06/07
The European parliament has rejected pure software patents with an overwhelming majority. 648 MEP's voted against, 14 voted in favor and there where 18 absentions. This really is good news for open source developers and small software corporations in the EU.
Jonas Maebe, FFII Board Member:
This result clearly shows that thorough analysis, genuinely concerned citizens and factual information have more impact than free ice-cream, boatloads of hired lobbyists and outsourcing threats.
It is the second time the parliament votes on this directive. The first time the parliament added a lot of amendments. It then went back to the European commission for a redesign with the amendments. The commission (that is not democraticly chosen) ignored the amendments of the parliament (which is democraticly chosen) and proposed a directive that would allow pure software patents. That probably annoyed a lot of MEP's. That might be an explanation for the overwhelming rejection. Another explanation is that the MEP's that are in favor of software patents didn't like the amendments that would follow if it was passed.
The commission earlier said that it would not propose a new directive if it was rejected. So if they stick to their promise, the nightmare and uncertainty is over, for now :-). A big thanks to the FFII and everyone else that convinced the MEP's to vote against
You can read why software patents are so bad here (Dutch) or here (English)
A lot of the regular news sites have stories (2, 3 ,4) on this
Categorieën: Open Source, Politiek | Geen reacties
Today I hacked a bit on a wavefront loader. It's a fairly simple format and we used it for jaqel plus blender can export it. The loader is pretty naive and only loads the geometry (only triangles), not the materials although I added a custom texture token so it loads texture maps. The code is pretty ugly, I'll clean it up tomorrow.
I created this would-be basketball to test the application. As you can see the texture and texture coordinates where made in a hurry ;-)
The plan is to let the 'basketball' bounce inside a room to test collision detection
This is also my first OpenGL application that uses Vertex Arrays. This allows you to access your vertex data (unlike display lists) while keeping it in memory only once. This comes in handy when doing collision detection.
Categorieën: Programmeren | Geen reacties
04/07
Installed SuSE 9.3 today. The ISO's became available a month or so ago and I read that it was easier to get ATI hardware acceleration working than on 9.2 so I gave it a go, and indeed, it works now, although some "hacking" was involved, meaning it didn't work out of the box :-)
The fonts showed up a bit large , unfortunately it always takes an effort to get it right from a fresh installation.
Before installing SuSE, I added a light to the textured cubes in my OpenGL example. Next I think I'll try to write an animation.
After installing SuSE, I did some research on collision detection and I ended up with a an interesting technique for limiting the number of polygons you have to test colision with : Octrees. It's a tree structure that contains polygons. The polygons of a child node are within the bounding volume of the parent node. So if you don't colide with the parent bounding volume, there is no need to test collision with the polygons of the child node. Nice idea :-)
Categorieën: Programmeren | Geen reacties
02/07
Yesterday, I decided to learn OpenGL. Making Jaqel together with Robin was really fun and I may create another game, if I can make the effort of sticking to one project at a time :-).
Qt has very good OpenGL integration. It's really a pleasure to work with. It even converts your QImages to OpenGL ready textures.
When learning Java3D for Jaqel, even rotating a textured cube inside a small window was slow (no hardware acceleration). With OpenGL in C++, it is relatively smooth.
This is what I have so far using the NeHe tutorials :-)
Categorieën: Programmeren | Geen reacties
01/07
Trolltech released Qt 4. While there where beta versions available for quite some time, it is nice to hear that Trolltech conciders it done. This version is also GPL'ed on MS Windows, so now I can write applications for my family and friends that didn't make the switch (yet :-)
This should also make it a lot easier to write eyecandy loaded software for KDE, as the examples demonstrate.
The trolls have also created a rather embarrasing but funny movie about Qt 4.
PS: for those of you that have never heard of Trolltech/Qt, it is the basis for KDE and (in my opinion) one of the best GUI toolkits available.
Categorieën: Linux, Open Source, Programmeren | Geen reacties