I’ve always been envious of Java developers since they could essentially write their code and then run it on any device. It might not be a perfect translation each time, but its still much better than what a pure Windows dev could put together.

I recently started doing some iPhone development and decided to investigate MonoTouch. I downloaded the a copy of MonoDevelop (which is still in beta at this time) and installed it. After starting up the application I was shocked to see what came up…

Uh… what? Wow! Is this for real? This really looks pretty nice!

Not What You’d Expect

When you first mess with the IDE you’ll be pleased to see it works just like you’d hope. Intellisense is quick and accurate; Syntax highlighting works as you would expect; Believe me when I say, it is just that impressive.

But having a pretty IDE is nice but it doesn’t mean anything if the language doesn’t work the way you need it to. Honestly, I figured it had to be some sort of watered-down version of the same .NET C# language that I work with every day. The first thing I did was hack out something that was certain to fail… but…

Incredible! Granted this isn’t that hard of code, who would have thought so much was already available!

And that isn’t all – You have LINQ support, Generics… heck, even ASP.NET MVC is already packed in here!!

Not only that, but check out this “little” dialog. I’m sure it doesn’t mean much…

If I’m reading this correctly, we can import existing .NET assemblies – How awesome would that be! (but I’m just guessing here… I’ll test it later…)

See It To Believe It

Mono and MonoDevelop are going to open up a lot of existing C#/Windows devs to an entirely new world. Don’t just take my word for it though — try it out for yourself. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, download a copy of VirtualBox and setup a virtual instance of another OS and prepare to be impressed.

Great job Mono Team! I think the benefits of .NET cross-platform development are yet to be realized!

Hello again, its just been a few minutes from my previous post, just wanted to share a PHP IDE I encountered this day when I was looking for a Dreamweaver alternative.

Aptana Studio, is a java-based IDE for web development. It has a similar interface to the Eclipse IDE, is free, supports internal previews, debugging, and code completions. I’m not going to give more details about it, but if your interested, here’s the site.

A small group of 3 software developers (at the time of writing) have released a new Jabber server that they say will rival the current number one XMPP/Jabber server, ejabberd, in performance, extensibility and computer resource consumption regards, or pretty much every regard, according to the developers who have chosen to write the server in their favorite “scripting” language called Lua. While everyone knows that Lua is a very powerful language for embedding with your C or C++ applications, allowing easy runtime scripting and manipulation of data and code (Lua is often used to parse very large blocks of data without problems), it actually is very capable as a stand-alone language for your applications, with dozens of useful libraries and bindings that bring sockets to Lua, bit manipulation and more. If you don’t know about Lua, visit lua.org.

Another reason the developers have chosen Lua is that a Jabber server needs to parse varying amounts of text that get bigger and bigger as more users are being served by the server and this is where Lua excels. While there will be a physical limit on how many users Prosody can serve (if you haven’t figured it out already, Prosody is the name of the server), future releases are said to provide clustering capabilities built-in. Also, as Lua is an interpreted language, extending the server by adding new XEPs or protocols is easy because you don’t have to recompile the server, you don’t even need to restart the server, you can load arbitrary code at run-time.

That said, Prosody seems pretty sweet. Version 0.2.0 of the server has just been released today, just a month after the first 0.1.0 release and brings a load of new features and improvements. I’ve tried the latest version myself and I like it. Setting it up was trivial as the configuration file was easy to understand. It is actually also written in Lua but even if you don’t know the language, you can understand it right away as it’s pretty easy and there are a lot of helpful comments in the file.

The future looks promising with version 0.3.0 as they plan to bring MUC support allowing for multi-user chat conferences. The support has already been written according to the developers who hang around and discuss the development of the server on the Jabber chat room prosody [at] conference [dot] heavy-horse [dot] co [dot] uk. But as it was a late developement, it hasn’t been tested yet so it wasn’t included in the current release.

I am eagerly waiting in anticipation for the next release as adding new cool features to the chat rooms might be too easy. I’m thinking of a MOO world running on Prosody.

The slides for my talk at the 2008 Game Developers’ Conference, “How To Go From PC To Console Development Without Killing Your Studio,” are now available online at the Valve website. 

The talk describes some of the many pitfalls that face developers who are used to developing their games exclusively for the home personal computer, but are now about to embark upon their first crossplatform title, shipping on both PC and console at the same time. These pitfalls have brought some studios to their doom, but fear not: I also provide techniques for how to deal with each of these issues, without having to rewrite most of your game from scratch.  Some of the techniques are production issues, like dealing with certification. Others address programming problems like improving framerate on the PowerPC — some assembly is required.

My speaker’s notes are embedded in the slides: hover over or click the small dialog bubble that Adobe Acrobat superimposes at the top left.

I’ve also started a Q&A page to address questions people have asked me about this talk, either in person at the conference, or through email since then. If you have questions of your own, please feel free to leave a comment.

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Thats a terrific happy news for all those love Qt – the best C++ OpenSource Crossplafrom framework ever built. It just emphasises the fact that passion, innovation and dedicated hardwork always pays off. Trolls are a such wonder and unfortunately Qt, didn’t get much publicity even in the developer community!  . But all those have felt the power and easiness of Qt, became the great fans of the wonderful framework.

Today Trolltech announce that Nokia is going to aquire Trolls to boost its business empire, for an approximate deal of $150 Million. This proves what potential Qt and its associated cousin frameworks like Qtopia offers!.

