing the rough things, suddenly there was a change request by the people looking over, telling us to swap two measurements and reconstruct that thing. Then I spent too much time deriving the construction of a simple ellipse again, and in the end it didn't look like one. I added a lot of annotations on my sheet, and I forgot noting down the scale I drew with. All in all, I probably passed that exam with a bad mark, which I don't want, so I'll have to see whether I can repeat it soon. And I forgot a pencil there, fuck.

A Windows SDK note: Always remember! Use CreateDialog for creating a modeless dialog, and DialogBox for creating a modal one!

All my hobby work stopped for a week... birthday this week, and my last written exam at the university ever a day later :D It's about geometrical construction. *practises*
I have posted some random Microbrush 2 info here: Interlopers

Dear readers, I have good news for you. Last week, the SVOC network was compromised by a group of now well-known to us Kriegtek hackers. They left their traces in our big virtual honey pot, so we used a feedback loop to counter-spy on them. Among incredible loads of porn on KT workstations, we discovered one thing that might indicate what they are planning next. It turns out they made a model of a voxelized pool with swastikas all over its side walls. We have several theories on its future use:

• they're going to build a water park
• the pool is a trap in their upcoming malware no-budget game "Voxelstein 3D", where the player can't escape from
• they drafted that pool for a non-voxel game with actual water and good graphics
• the pool is a means of downloading more porn to KT workstations

We'll let you know as soon as our intensive analysis of the case provides a definite answer to this mystery.

I bought a new laptop yesterday, it's a Packard Bell EasyNote LJ65, with an ATi Mobility Radeon HD 4570, 4 gigs for am, 500 gigs of HDD, LED backlight, 17.3 inch screen, fancy touch-sensitive icons, Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 (45nm), very good webcam and microphone... And man, this thing rocks! I can run Saints Row 2 at playable framerates with this one, it's very silent, remains very cold, eats much less energy than the Acer laptop, the colors are much better to see, the viewing angle is much better, the screen is much brigther *slobs* Oooh, and the backup maintenance DVDs really did a job this time: From one of them, I installed all necessary drivers and OEM programs that shipped with it, after putting a proper version of Vista on it and repartitioning the HDD :D Also, a battery life of 4 hours (under no heavy load) is quite awesome to me :D
^^

Two days ago, my laptop broke down. All symptoms indicate a mainboard failure, the HDD was alright and all data could be retrieved. That damn laptop didn't even last for 3 years... bah. It was an Acer Aspire 5112 WLMi 2GB. So, time for a new laptop!

Here, I posted something on YouTube :D

Our government has recently introduced a law on DSN-banning websites with child pornography. People browsing to such a link will now see a stop site which claims that this is the way child abuse is stopped. The first draft, which would have been accepted unchanged if our one big Europe election losing party didn't oppose it in the last second in order to get some young voters, said that the IPs of people browsing to that stop page were to be recorded, their identities determined, and then those people prosecuted (as child pornography consumers). Of course, that'd mean if you wanted to get rid of your neighbor, you'd just hide a link to that stop page in random chatter.

Just today, a conservative (read: idiotic) politician of the CDU (a Christian party) started making an effort on expanding those DNS bands to all pages about violent games. So... now they not only brand all German gamers as natural predetermined spree killers (by coining all violent games as "Killer Games"), they also lump us together with child abusers.

Dear fucking politicians, I am not a fucking child abuser. Neither can you stop child porn on the internet that way, nor is this exaggerated paternalism helping reduce violence in any way. Violent games are already VERBOTEN for youngsters, we already have the strictest laws regarding violence in media in the whole world, so strict that in fact this can be considered mass censoring, so strict that all major movies on TV are suddenly suitable for youngsters (at noticeable loss of consistency in story), there IS NO MORE ACTION REQUIRED. I am sick of being branded as a criminal for playing games where, omg, where there is shooting!
In our society, the image of all gamers

• being nazis
• abusing children
• being terrorists
• planning killing sprees

is slowly being cemented by populist politicians and the rainbow press. How come that when there are not enough catastrophes at hand, politicians tend to gradually take away more and more rights from adults and criminalize more and more things nobody cares about in any other country? Seems that heading into a totalitarian style of leadership is the default movement in politics. What are we supposed to do in our free time once everything is forbidden, huh? Fuck them.

A squad of fellow SVOC employees has broken into the Kriegtek headquarters last night. Not only did they set the development office on fire, they also secured evidence of continued Voxelstein 3D development. According to insider news (read: a captured and interrogated Kriegtek employee), the new engine will, just like that which Ken Silverman wrote, not harness GPU acceleration in any way. Interrogation revealed that the new engine has been written from scratch, maybe that's the reason why Voxelstein 3D development is taking so long. The evidence contained a technology demo in an engine version named "Kriegcast 010", a few screenshots follow:















































That scene is 1024 voxels in width, length and height, which seems like much. Shortly before death, the interrogated employee also revealed that advanced realtime shading technologies will make it into the final game. Regarding that, see what the head of Kriegtek posted some time ago. Confidential Kriegtek documents have revealed the following feature list for the new engine:

• open source license
• support for Windows AND Unix
• dynamic lighting
• multi-core parallelization
• voxel materials
• streaming voxel worlds up to 16384^3
• real-time reflections and refractions
• post-processing effects such as motion blur, depth of field and bloom

I personally think that this sounds like crap - once again, Kriegtek is screwing up. If you scroll down this news site a little, you might also notice that Kriegtek actually STOLE our latest building! We are still investigating how that was even possible, with ceiling-mounted sentry guns in each of our corridors. To give you an impression of our tight security measures, I should mention that our active security measures, such as the sentry guns, are all configured to activate when "in doubt", meaning that from time to time we lose valuable workers, but they gave their lives only for the improved security of everyone else. We will continue our efforts to beat this competitor out of existence.

2009 2008