AncienT RituaL News Feed

Arcturus playing in Athens

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Hello... it's been a while. This short post is dedicated to a beautiful band called Arcturus.

Arcturus formed many many years ago by a bunch of talented guys as a side musical project. Through experimentation and fresh ideas the band, eventually, became one of those side projects that exceeds the main ones in almost every aspect. In 2005 the guys released their masterpiece album and a year later a DVD as encore, after that the band was put to rest. The main projects demanded more time, the main projects eventually won.

A few years passed and the guys realized that people love Arcturus too much. They move, dream, wake and sleep with their music. So, the band reformed to play a few selective live shows. One of those shows was in Athens, my home town. The Greek underground metal scene always had an affection for Arcturus and the audience in the 4rth of February just proved that they still do. I don't know who intervened and brought Arcturus to Athens but I'm glad he did.

When I first heard about the live I felt half happy, half skeptical. The show was advertised only by a bunch of Greek web sites. The band does not have an official site, no myspace, no facebook that I know of. Doubt was a logical reaction. The weeks passed and I decided to buy a couple of tickets no matter what. They looked authentic so my doubts were put to rest.

The excitement was running through my pants and into the street as I was running to the venue. The left hand was close to my pocket feeling the tickets and with the other I was holding and pulling the recipient of the second ticket. We arrived ahead of time, removed our extra clothing and positioned ourselves in the best possible spot. The show started and... it was just great.

I have seen Gagarin more crowded in the past, this time and for this band I was expecting more. Maybe it was the lack of advertising, maybe the fucking economic crisis. Who knows. The band seemed to enjoy the show, they were pretty smiley for Norwegians. Then again maybe it was the "bad" smokes they were doing prior and during the show. Who knows.

Closure, closure, closure. Don't know what to say at this point...

"Third night in flight
My body says no but my mind says go
go go go go goooo"...

Poetry - The flesh doctrine: Part I

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

If you want to interpret the "poem" for your selves dont read this paragraph right away, read the "poem" first and then come later for the interpretation from the writer's point of view. This "poem" is basically a narration that comes from a lost soul. With the help of a second person, a woman, it describes the Hell as the writer imagines it. A cold barren place where the lost souls wonder around unable to communicate with each other. The light is so dim that they cannot recognise the faces of each other. Cold, dark and silent. The narrator is a soul that haven't lost its hope. The hope for the rise of the dead, the day that all the lost will march above, the day that they will reclaim the beauty of flesh. In a following "poem" I will present the notion of "flesh" and the role it plays in our lives. The flesh is a synonym for our desires.

Touch her skin
to feel her wounds
speak to her
blank words she will respond
or reply with just a nod

What do you hope you
can find inside her?
The body is in molten decay
receptacle of a hollow space

Where do you think her
train of thought leads?
The rails are melting
the train derailed,
randomly moves away and fades
renders her mind insane

Silent plea for a sound
even for a noise
but no, everything's in silence
what blocks the sound of her voice?

Diffident with her arms around the face
if you move her
she will stay right there
oh, it feels so cold in this place

In these barren lands
holes in the ground vomiting
blue flames and poisonous gas
These are the so called "endless nights"

And in this flawed and dim light
only her siluete can be revealed
and her once beautiful face
in this hell will never shine again
Until the Day she will remain defaced

From ages ago and on
this was my home
faceless souls, darkness,
silence and cold
But I hope!

Hope is all I have and never lost
Hope that one day I shall reborn
and I shall march with the legions along
in front of heaven's doors

Forgotten world be prepared
holding your arms, wait
the rebirth succeeding their death
the rise of the undead

The erotic poetry
of the man-eating man
blending alchemy with love
and the doctrine of flesh
shall become a Gospel
and the once rotten
as beautiful will rise
over skies and over gods

And I wish and I wait
patience is all I have left
for the uprise of the flesh
in a war where some may be lost
I stand prepared!...

