OpenDemo

Rage

2011-10-20T19:07:00.000+02:00

I play it in Wine, which works surprisingly well.

More time

2011-07-13T08:24:00.003+02:00

After a long time it looks like I've got a bit more time for software related stuff. I already looked at fluid simulation, 3D camera tracking and some other very interesting things. Probably something Android related will come out of all this.

Transition to Half-Empty finished

2009-11-17T09:10:00.002+01:00

Now no reference (that I'm aware of) to PlanetQuake exists any more at the new place demospecs.half-empty.de. My old email address at PlanetQuake does still work but this may stop any day now. So please better use the new one, which you can find all over the place at the new Demo Specs page.

Hopefully I find the time to add new material. With id Tech 5 coming next year maybe I should finally publish some id Tech 4 findings.

2nd Dan Taekwondo

2009-11-16T09:30:00.009+01:00

Over the weekend I passed the 2nd Dan exam in traditional Taekwon-Do.

On Saturday I had to demonstrate the pattern Eul-Ji Hyeong and had to fight a free sparring against two opponents. Both held a piece of wood, which I had to break with a technique fitting into the fight. For one board I used a "normal" 180° Pandae-Dollyo-Chagi with the right foot and for the other a 360° Pandae-Dollyo-Chagi with the left foot. This took place in the Black Belt Center in Gräfelfing near Munich, Germany.

On Sunday I had to perform another three breaking tests right out of (movements 12, 17, and 27) the Euil-Ji Hyeong pattern. One Twio-yop-Chagi, one Twio-tora-yop-Chagi, and lastly a Twio-Ap-Chagi. This second and last part of the exam took place in Lauf an der Pegnitz near Nuremberg, Germany.

If you look closely at the big flag behind Grandmaster Kown, Jae-Hwa (7th Dan, examiner), myself (totally exhausted), and my Master Claus Bernet (4th Dan), all this took place in preparation for the celebration of "45 Years Taekwon-Do in Europe" next year.

PlanetQuake to Half-Empty transition

2009-10-19T13:30:00.002+02:00

Since 1998 I had my DemoSpecs page at PlanetQuake. Now finally GameSpy decided to stop all free hosting. So I got my own domain and I'm currently moving DemoSpecs over to Half-Empty. I already copied over the web pages and now I have to purge all references to PlanetQuake and FilePlanet.

Machinima on the radio

2008-11-10T09:34:00.005+01:00

The Austrian radio station ORF1 did a short machinima show on Sunday (November 9, 2008). The (German) abstract is available online. Richard Brem did the interview with me about two weeks ago at my place and I'm featured quite a bit in this show.

I did a recording of the audio stream with mimms, cut it later at the right positions and re-encoded it with ffmpeg and have now a 30 minutes MP3 file (14.4MB).

Games Convention & OpenStreetMap

2007-08-17T14:40:00.000+02:00

Next week is the Games Convention 2007 and I'll be there speaking friday and saturday 2:30 pm at the booth of animationsprojekt.de (hall 5, B21). They already showed machinima in several workshops last year. But unfortunately, I had no time back then.

Just have a look a OpenStreetMap.org. It's a wiki-like mapping project, which tries to map the whole world. I already contributed some GPS track logs and added some streets in my neighbourhood. It's highly addictive!

PlanetQuake web page, Games Convention, Taekwon-Do

2006-08-26T23:26:00.000+02:00

Finally I got again access to PlanetQuake and as such could update the demo specs page. Only the FilePlanet download links still don't work. I think I still got the wrong access data for it.
This week is the Games Convention with several Machinima workshops in Leipzig but unfortunately I cannot participate because I just returned yesterday form a taekwon-do training camp in Trins, Tirol, Austria. Twice a day training and 6 hours mountain hiking. As the highest graduated student I had to do some organisation work as well. That was a tough week indeed.

