Thoughts Serializer

Computer graphics, Games, Personal

Having both Mac OSX and iPhone targets in XCODE

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I have a library (guess what that is!) for use in the iPhone. For the library I have an XCode project with two targets. One for the emulator and one for the actual device. Nothing wild as you can see.

However the joy came when I desided to also use the library in OSX. As one would guess I went on and created a new target for OSX, which started out as a copy of the original iPhone, target but with the “base SDK” for the specific target switched to “Mac OS X 10.6″.

When I compiled for the first time, I came to the realization that even with this option set to Mac OS X 10.6, xcode was still compiling for the iPhone! From this point on, nothing worked. I tried every option, setting, for the project and the target.. but nothing. XCode seemed locked to compile for the iPhone, totally ignoring the SDK setting. I ended up trying quiting/starting again XCode, restarting the MAC… and some other arcane spells and voodoo I can’t really confess here… nothing… Then I gave up and dreamed of the nice days of scons and even make files, when you knew what was under the hood..

All that until today when in a moment of enlightenment, I clicked on the “Overview” dropdown of XCode with the ALT key pressed. And “boom” (as Jobs would say), there is was… “the choise”! By holding ALT when selecting the “Overview dropdown, XCode allows you to choose the active SDK!  This was so overwhelming for me that I tweeted about it and also desided to make a blog post, so that no one has to go through what I did.

So bottom line for both OS X and iPhone targets:

  1. Make a new target for OS X and set it up.
  2. ALT-click the Overview to select your active SDK.
  3. Compile.
  4. Have a nice day!

Python Easter Egg

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Since Easter is coming, here is an easter egg for you :

If you type from __future__ import braces in Python..

You get :

SyntaxError: not a chance

:D :D :D

Ray Tracing into a Sparse Voxel Octree

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And just when you thought you were through with tracing things all over the place… John Carmack strikes back with a mortal blow with something about ray tracing into a sparse voxel octree!!

The article doesn’t really say much (nothing actually) about the algorithm, and this is where the fun/fuss starts! I can’t wait to see all the amazing/crazy ideas people from all over world will come up with, about what John is actually talking about. Plots over plots will emerge.. flames.. Read the rest of this entry »

NVIDIA to Acquire AGEIA Technologies

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According to this press release, nVidia will acquire Ageia Technologies. Yeap! The well known physics software and hardware vendor. In my mind this means that the future nVidia based accelerators will support physics acceleration, too. It will basically mean the death of the PhysX processor, since the GPU can do that easily with no extra cost.

Actually the PPU solution was never to work. I find it quite hard to believe people would ever Read the rest of this entry »

Software Engineering Proverbs

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Must read.. :)

One I really liked :

Q: How many QA testers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: QA testers don’t change anything. They just report that it’s dark.

My Βabbler Coldfusion

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If you where a compiler and you would like to express yourself about an index that was mistakenly out of bounds what would you say?

I would say something like this : - “Line 342 : Index out of bounds”

Read on to find out what Coldfusion would say!!! Read the rest of this entry »

Double Check Your EXCEL

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Do you trust Microsoft Excel to do your financial plans? Do you count on it for business matters? Do you even use it as a calculator?

Think again… since Excel can’t even multiply correctly!!

I wonder how they accomplished such a thing! What kind of COM, CORBA and VB should you be calling for a multiplication to make it have a bug!?

p.s. If I recall correctly there was a bug like that in the calculator that came with a previous version of Windows…

microsoft, excel, bug, multiply

Getting Started Again… True Megatexture

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Greetings everybody!

It been a long time since this blog was updated, I know! Well I was kind of busy lately. Looking for a job, finding a job, then doing the job and finally trying to get some free time for summer vacation and free time projects. You know that getting a new job always makes things a bit harder until you get comfortable. The good thing is that now work has stabilized and I finally start to have some free time.

I’m not going to write a lot here at this time. I just wanted to let you know that I’m well and good. I’m also planing to start working on Sylphis3D again in a more committed and persistent manner.

Regarding Sylphis3D I would also like to inform you that I’m working on something big! You probably know my opinion on megatexture on terrain. Well I managed to think of an algorithm to apply megatextures on any kind of geometry. Yes you heard correct! The new Sylphis3D will have totally virtual texturing.

You will be able to apply any size texture on any kind of mesh with no impact on performance! Would you like to apply a 4096×4096 texture on that talisman the player wears just in case someone gets so close to see it? It ok! It doesn’t hurt! Go ahead! It’s up to you! At the moment I am at implementation stage and things seem that will work out just fine! Stay tuned…

farbrausch

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Just watch this :

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=30244

Anything said is wasted….

The wait is over… Sylphis3D is open source!

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I just release the source to Sylphis3D! Check out the story at the Developer Network.

The wait is over! Sylphis3D is officially released under the GNU GPL ver.2 (with the classpath exception for those that need closed source solutions). The engine weights at around 45000 lines of source code written in C++ and Python.The source code can be obtained from the download page of the [sourceforge.net project page](http://www.sf.net/projects/sylphis3d). Latter on the source will be added to the subversion repository for easier access.The source code compiles under Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. The makefiles and sconsturct files, for compiling with GCC, are out of date. However the mapcompiler is up to date. The source would compile out of the box. Read the rest of this entry »