iOS 7 Tech Talks – Game Developer Day in Berlin

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On December 13th 2013 I had the chance to attend the iOS 7 Tech Talks Game Developer Day from Apple at the Maritim Hotel in Berlin. In short: it was amazing!

I’ve met some interesting people to talk about iOS & game development and got a lot of information and tips. The presentations were hold by Apple Developers and had many useful hints and tips to improve Apps and software in general. One of my favorite presentations was the one about OpenGL ES 3.0. It’s truly awesome what mobile devices are able to do these days!

Next to the presentation room was a lab where you had the opportunity to talk to the developers from person to person. For me this was one of the highlights of the day because they gave me a lot of input for some of the projects I am working on.  Everyone was willing to help you on your problems and it’s great to discuss stuff of your apps directly with people with tons of experience.

To summarize, it was a very interesting day and I think it’s great that Apple cares so much about the developers! I hope that I will have the chance to join some of this kind of event (WWDC? ;-) ) again, even if it was a bit stressful after all (there was the christmas party of my job the same evening in Dresden…)!

If your are a in the iOS Developer Program you can watch the presentations here: https://developer.apple.com/tech-talks/videos/

 

Turning your Raspberry pi into an AirPlay receiver

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The Raspberry Pi is an awesome piece of hardware, you can do so much stuff with this little computer at very low costs and nearly unlimited possibilities. I’ve got one to expand my “musical network” at home. Besides a AirPlay enabled receiver in the living room and a Apple TV in the bedroom I wanted to get another AirPlay client for the bathroom or kitchen. After some research the Raspberry Pi turned up as the at least expensive and most flexible solution. Since there are a lot of tutorials on the Pi and Airplay it is fairly easy to set everything up.

get some more…

the hassle-free guide to wifi-up your raspberry pi!

you’ve got an raspberry pi and want to get wifi working? it’s pretty easy if you choose this usb dongle: EDIMAX EW-7811UN it is working out of the box with just some configuration. the setup is done in some minutes and you are ready to use wifi with your raspberry pi!

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making of 1 million particles

this time I will give you some insights on how to create a gpu driven particle system with opengl and glsl. for most of my opengl work I choose cinder and highly recommend to get in touch with it. already knowing cinder is not essential but gives a better understanding of the text. also since this is just a making of, not a step by step guide, some OpenGL and shader knowledge is required.

1mp_bw

before we dive into the code I think it’s good to get an overview on how the system works. the base of this particle system is a so called ping-pong framebuffer object. ping-pong means that you have two framebuffer objects (fbo) which are drawn alternately. when fbo A is drawn fbo B is used for calculations. on the next frame B will be drawn and A is used for calculations and so on. the particle movement is calculated by an glsl shader, all results (current position, velocity,…) are saved into textures. the drawing of the particles is also controlled by a shader who controls opacity and size. each particle has a time to live, if it’s old enough it will be respawned at a new position with it’s initial velocity. you see there is not that much going on, so now let’s look at the code a little bit deeper!

get some more…

1 million particles revisited

1million particles

here we go again, I reworked my gpgpu particle system which I did some time ago (link). the new version offers a better particle movement driven by perlin noise. also it is a bit more colorful since the original version was black & white only. aside from some minor code tweaks the big thing is that you can grab a copy on github now! i’ve got some requests to share the code but never felt that it is good enough to give it to others (the new version might not be that better… ;-) ). i hope it will help people to learn something about gpgpu programming and OpenGL in general :-) at the moment I am also writing a “making of” to explain some of the nifty stuff a bit more, so check the blog the next days!

github

new processing sketch — cubicle

we have updated our home with some new furniture. as a result we now have more space to hang some pictures and what is better than creating the pictures by yourself? yes right, code them by yourself!!! at least if you can’t draw.

the sketch I made today is called “cubicle” and does nothing more than drawing some quads and rotate every quad by some degrees. the result is vortex of quads :-)

cubicle

 

 

 

the code behind it is fairly simple, nothing special to explain. just some basic setup of size and settings and after that we’re ready to go. draw a lot of quads till they reach the border which is set in the condition of the while iteration. have a look:

size(1000,1000);
background(255);

smooth();
strokeWeight(0.5);
noFill();

float initialSize = 20.0f;
float rotation = 0.430f;

float strokeAlph = 30.0f; 

while(initialSize < height - 300)
{
  stroke(0,strokeAlph); 
  pushMatrix();
  translate(width/2, height/2);
  rotate(rotation);
  rect( 0 - initialSize / 2, 0 - initialSize / 2, initialSize, initialSize);
  popMatrix();

  initialSize += sqrt( 2 * pow(initialSize,2)) * .0033;
  strokeAlph += .1f;
  rotation += noise(PI / 3);
}

if you want you can grab the code (and other sketches too) on my github!

 

i’m on github now!

i finally managed it to commit my processing sketches to github where you can grab / edit and share them! when i  get some time to clean up my c++ stuff I will commit them too but at the moment I’m not sure when this will be…

have fun with the code: my processing sketches on github

some processing fun

 

i’ve got some time to work with processing again. creating stuff with processing is always fun because this “prototyping” kind of style. you’re way faster tryin’ some stuff than creating a similar app in cinder or openframeworks. since i’ve discovered processing it became a very important part in my toolchain. nowadays before i start to create a new project in c++ the first sketches are done in processing. my last experiments were all about perlin noise. drawing lines, arcs and even spheres in 3D…perlin noise is sooo powerful in creating randomness with a natural feeling! so here are some results of my latest …

Halloween Fun

Today is Halloween!
So besides the preparation of the plea of my diploma thesis there was some time to create a nice pumpkin. It’s nothing special but we had a lot of fun (especially makin’ the timelapse video)!