Bugs here, Bugs there, Bugs are everywhere

 Posted on January 7, 2006  |  Sascha

So every programmer out there knows them and as more complex your programs get, the more likely you’ll encounter them. But what also happens is, that you often (at least when doing hobby development) don’t catch those bugs since they don’t occure to you, but only happen for other users. And especially with a complex application like the NewtonPlayGround, where there is no real limitation in what to do for the user, it’s hard to catch all those bugs. [Read More]
newton 

Newton 1.5 is finally out

 Posted on January 3, 2006  |  Sascha

Yes, it’s finally out! Though it’s no longer called 1.35, but 1.5 instead due to the huge number of changes/additions. So go to the Newton Page and download it ASAP. And then get the Delphi/Pascal headers from my Newton Subdomain. This time, it’s not only the updated header, but it also contains a translation of the custom joints that are included in the Newton SDK (see my last news post for more info on what that actually is). [Read More]
newton 

Newton's custom joint interface

 Posted on December 28, 2005  |  Sascha

So one of the most interesting features of Newton are the so-called custom joints, which basically expose Newton’s low-level functionality for joints and allow you to create all kind of joints. In the end, this means you’re not bound to the given set of pre-defined joints (like it’s the case with other engines, even most commercial ones like Novodex) and so if you need a joint that Newton doesn’t offer you just create it yourself. [Read More]
newton 

1.35 is around the corner

 Posted on December 14, 2005  |  Sascha

Newton 1.35 Believe it or not, but the 1.35 release of Newton is almost upon us! We SDK-developers are getting constantly updated SDKs (almost every two days or so) and it looks better and better with each SDK. The only thing that’s really left for the Newton makers is now the overhaul of the vehicle container and some tweaking and testing. Julio (the main man behind NGD) already said that he wants to release 1. [Read More]
newton  newton-playground 

New Newton Beta SDK

 Posted on November 28, 2005  |  Sascha

So much for the regular updates, but the last weeks have been very dull in terms of coding (did almost nothing with Delphi or any other programming language). But this weekend we SDK-developers got another beta of the Newton 1.35-SDK to try out, so I fired up Delphi, updated the header to the recent beta-SDK and also fixed some minor bugs in the NewtonPlayGround to test it with the new SDK. [Read More]
newton 

Life goes on

 Posted on November 10, 2005  |  Sascha

One of the bigger things that have been finished was the Direct X .X fileloader. After creating some complex objects and scenes and importing them into the PlayGround, I noticed that lighting wasn’t looking like it should and so I added a small debug-function to the X-loader for outputting the vertex normals into the vertex color to see if normals were loaded correct. And guess what? I forgot to multiply the normals by the rotation part of the meshes’ matrix, which caused them to point into wrong directions. [Read More]
newton  newtonplayground 

Not much happening

 Posted on October 23, 2005  |  Sascha

Note: As with the last entry, this is not about programming, so skip if you came for programming information. So as told in my last post I got that new shiny GeForce 6800 and I decided to play some newer games and replay some of the recent ones with the higher details I can now set. Sad thing is that I have almost no free time due to personal reasons, so it’s about 1 or 2 hours of spare time a day in the end. [Read More]

It's here

 Posted on October 19, 2005  |  Sascha

Note : No programming news in this item, so if you don’t wanna know about my new gfx-cards, skip this post. As usual, Amazon was lighting fast with their delivery. The mail that my new graphics card was dispatched arrived yesterday in the late evening and the card was already here this morning. Why I order hardware at Amazon? Because getting any of the GeForce 6800 cards for AGP is almost impossible now. [Read More]
hardware 

Follow up to the last post (and more)

 Posted on October 18, 2005  |  Sascha

So I finally implemented the new DirectX 3D file format (I mentioned in the last posting, the terrain and vehicle in the screenshot are loaded from .X files) into the NewtonPlayGround. It wasn’t really much work and I also did some more additions to the loader. It now loads textures into a global texture pool, which saves much memory when you have several meshes with the same texture in one scene (e. [Read More]

Switching formats

 Posted on October 14, 2005  |  Sascha

So I’m doing 3D coding for quite some time now (over 6 years afair, at least with OpenGL) and the only 3D file format I’ve used in all those years was the 3DS - format, which is still widely used (due to the fact that almost every 3D modeller can export/import it and there are plenty of loader) but by nowadays standards totally out-dated. And due to it’s age this format has some drawbacks that recently made me want to get rid of it. [Read More]