LMPC 3.4.2

2006-08-15T19:11:00.000+02:00

There is a new version of LMPC. Version 3.4.2 can finally decode Duke Nukem 3.D recordings from the newer versions 1.3D, 1.4, and 1.5. You can download it from SourceForge. The compression algorithm was changed and the innermost data format was changed. What a mess!

Trouble with web pages

2006-08-15T18:38:00.000+02:00

Currently I have problems updating my web pages.
www.machinima.com does not let me in any more (account is blocked and won't be opended up again). Thus I can't update my OpenDemo page at http://www.machinima.com/opendemo any more. My blog (you read it just now) is also placed at this site, thus I had to move it back to the free blogspot hosting site.
My other page at www.planetquake.com/demospecs was moved over to http://demospecs.planetquake.gamespy.com but somehow also the ftp access was changed. I already asked the tech support of GameSpy but got no response for two weeks. Too bad!
I think I'll have finally to buy my own domain to stop all this wandering around.

Duke 3D, re-visited

2006-06-24T23:08:00.000+02:00

Duke 3D was used many years ago in neuro science: give people a task in the game and look with NMR, what happens in their brain. As far as I can remember, they used a patched binary of Duke Nukem 3D 1.3, which wrote out the absolute coordinates of the player over the time. The DMO recording format contains only the input actions and is not really helpful here (in my opinion).
Now I got new request from this science area to correct my DMO specs and LMPC, because the DMO text file does not represent the actual actions done. I was never quite sure about the DMO format but the requests from other people centered only around quake games, thus I never really finished the DMO support.
I tried (with partly success) to use the old MS-DOS binary of Duke Nukem 3D 1.3 (shareware) in DOSEMU under Linux (Suse Linux 10.1). In DOSBOX under Linux it did not work at all. I compiled the CVS source from cvs.icculus.org (only one small error to correct). But this gave me Duke Nukem 3D 1.5, where the DMO file format is slightly different.
I updated LMPC to read the new DMO header but the data compression still makes problems. Then I looked at the actual input data and found, that my old DMO description is indeed completely wrong. I updated this part of LMPC too.
The next step is to bring the DOSEMU method to run at last to check, if the new input format is correct. Then I'll copy the new uncompression routines out the published source code and incorporate it in LMPC. In the end LMPC will hopefully be able to understand all variants of DMO. Then is a good time to update the DMO specs and release a new LMPC.
I was a bit injured during the tae kwon do class last monday and can't currently participate. Thus I expect to get all this Duke stuff done fairly quickly.

LMPC 3.4.1 is ready for download

2006-03-04T18:54:00.001+01:00

LMPC 'Deggendorf' got its proper name LMPC 3.4.1 and can now be downloaded from the LMPC home page.
To be honest, I did not learn really much in adding Q3A support to LMPC. Possibly it's more interesting to finally finish the OpenDemo cutter GUI, which I wrote in wxPerl.

LMPC 'Deggendorf' supports Q3A

2006-03-02T13:56:00.000+01:00

I found the last bug in my DM3 writer code for LMPC. Now LMPC can read and write binary and text DM3 files (all 4 transformations are completely implemented).
The next steps included cosmetic code improvements and the removing of all the now not needed Q3A source code. I'll update the documentation, the recording faq etc. and will produce a new LMPC release - code name "Deggendorf".
I choosed this code name because I hurt myself during a taekwon-do school opening demonstration in Deggendorf. Due to this problem I cannot go to the usual taekwon-do classes and now have a lot more free time to improve LMPC.

Basic parser for Q3A ready

2006-02-19T17:48:00.000+01:00

Unlike my last posting could suggest, entity parsing was easy too. Sometimes it helps to read the writing half of a communication. I just added "gamestate" parsing and now my one and only recording can be transferred into text without any "still unknown" parts. I know, that parsing of "servercommand" and "download" is still missing but I'm not sure how to create recordings with such a content and my code needs testing.
Next, I'll play against some bots and record the action to get a better input example. Then I'll think about a better representation. Maybe I can remove all these "EOF" tags from the text output.
Please download the LMPC source via CVS and try yourself!