Trolltech provides cross-platform software development frameworks and application platforms. Trolltech’s Qt is used in popular software such as Skype, Google Earth, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Lucasfilm and by more than 5000 customers worldwide. Trolltech’s Qtopia has enabled a new generation of exciting consumer devices such as mobile handsets, video-phones, set-top boxes and media players. Trolltech’s software has shipped in more than 10 million devices.

Trolltech’s products enable companies to easily build and deploy software across a wide range of operating systems and electronic devices. The company serves desktop and embedded application providers, as well as consumer electronics and mobile vendors, who face challenges in delivering user-friendly and differentiated software. Trolltech enables customers to accelerate innovation, shorten time to market and increase revenues. Trolltech’s software improves the user experience by increasing the appeal and quality of customer’s applications on desktop and devices. The future proof Qt software allows developers to code less, create more and deploy anywhere.

To know more about the deal read out here:  www.trolltech.com

I guess I should admit it – I’ve been sidetracked over the last few days. Yesterday was not a particularly eventful day, the only real feature I got was mouse picking for tiles (and that caused far too many headaches for what it’s worth…) and sorta hit a dead end on what is the next logical step for progressing the engine.

Of course, when a decision needs to be made, what better place than to do it on IRC? The conversation went waaay off topic as always, and we started exchanging screenshots of our desktops (I did say way off topic) and my “real” desktop is my Mac not the Windows machine. So I restarted and thought… why can’t Overload run on here?

The Mono project is an open source effort to create a .NET implementation that can run on all operating systems, not just Windows. I gave it a try and wow – 1 compile time error! Saddly, runtime was far worse. Firstly there’s no Direct3D support on Macs, so the Direct3D renderer is already useless. Secondly, the System.Windows.Forms implementation in Mono is custom, not native to the OS. It also just didn’t seem to work, so I’ve slightly moving things around inside Moebius, Overload’s engine. Moebius now has now dependancies on SWF and all window management is handled by SDL. It is one more essential dependancy, but it’s not huge – and SDL is quite easy to redistribute.

Renderers are now given a handle to window created by SDL and are in charge of attaching themselves to the Window. I haven’t got Direct3D working with this yet, but it should be a pretty easy task. I wrote an OpenGL renderer and 6 hours later… here we are!

It’s exciting to know that Overload is capable of supporting multiple platforms now, and I’m glad to see that I’m finally capable of managing a cross platform project. Now, just got to wait for Daniel to get back from IOWA – and we can start some real development!

Moving song files between platforms is pretty straightforward but it requires a bit of planning (and usually a bit of trial & error).

Moving projects by consolidating files.

Probably the most reliable way of moving songs between platforms is to make sure all tracks have the same starting point ( i/e bar: 1.1.1.1) and then bounce them all to individual audio files . However even if the source app has a “Bounce all tracks” feature, writing down and then setting up all insert and f/x settings again in the new app this can be fairly time consuming.

But with a bit of planning and what’s know as “printing to stems” we can save some time and make sure we’ll get to the pub before last orders.

Let’s say we’re moving a project to another studio in order to record some bass. In the below screenshot the drums have been mixed together to one stereo file (stem) and all the rest of the music to another. The bass have been left on it’s own individual file so we can mute it once the the bass player have learned how to play it. The point of splitting the music and the drums is so we can adjust the level of the drums to suit the bass player preferences.

If we’re recording vocals, guitars etc or programming drums/virtual instruments instead just set up the file accordingly.

Make sure that you note the BPM of the song and that all files are bounced with the same bit and sample rate. Do not use 32 bit files when moving in between platforms as some apps (Pro Tools, Logic) only allows you to import 16 and 24 bit files. The benefit of using 32bit files outside of an app is also highly questionable. When moving between Windows and OSX or vice versa stick to Wav/Broadcast Wav as file format.

Moving projects using OMF .

If your application supports OMF (Open media format) this can be used when moving projects. OMF comes as version 1 or 2 and although most applications understands both always double check that the app your moving to actually do.

The benefit of using OMF is that we don’t have to bounce all the tracks from the same starting point.

Here the the “stem” example file have been exported from Logic as an OMF file and then imported into Cubase. Notice that the individual audio regions have automatically been placed at the correct position on the time line.

Unfortunately OMF can only be used to export audio files it will not work on midi files and plug ins. To move midi files you need to save them separately as .mid files.

Bouncing or glueing?

Bouncing all the instrument and audio tracks in real time can understandably take more time then we are prepared to spend, although bouncing in real time is preferable to “offline” bouncing.

Instead we can opt to glue the audio regions straight in the arrange window. Just place a short snippet of audio/empty region in the beginning ( at bar 1.1.1.1) of the song and then glue it together with the rest of the file. Rinse & repeat for each track.

I don’t know how I found this game, all I know is that I was tinkering with my Gentoo Linux box, and I installed something I wasn’t sure about for later (the next day ) to be captivated by this cartoon style first person shooter based on the ioquake3 engine. The game features lots of playing modes, including Las Pad Standing which is the classical Last Man Standing, and some original ones. Weapons have funny names like Splasher, Baloony, and so on. You can probably figure it out why they are named that way. Maps are wonderful, nothing like I’ve seen before. Most are big places, enormous objects. Imagine yourself as an ant in a kitchen room . Graphics are totally awesome too. I’m pretty surprised of how much the quake3 engine has been developed. What impressed me first, though, was the menu and in-game music, hard metal and some slow ones too. The music will soon be available on the game’s official site. That’s all I can say right now, I’ve got to get back in the game!