Recently I was busy modeling and animating a lower-poly replacement for Perilith Knight meant to be used with JME game I’m working on. All was dandy as long as I was working inside Blender. I exported the model a few times and it was all looking fine as a static mesh. Animated model was a whole different story…
I ran into all kinds of issues from animation not being played at all, being played at the wrong speed, wrong vertices being animated… long story short I needed a tool to preview model from all angles, at different animation steps, scaled, rotated, mashed… I needed a M3G model viewer.
Monster download of Wizzer Works’ M3G Viewer didn’t really bring the expected benefits as it refused to import any of my models. Nifty A desktop application would be nice but at the end of the day what really counts is how a model looks on an actual device so a simple J2ME M3G viewer was the way to go.
If you think the left guy seems familiar you may be right. Although the model is different the texture is the same Actually I think I messed up with texturing of the knight too.
Looks like Eclipse folks made it again Galileo release with Eclipse 3.5 and MTJ 1.0 is included. Yes, I did say ‘MTJ 1.0′! After years of trouble and uncertainity about project’s future Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java project actually saw its release 1.0! I have to admit I’ve never been a huge fan of Java ME tools integrated with various IDEs and instead developed BitCruncher but it’s such an important milestone that I just have to try it out
Finally! It seemed like eternity but finally there’s some real news for Linux and OSX devs out there — Sun presented a prototype of Java ME SDK 3.0 running on nothing else but Mac OS X!
Recently acronym RPG when applied to computer games is mostly equivalent with MMORPG. For all fans of single-player role-playing games it’s an uncomfortable situation and some people (like Epic of Thalia devs) felt the need to underline that their game is not a MMORPG. But having a new acronym (actually an acronyms acronym) beats it all and one has been suggested yesterday by Charlie at Free Gamer Blog: FSFR. FSFR obviously stands for FOSS SP FPS RPG which of course stands for Free/Open Source Software Single Player First Person Perspective Role Playing Game. Brilliant
I’ve just had a big LOL at myself today. I bought a small Bamboo Wacom tablet, brought it home and plugged into my Linux box. First impression: it’s good. Tablet was recognized as a mouse, I could move cursor and click things but, well, GIMP didn’t like it as a damn tablet. Taught by years of hacking Linux I fired up Firefox, googled for “linux wacom tablet”, found excellent Linux Wacom Project and started debugging/configuring/messing around with system settings. The problem was that everything seemed to work as expected but damn GIMP refused to treat stupid tablet as a, well, tablet. Half hour later I read about disabling something when RedHat is booted with tablet plugged in as it differently autoconfigures tablet when it’s connected before system start and when system is running. *DING!* Maybe my old habits just don’t apply to modern Linux times when things Just Work? Automagically? I rebooted (I know, I could’ve just killed X) with tablet connected and voila! everything Just Works.
Fuck!
LOL!
Happiness
That happens when you’re just so used to manually configuring things that you just don’t think that free software is up to the task of applying AutoMagic(tm) and everything Just Works
While porting to the Sidekick platform one of the most mysterious issues I was fighting with were massive application slowdowns. What was most interesting they happened e.g. on the menu screen which, after it’s initialized, is basically a static screen. After trying various approaches I started to think and remembered I read something about threading issues in “Java ME Applications on the hiptop Platform” document (available from Danger’s developer site).
It’s just too good not to mention it I just checked calendar… no, it’s not April 1st but if it was it’d be my 100% candidate for a hoax Here’s a Slashdot article:
“The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today’s news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United’s total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story.”
I’m surprised it’s not on Revealing Errors yet (update: submitted the article) Full story here.
Sidekick has a powerful API but it has this feeling of in-house development where not enough thought has been put into making it clean and well designed. Instead it sometimes feels like methods has been added on an ad-hoc basis whenever someone felt like something is needed. Then there’s really a lot of deprecated/unused methods and constants. Generally it’s not a bad API at all it just feel a bit random at places
But there are places that are really bad. I know I’m not the most experienced Sidekick programmer out there but I can tell bad API when I see one and one of the things that frustrates me most in Sidekick API is danger.ui.Pen class.
How crappy a net connection must be to call it ‘no net connection’? It must be unreliable, slow and with horrible lag. Just like mine for last 3 weeks. And when I say ‘unreliable’ I mean ‘it is there for several hours then gone for two days’. Meaning — very unreliable Anyway, today I bought a mobile broadband modem from 3uk and things are back to normal. The signal is very weak where I live so while it does connect to HSDPA network speed is not very impressive but having a permanent connection again is like breath of fresh air
Since this is the first time I’m using mobile modem I was a bit unsure how to actually use it with Linux. Various HOWTOs on the net suggested wildly different things, ranging from installing special hotplug software to upgrading Network Manager to manually configuring wvdial. Fortunately it turned out to be much easier.
3UK mobile broadband Huawei E220 modem Ubuntu Linux HOWTO
A desktop application would be nice but at the end of the day what really counts is how a model looks on an actual device so a simple J2ME M3G viewer was the way to go.
Actually I think I messed up with texturing of the knight too.
and remembered I read something about threading issues in “Java ME Applications on the hiptop Platform” document (available from 