Dawn of the Geeks

mobile.icarusindie.com is the new home for Indie-Mobile. This location should be a lot easier to remember.

I’ve been using Godaddy for Freeringtone Heaven for awhile now and just realized that I can have unlimited domains and subdomains. This means that there will be fewer Icarus Indie sections using port 2004. Indie-Mobile is getting moved over. The Mirror is moving over. I have 100GB to work with which is more than all the large sites use. My sites will still be spread over 3 servers but the better ones will be getting a new home.

Creationism Museum Opening was submitted today with nothing nice to say in the tags. This comment was particularly ignorant. An orthodox Jew spends a rediculous amount of time talking about “behemoth” arguing that it’s just a metaphor because the word doesn’t mean dinosaur. Slashdot rates it up of course.

Meanwhile the Bible describes the behemoth as having a tail like a cedar tree. What animals do we know of that has a tail the size of a cedar tree? Dinosaurs.

It’s amazing how much time people waste arguing about nothing.

Java Lesson 5 finally covers how to raycast floors. In the C++ raycaster I had some pretty crazy lighting stuff going on but no floors. Now I have floors but no lighting tricks. That’ll change as we progress through the tutorials.

I had found the equations for floors long ago but could never get them to work. Turns out it was a simple problem of scale. Most tutorials do a very good job of leaving out details that turn out to be very important. My own java tutorials are pretty sparse for details right now. That’ll change later. My goal right now is mostly to just move along and summarize the advances. I’ll go back and rewrite the tutorials at a later date.

Adding sound effects turned out to be pretty easy. I found a quick and dirty wav playing class on-line. After a few hours it was turned into a solid solution. I never understood the obsession with using a fixed size array when loading files into memory. Is it really that hard to check the file size and make the buffer just the right size?

Anyway, Lesson 5 is a huge advance. Lesson 6 will continue with cleaning up and improving the code. I may add one or two new key components of game programming.

Lesson 3 introduces you to loading textures and some clever ways to save memory and speed up the rendering process. This project is starting to take shape.

I’ve updated the RTSR tutorial site to be much easier to update. It’s also easier to browse around. The reason for doing this is that I’d like to get going with the Java 3D tutorials but it was hard to get motivated when putting up even a single page was a huge chore.

The Icarus-Indie Mirror is now running. The first mirror available is Project Gutenberg minus the redundant compressed files and ISOs. More will definitly be to come. I have a 150GB hard drive with over 100GB left. There’s no reason not to fill it up with files.