DM3 file format brings in new problems

2006-02-19T13:25:00.000+01:00

I just implemented the first part of the snapshot parsing (general data and player data), which was fairly easy. I looked then at the entity data. These are encoded in the end just like the player data with a clever field re-ordering and delta-encoding (only changed data appear in the demo file). But the fact, which entity appears in a given snapshot is not encoded completely in the snapshot itself but it possibly needs an internal state just like the game itself. This would mean I have to re-create a complete state machine with many former frames and all the entities in there.
Just read the function CL_ParsePacketEntities() in the file cl_parse.c to understand what I mean. It is not really clear, which entities should be read with CL_DeltaEntity() just by looking at the input file. I need a bit more time to think about it.

Machinima in TV show

2006-02-18T18:13:00.000+01:00

The short machinima part in the 3sat TV show on the Berlinale film festival was a bit disappointing: it was about 4 minutes long, contained some really basic interviews and showed some seconds of machinimas. The whole machinima movement was shown as a hobby thing made by nerds and not as new way to produce film. They even showed a HL2 movie and did not detect the revolutionary face movement quality. Of course, all this machinima stuff could make cinema and even the more traditional TV obsolete. Thus, TV people must laugh at this looming danger! On a personal side, I did two break tests in the taekwon-do class just for the camera but they are not shown. That's show business.

LMPC plus Q3A grows and grows. Now LMPC can parse the command name of the first command in a message. Up to this point, I used from the Q3A source only the basic message parse functions (MSG_*) but I hope, that I can use now the full source of the command parse routines directly.

Machinima in TV, LMPC + Q3A

2006-02-08T20:19:00.000+01:00

Yesterday a camera team from Lizard Medienproduktion came to my place and made a short interview about machinima and my involvement. At the end they even filmed me during a Taekwon-Do class in Garching. My master used the opportunity and let me do two break tests (leg and hand).
Part of this will be sended in the so called computainment show "neues" (news) at the channel 3sat. The sending date is Saturday, february 11, 2006, 5.00-5.30 pm GMT+1. I'll record a MPEG2 file (via DVB-t) of this show. Maybe www.machinima.com can distribute the 4 minutes about machinima.
This installment of "neues" is fully dedicated to the Berlinale film festival, which starts tomorrow. And where else should machinima be mentioned, if not in a computer show, which reports from a film festival?

A much more down-to-earth thing is, that I just checked into the LMPC source a basic binary to text translator for Q3A, which understands currently only the top-layer block structure (no internal game data) but it is a start and now I know again my old program and can remember how to create the internal node tree.

LMPC with Q3A support - start of implementation

2006-02-06T08:18:00.000+01:00

Over the weekend I copied the demo relevant files from the Q3A source into the directory src/quake3 of LMPC. Then I activated by default the already existing DM3 support in the main compile infrastructure files and started implementing. First I converted the Q3A source from DOS line endings to UNIX line endings, changed all the C++ comments to standard C comments, and removed some GCC warnings. The next step was to create the library libquake3.a, which should contain all the needed parts of the Q3A source. I had to add several header files to make this happen.
The last step was to implement the function isDM3bin() in the file src/udm3.c. Thus the LMPC option --info works now on Q3A demo files too. All the rest will follow.
As usual I'll first implement the "binary read -> text write" part. To simplify this I'll use the already existing "node-tree as text" output code, which creates not XML but my own structured text (known from DEM, QWD, and DM2 text files). It's easy to write a XML backend later on.

Q3A source - running in SuSE Linux 9.3

2005-08-21T03:42:00.000+02:00

I just compiled the published Q3A source code: it simply works regardless of the used compiler (SuSE 9.3 comes with GCC 3.3.5 20050117). The only thing I had to do was to convert some text files from DOS line endings (0x0d 0x0a) to UNIX line endings (0x0a). This was needed for the 'make' replacement 'code/unix/cons' (which is written in Perl) and for almost all game source code files (already known from the SDK) because the LCC compiler (used for byte code creation) is very picky about line endings in pre-processor directives (#include, #define).

