Its been almost 24 hours since the release of Sylphis3D and the sourceforge shows that 3GBytes were downloaded already about 10 e-mails expressing unbounded appreciation and some very nice comments. People are already jumping in to help with the website, doing changes and cleaning up the mess!
I would like to thank every one of you for your good wishes and I hope the best for you, too.
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 The makefiles and sconsturct files, for compiling with GCC, are out of date.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 »
The time has come… tomorrow is the release day of Sylphis3D as an open source project. I’m very excited for this new begining! This is going to be my biggest contribution to the open source community until now.
The source that is going to be released counts ~45000 lines of code in C++ and Python counted with SLOCCount and the development cost was evaluated at $1.500.000 !!!
Oh.. well…. 
The last days I’m spending most of my time considering open source licenses and what would be the appropriate license for Sylphis3D. I must say that it is a very brain-melting procedure. I can see now why I could never became a lawyer!
I initially started considering two licenses, the GPL and the BSD. These are both approved open source licenses by the FSF. GPL is the defacto open source license today and has proven its value. Most of open source software today is released under the GPL, including Linux. The license was proven to be able to protect and empower the freedom of the software, by forcing code to be contributed back to the original GPLed software. The BSD on the other side is a more liberal license. Requires for the adopters of the code to make no more than to mention the code that was used. They are not required to release their code back. This is looked upon by some open source people because it allows closed source projects to benefit from open source, without ever contributing back. The classic example here is the Windows operating system that used the networking stack of the freeBSD operating system; no code was ever contributed back by Microsoft.
The problem with GPL is that it is not an easy solution when it comes to 3D game engines. A GPLed engine Read the rest of this entry »
I think this is good news on the doorstep today! Yeap! After long thoughts I came to the decision to finally open the source code of Sylphis3D. This is going to be a big step for the development of the game engine and Read the rest of this entry »
Working heavily on pixel shaders the last few days, I came to realize some facts about the current way of treating the GPUs and how that way is inefficient/impractical and really doesn’t allow us to fully harness the powers of GPUs. Read the rest of this entry »
Having a digital camera at my disposal for the last 4 years, I can tell you: Photographs are a big load of data to manage. The trouble is not obvious from the beginning but after counting some GB’s of photos it really get hard to find photos. I used some photo management software before (mostly software that came with my camera) but I never got the feelling that the software was untieing my hands. Actually most software for managing photos is bloated with eye-candy and transitions effects that at the end of the day get in your way. I’m not going to mention here software that I rejected, as its pointless, but I will rather tell you about Picasa 2. The photo management and manipulation application from Google. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you want to do a fun thing? Try running Azureus on a laptop running Debian with 128MB of RAM…
JAVA to the people!!!
It is a common thing in programming languages, and a sign of maturity to implement a language in the language itself. This however is not common Read the rest of this entry »
Unfortunately noone can be told what Perl 6 is… You have to see it for yourself.
Read this on slashdot today…