A tale of GPU upgrades (1999 - 2011)

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

My first experience with a computer was at a very early age. My father owned an IBM compatible PC two years after my birth so you can say that I had experience with computers practically since ever. For many years I was using my father's PCs for web surfing and occasionally for gaming, none of these PCs had a dedicated 3D accelerator. This continued until 1999 when my father bought me my very own PC. It was running on a S3 Savage 4 with 16MB of VRAM. The VGA was dissent for the time but I kept it for one year, it was until I felt the need for my first upgrade.

My initial choice was an nVidia TNT 2 but it was pretty expensive at the time so I compromised with a Voodoo 3 3300 from 3Dfx with 16MB of VRAM. I dont remember if I saw any difference in speed but one thing that bugged me was that I went from 16 & 32bit color to 16bit only. I remember playing Shadowman (from Acclaim) and actually experiencing worst graphics with the Voodoo. Fortunately at that time 32bit color was a luxury and apart from a few games it never bugged me again.

After one year and after following the suggestion of a friend I bought a Geforce 2 MX with 32MB of VRAM. The new GPU featured hardware transform and lighting but it was the low range model of the Geforce 2 series. I dont really remember much from this card because after one year I bought once again a new one.

The new purchase was a Geforce 4 Ti and at this point you have to forgive me because I cannot recall the number of the model. It featured 64MB of VRAM and it was my first GPU with programmable hardware. I remember that it was pretty fast but as you have guest from now it only lasted a year. I sold it to a close friend and he used it for many years without problems.

The next purchase was an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB of VRAM somewhere around 2003/2004. With this GPU I played many great games like Half Life 2 and Doom 3. In 2004 I bought a laptop with a mobile ATI Radeon 9200 and I gave my desktop to my brother. That desktop suffered allot in my brother's hands and now it sits in my storeroom waiting for a GPU replacement. Apparently this poor GPU was the first that died but not from my fault.

In 2008 or 2009 I bought a new desktop PC with an nVidia 8800 GTS and 380MB of VRAM. AnKi 3D engine first run in this GPU. This VGA is still working, pretty much in dally basis, in my other brother's PC.

The period to upgrade GPU changed radically and duplicated. Two years ago I got an ATI Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB VRAM which I still own and use. Its a pretty decent piece of hardware but for many months it suffered from driver issues in Linux.

So lets recap:

1. S3 Savage 4 16MB
2. 3Dfx Voodoo 3 3300 16MB
3. nVidia Geforce 2 MX 32MB
4. nVidia Geforce 4 xxx Ti 64MB
5. ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
6. nVidia 8800 GTS 380MB
7. ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB

According to the schedule the time for a new purchase is closing. I rarely use my GPUs for gaming now but I want lots of new generation features for experimentation with 3D graphics programming. The 4870 successor will be DX11/OpenGL 4.x compatible so I can play with tessellation and other cool new features. Hope you enjoyed this sort tale. ...

2011 a great year for video gaming

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT

It's been some time since the last update. The truth is that I didn't have much to share except for some technical articles. I try to keep AncienT RituaL clean of such hardcore stuff and for that reason you can find these articles in AnKi's developers blog. Following the recent announcement of Duke Nukem Forever's release date lets see why 2011 seems like a great year for video games.

First of all its DNF that will finally ship this May after 12 years of development. I remember myself reading previews and seeing screenshots when I was still attending school. The years passed and the initial enthusiasm succeeded by skepticism and disbelieve especially after the 3DRealms closure fiasco. Anyway, it seems that DNF is coming.

Aside Duke there are quite a few great titles due to release this year. Starting from the most wanted to the least most wanted the notable ones are:

- The Witcher 2
- Duke Nukem Forever
- Mass Effect 3
- Rage
- Deus Ex 3
- Dragon Age 2

Honorable mentions: Brink, Bulletstorm, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim ...

AnKi 3D engine development site

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

AnKi 3D engine has now a development site that will feature all the AnKi related news as well as programming tips and other interesting software engineering stuff.

www.anki3d.org

So, update your bookmarks!...