From a demo analysing standpoint the files 'code/qcommon/msg.c', 'code/qcommon/huffman.c', and 'code/client/cl_parse.c' were especially interesting for me. With the GPL license it would be even possible to simply use most of these files in LMPC (which is GPL too).

Q3A source - finally available

2005-08-20T23:48:00.000+02:00

Get the Q3A source now from id.

I'll try to get it compile under Linux with standard versions of the GCC. The documentation of the source code speaks about a needed GCC 2.95, which was definitely the last fast compiling GCC but it is no longer included in any current Linux distribution. SuSE 10 will contain GCC 4.0.

Q3A source - any relevance for LMPC ?

2005-08-18T19:55:00.000+02:00

As we all know, the Quake 3 Arena source code (minus PunkBuster) will be released under the GPL soon. Now I could finally add Q3A support in LMPC. Would anyone be interested in such an addition?

What text file format would be nice?

The old self-made LMPC text format with "keyword values;" or "keyword { block }"

A similar format but as XML

A XML format, which is as near as possibile to the OpenDemo Q3A DTD

A feature like seeking in DM3 files is finally not out of reach any more. But this would be another project.

Black Belt photo

2005-08-03T14:31:00.001+02:00

Finally I got a photo from my black belt exam. Guess who I am.

Black Belt

2005-07-23T23:36:00.001+02:00

Today I passed my exam to the first dan (black belt) in traditional taekwon-do.
The test was held in Erlangen (Germany) and the examiner was
Grandmaster Kwon, Jae-Hwa.

Now, you can call me doctor and master ;-)

2005-02-08T15:51:00.000+01:00

Over a year ago (actually directly after the Machinima Film Festival 2003), I started working on the OpenDemo Cutter tool. First I created a Perl version of DEMcut but for OpenDemo files.
Later I found, that a much bigger audience could be reached by adding a GUI on top. There are many GUIs for Perl available and after some looking around and checking I decided to give wxPerl a try. This is a Perl binding for the wxWidgets library. This library does not draw its own widgets but uses on all supported platforms the apropriate native widgets. In the end you end up with a cross-platform GUI in a simple script.
I started implementing this GUI in wxPerl but it was really an uphill battle. To place all the GUI elements by hand is difficult and time consuming. And this prevents the program to evolve fast. It simply takes too much time to change the already existing GUI. And so the OpenDemo cutter tool slowly faded away.
Last weekend I finally looked at GUI designers for wxWidgets and found wxGlade, which could create Perl code for wxPerl (besides C++ and Python). After a small learning phase I could recreate all the already existing GUI code and even more. For the first time I accept, that a graphical oriented tool is useful for something (even if it is only creating Perl code).

The OpenDemo Cutter tool will become strong again and I hope to include it officially in the next OpenDemo release.

Here you see again my main driving force: learn something new and use it for a real (hopefully demo related) project.

DOOM 3 SDK

2005-01-20T22:19:00.000+01:00

Finally I finished the single player part of DOOM 3. Yes, I know, I'm a slow player. The next step was to install the DOOM 3 SDK for Linux.

Besides the strange build system, which uses SCons instead of the usual GNU make it looks very promising with all the included source code.

Q3A had a problem with files: it could only access files in the game directory but it looks like DOOM 3 can access any OS file via the fileSystem object, which has the OpenExplicitFileRead() and OpenExplicitFileWrite()method. I'll try it out.

This is really important because the nice remote control mode of OpenDemo is based on a named pipe from the playback GUI to the game program. MS Windows cannot place named pipes in an arbitrary directory, a simple feature, which all other OSes have no problem with. MS Windows has a special file system type for named pipes, which means the using program (here DOOM 3) has to be able to access an arbitrary directory.