Irrlicht Engine Guide Book!

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For those who don’t know what is Irrlicht Engine, it is actually a C++ based 3D rendering engine used for simulations and games. I have been using it since 5-6 years ago because it is easier to pick up than any other engines, especially for beginners.


Gothic scene done by wing64, rendered in Irrlicht Engine

And now, someone wrote a book for it! Awesome!


Irrlicht 1.7 Realtime 3D Engine Beginner’s Guide is currently available for purchase on Packt Publishing.

I have been waiting for such a book to be published since day one. It would be wayyyyyy easier for me to learn how to write my own game if this book had been written long time ago. Therefore I opened up the guide book and looked through its contents.


I could have done better last time if I owned the book.

At first, I thought the book would be quite similar to the official Irrlicht tutorials on the wiki site when I was reading the table of contents, but later on I was very surprised because the authors explained everything in a very detailed manner. They even explained what is a dot product, cross product, normalization, etc. which most online tutorials don’t because they expect you to know it already. They even explained how to create fade in/fade out effects in the game loop, which is one of the most frequently asked questions on the beginner forum.

Another good thing about this book is that the authors also teach you how to use external tools together with Irrlicht Engine to maximize your efficiency. This includes irrEdit (scene editor), CopperCube 2 (also scene editor), and Irrlicht Font Tool (obviously, bitmap font generator). However, I wish they could add in a new section which shows the beginner how to export 3D models from a 3D modelling software (Maya/3D Studio Max/Blender3D) to formats which supported by the engine.

My favourite part in the book? Shaders! What really makes this book special is it that it includes Geometry Shader. I can’t even find Geometry Shader in the official tutorials, but it is included in this book! What more can I say?


Shaders can be used to create non-realatistic scene, too

After reading this book, I want to pick up Irrlicht Engine again and get my hand dirty!

Recently, Before 2011 Ends

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This year I rarely posted anything on the blog at all because I was simply lazy or too busy to do that. All I want to say is… no, I’m not dead, yet, lol and this year is pretty much all about works and preparation for next year.

What will happen in 2012? No, not meteoroids and mayan stuffs but I am sure next year will be a lucky year for me – A prosperous year! Fk yeah!!

Actually even this year all were running pretty smoothly according to plan. Met nice people, did great stuffs, went to awesome places and so on.

Few weeks ago I went to a temple with friends somewhere 2-3 hours driving.

I’m not a religious person at all, but I like the culture behind the crafts and the artistic values. It does look impressive to me.

Meanwhile I can see that my friend really got some spiritual boosts by standing on the yin yang platform lol

The view from within the temple looks nice too. A little sub-urban area full of peacefulness.

Not only I like those old style buildings but I also like antiques too. They look really interesting to me.

It reminds me of my dad because he used to sell antiques when I was in kindergarden. Nowadays he still likes to collect some of this things, though. Should buy some for him as gifts if I could afford it lol.

Anyway, the most anticipated thing in adult life is still – gathering. :D

True friends are hard to find, especially when you’re out to the society. Appreciate them.

Example, this 2 guys:

Really good friends of mine, lol.

Another enjoyable thing in life is undeniably…..

Foods.

Foods.

And more foods!!

Other than that,

Card games.

Video games.

And more video games!!

Sometimes I also attend some gathering with fellow Sabahans and Sarawakians too. They are really nice people. Like brothers, like sisters.


In the picture above, there were actually 4 different ethnicity and you can’t tell what is their religion, culture, language and racial background by just looking at skin color. That’s the magical thing about East Malaysians. Different, but same.

At night usually I will be doing my own project and won’t go out really often, but there is a really cool place to hang out, just a few steps away from my house.

They had this little concert which I could hear from my room so I went there to have a look. Really nice environment and atmosphere.

Anyway my post is getting a little random already lol. I should sum up this post by saying Happy Christmas!! to those who celebrate it and Happy Santa Day!! to those who don’t. ;-)

I will call this a day, good luck people!!

Photoshop CS2 on Wine

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Today I wanna share to you how to run Photoshop CS2 properly on linux OS under wine.

If you have problem with the shortcut key being disfunctional or crash on the second launch saying “Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error. Sorry, but this error is unrecoverable.” then you have probably missed out several important steps before you install the software.

However, no worry about that, you can still solve the problems now and require no re-installation of either wine or Photoshop.

The steps are simple:

  1. Open up a handy tool called “Winetricks” it is under the Wine directory in your application menu.
  2. Click “Select the default wine prefix” and click OK.
  3. Choose “Install a Windows DLL or component” and click OK.
  4. Scroll down the list a bit and select “vcrun6″ (Visual C++ 6 Runtime) and click OK. Nothing seem to happen now but you just have to wait for a while. The program is running at the background. (p/s. this operation requires an internet connection)
  5. After that the previous Winetricks menu will pop out again. It means the “vcrun6″ has been successfully installed.
  6. Now, select “Install a font” and press OK.
  7. Choose “core fonts” and press OK. Wait for a while and you’re done.

Now you can close winetricks and try to launch Photoshop CS2 again. It should work like charm now. :-)

Cheers!

Water

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I’m not dead yet! Extremely busy lately hehehe.

Nothing much to talk about, show you a quick water simulation I did with Blender!

I’ll update more frequently soon!

Btw the database has some problems few days ago and there might have some comments that accidentally been deleted. Please do post your comment again if you couldn’t find your comment here. Very sorry!