Embedding Python in C++ applications

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Embedding a scripting language to a C++ application is very useful and it has various applications. You can build cross platform plugins without touching and compiling C++ code. The scripted plugins run in multiple platforms, they are safer than native code but they are much slower. Every game engine out there has some form of scripting and AnKi needed one as well. After a long research period the idea of using boost::python seemed appealing and easy to implement. The pain in the ass is to write glue code and boost::python seems to handle it pretty well. You can find the prototype in my SVN repository.

Also (as a bonus) you can find how to embed Qt applications using QtScript. This works pretty well also. Find it in the same repository....

Android, Google, Oracle and the SDK

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I've been fooling around with the Android SDK. The main language for Android development is Java but not exactly the Java we all know. The main reason behind this claim is because the Android's Java implements only subset of Java core libraries and secondly because the compiler does not produce Java bytecode but another type of bytecode meant for the Dalvik virtual machine. Despite the fact that the Android API is exposed through Java there is a way to write (dynamic) libraries in C/C++ using the Android NDK. The purpose of NDK is to be able to write new native libraries or to compile existing ones without the speed penalty of the Dalvik VM. The NDK creates a number of dynamic libraries (.so), one for every Android supported platform (currently for ARM in two flavors and soon x86). Nevertheless, only a subset of the Android API is exposed in C/C++ with the UI to be Java exclusive. Moreover, the implementation of C++ STL library is an incomplete version of the STL we all know and love. That's a bummer but it is somewhat justified by the fact that STL containers have a certain memory penalty and the Android devices work in a very limited memory space. The good news is that the OpenGL ES API is totally exposed from NDK and Java as well and this is unlikely to change in a future release.

After this short prologue of how things are in the Android development world we will see another issue that recently came to the surface. Oracle, owner of Java, sued Google for improper use of Java language (patents and stuff). Oracle's claim may be justified by the fact that Google changed the main motivation that created Java itself, "compile once, run anywhere".

Even if its difficult to predict how things will develop, this situation may be a good opportunity for a change in the philosophy behind Android development. Java is a well structured language, offers platform abstraction but its not as fast as native code. C and C++ on the other hand are very difficult to develop and they are not known for their portability, especially C++. You can create multiple binaries just like NDK does but who will guaranty you that your application will run as it should on every platform? C++ portability is a joke. In numerous occasions I've found myself in front of incompatibilities even when compiling between different versions of GCC. Imagine what will happen between platforms. It will be a mess.

Another great idea is to use another great virtual machine, LLVM. LLVM is very low level and closer to native code than Dalvik bytecode is. It also offers a number of front ends like C (clang), C++ (under development) and a few other from non-LLVM developers like Python, Java and even Google's own language Go. LLVM will offer platform abstraction with the developers to be able to chose their preferred language. Also note that LLVM is very fast (check this Phoronix tests). The main problem behind this idea is that Google may have to expose the API in numerous front ends and secondly LLVM is not that well tested in large scale projects, especially the non-C front ends. Also we dont know if its suited for mobile platforms. It would be great though to be able to write in C++ and compile some libraries in native and some others in LLVM bytecode and combine them.

Some say that Google may use its own language, Go. I think this is a joke. Go is a functional language and it cannot be compared with the ease of use of Java or any other object oriented language.

Every platform has its strengths and its weaknesses. Google cannot make everyone happy and now that a major lawsuit is on the game may radically change. I hope that Google wont give up on Java in favor of Apple's monstrosity, Objective C. Ok that's a joke, this will never happen....

Bullet physics demos

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I have been messing around with bullets lately... I mean I've been researching Bullet physics engine because I want to integrate it into AnKi 3D engine. I've created a couple of demos, a particle emitter and a character demo with more following soon. Bullet's original demos are very good but you need to read lots of lines of code to understand a simple thing. Download them from this SVN repository at google code.

PS: To download: svn co http://godlike-projects.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/bullet-demos bullet-demos

PS2: Unix makefiles at the moment

PS3: Bullet needs to be in ../../bullet or change the makefiles...