d-log

Today the OpenSuSE project unleashes its latest offspring to the world. OpenSuSE 11.3 is finally officially available.

During my last installation, 11.2 at the time, more than a month after the release, I bumped into some serious errors (older AMD graphics cards had issues in a vanilla 11.2 install, the so-called black screen error – here and here) I decided I wouldn’t be a beta tester this time and give it some time.

It all looks nice and shiny, and one can see immediately that the linux world is growing up. Many distributions are making deals with companies to bundle various services.

read more »

Bookmark It

Blendernation has a video with Big Buck Bunny ‘Outtakes’ -- Bloopers. Quite hilarious, and much too short. This reminds me a bit of the Jacky Chan movies, where all the failed shots get added to the end. In some movies, that was the most entertaining part (sorry Jacky).

Bookmark It

Blender project Durian (what happened to the fruit names?) has just released its teaser. This should give you a good idea of what will be in this short movie produced by the Blender Institute.

The team now has just about 2 months left to finish this ambitious project, and the tension is mounting. Deadlines ahead!

Bookmark It

After getting increasingly dissatisfied with the service from Codesion, ImpressCMS decided to switch to another provider. We had few requirements, and so we started searching for a solution based upon those:

• free or affordable for our budgets
• Subversion
• Trac

We also thought of the possibility of doing the hosting ourselves, but that would mean an investment of time and effort, which would be unavailable for other tasks. Overall, we thought it was best to let specialized service providers handle that kind of non-core activity. read more »

Bookmark It

There is an interview with Brett Seyler at Gamasutra. He discusses why he left GarageGames to go to Unity3d, and what he would have done if the opportunity to work with them wouldn’t have been available. An interesting read.

Brett still posts on the GarageGames forums (or TorquePowered, depending whether the new name catches on). Keeping tabs on the competition I guess

Bookmark It

In this post, I’ll try to describe the steps I had to make to get a working Trac installation on Dreamhost. A few months back, Dreamhost started providing a one-click advanced installation package for trac 0.11.1 . With this package, you can get a working trac installation in a few simple steps. You can even use the Dreamhost panel to upgrade to the latest version, if a new release is made.

Trac is a very powerful package, but installing it (and getting it to work) on Dreamhost hasn’t been easy. Several shell scripts exist that provide a Trac installation, but they all need some manual tinkering.

In theory, the one-click installers at Dreamhost are just that : one click, and you have a ready-to-go setup. In the case of Trac, the installation you obtain by simply using the one-click install is not quite usable nor complete. read more »

Bookmark It

This second part of the first ImpressCMS IPF webcast gives a walkthrough of the blocks functionality, which was recently rewritten using IPF.

Next webcast in this session is on Monday 14 December 2009, at 21:00 (GMT)

Bookmark It

Torque Powered

Alpha Release – quicker than expected

Garagegames has just posted the first Alpha of Torque3D on the website for the current licensees of Torque3D Professional. This was a surprise for many, as the current communications coming out of Garagegames were all around the ongoing development of Torque2D, the successor to the Torque Game Builder.

Not much was known in advance about what was going to be in the Torque3D 1.1 release, and some rumours were that it would be a paid upgrade. I was happy to see that it wasn’t the case.

New Features

While Torque3D 1.0 was quite stable, quite some features scheduled to be added later.Some features, like the road editor, felt a bit light on features at the beginning. That has been remedied, and much quicker than any of us could have hoped. Let me give you some highlights of what’s coming: read more »

Bookmark It

I’ve been tinkering with Inkscape lately, a free vector drawing tool, and I’m slowly getting more confident with it. I want the 3mension.com look to be up-to-date and web 2.0-ish, so I have to learn how to make those glossy icons with a hint of depth and reflection. I found some icon creation tutorials, and that’s what I’m wading through now.

I might not wait until these icons have been finalized to launch the site. After all, there hasn’t been anything tangible on the 3mension.com front I was able to show for far too long. I can blame the skiing holidays and some changed at my day-job for that, but that doesn’t change the outcome : nothing yet.

links:

• A basic workflow to create icons with Inkscape
• Icon related tutorials
• Shiny Buttons by Nicu
• Rubber stamp by Nicu
• Chrome effect tutorial by Troy James

Much inspiration here, I’ll post samples as I finish them.

Bookmark It