soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

Let's say you know someone in the demoscene and you appreciate the efforts they do in and for the demoscene.

Also the activities they do are supposed to achieve a great degree of excellency in their execution, as their predecessors did, to maintain the previous level of quality - which all of us expect to see.

But they don't manage to do it once. Then you offer them your help and advices, and give them suggestions about how to solve the errors, without expecting any reward. You even don't ask them to appear in the website as a collaborator, you just want the things to be properly done.

And they don't even reply your e-mail to say "no, I don't want your help".

Next year they repeat the errors and you wonder again: should I help them? or should I let them be the laughing stock of the party?

Hard to decide, isn't it?

I was wondering if there was something like Dia for Mac. I remembered I used that for documenting and create the basic source classes for my final university project, and I was wondering if it would be possible to have it running on mac. First searches are very negative, and I couldn't figure out how the Class Diagrams of XCode (the development environment for mac) worked (maybe I was way too sleepy…)

Anybody, any suggestion? :-)

How can it be possible that somebody decides to develop a code editor without word wrapping? Am I expected to wrap each line manually? For god's sake! We are on 2005! Even notepad does it!

I even tried to update the php editor to the latest version, and the option still didn't appear anywhere. I tried to search on forums… nobody had a good answer. Some of the people even added a screenshot to demonstrate that the option appeared for some computers, but the best of all is that each screenshot featured different options for the same editor. Now, that's what I call an uniform interface design, when the suggested solutions are associate php files to external text editors! Then, why should I install the Java Virtual Machine and Eclipse, if I finally have to use dreamweaver for editing php files?

Bah!

When I showed shine the not-engine for demos that I had been developing, I can imagine his "ARGH" face. An ugly mixture of C and C++ code, with lots of things like

#ifdef _DEBUG

OutputDebugString("blabla");

#endif

instead of developing a logger object which always proves to be more efficient, powerful and useful (as you can for example configure it to output to a console or to a text file).

And those past days we have been discussing and thinking about a way of materializing the ideas which are rounding our minds. Most of those ideas were already implemented in the latest demo we did (vslpx), but they would need a bit more of polishing. Other ideas could be also taken from the structure that shine used on neon v2.

Finally we have here a good constraint: all the development should be system independent - and I am being really serious about this. We need to be really strict on this point because I want my demos to run on mac. So there's no place for directx, windows includes or win32 api functions, either mac os api functions. Luckily I'm going to use opengl (that's the only graphics framework that I have managed to understand), so we don't lose too much about directX, but I need to be very careful about little details as the endianess of the machine running the demo, the system file path separator (whether it is "\", as in windows, or "/" on *nixes, ":" on mac's -sometimes only-) and things like that…

All of these points bring me to a clear conclussion: I MUST learn C++!

What I have seen is that lots of the feature lacks in my programs come from the fact that I don't really know how to do things efficiently, so I finish doing workarounds which can work for one case, but they end in an spaghetti-code cascade most of the times :-S

Fortunately we can count on a good book by Bruce Eckel: Thinking in C++. You can download an HMTL version with source code for free. (Actually there are links to other books like Thinking in Java and Thinking in patterns).

Reading the introduction chapter it describes perfectly my scenario:

"I clawed my way into C++ from exactly the same position I expect many of the readers of this book are in: as a programmer with a very no-nonsense, nuts-and-bolts attitude about programming"

So let's expect this book to help me (and you, if that's your willing) improve my coding skills :-)

I have to greet a friend of mine: Shine!!
He has been building a brand new vj/demosystem (well, more specifically a vj system which can be used for demos too somehow) for some months: neon v2. He did it from scratch… and now he has won euskal democompo! He also did the 3d models and animated everything… and the result is nice… with lots of original and funny effects and ideas.
The ubercool music was made by wizard. Congrats for him too!
Take a look… see Sound Pressure :D (you'll need a graphics card with pixel shaders 2.0 or however it is called).