Mayhem! Alert! You definitively want to visit this website! It’s fun, got screaming colors and only Amiga/mod-Tunes from the chipmusic-scene on it, that will make you go smiiiiiile.

Mazemod

Mazemod is a internet-streaming-station for tracker music made with the amiga. The music collection is really good and general in a high quality. If you fall in love into special tracks or playlists, you can download them as .zip file. Almost all contents on Mazemod come with free licenses, like GPL and Creative Commons (exept the music, because every music creator decides about the licensing itself). I think the master behind the radio is Bozoo and also remarkable are the graphics from o+ro.

Scientists from University of Manchester and Dolby Canada in Vancouver have figured out a very simple method to capture textures and assign them with depth-information. You will need this to model rooms, walls or characters with specific height information, in order to set height-maps, depth-maps or albedo-maps. Capturing them was a time consuming task that had to be done by hand or that required special expensive equipment like laser-scanner. Now we got this:

If the video does not start correctly, move the slider somewhere in the middle of the video.

You just take pictures of the desired texture. One with flash, one without. Some post-processing on the colors (that differ by the color of the flashlight and specific shadows) result in the height map, we are ready to use. This technique should not give *that* accurate results, but at least it works perfectly, in relation to the cost. So, happy hacking and modeling! More details on Gizmodo and NewScientist.

If you are running low on inspiration than I have something for you. At O’Reilly there is an interview available with Andy Hertzfeld, one of the leading designers on the early Macintosh-range. This interview is not only written, but you can also listen to it as podcast, so check it out.

From the interview:

James Turner: Reading your book, it seems like the project management style for the Mac was very loose. How would you compare it to conventional project management approaches like Agile or Waterfall?



Andy Hertzfeld: I’m not sure; I don’t even know what Waterfall is. I have a pretty good idea of what Agile programming is and in a way that’s the technique we used by the Mac. But I think you know all conventional processes will make conventional products. The key thing–the key ingredient to me is the passion that developers put into their work–how much of themselves they invest in it, and I think that’s kind of orthogonal to a conventional development process. You can, you know the formal process can be whatever but the key ingredient is the passion and you know and the Mac team had passion in spades.

Lately I came across the trailer of this old british movie from 1965. Unfortunately I missed the screening of it, but it looks very interesting. Very unusual and crazy and it seems to open rooms for vintage and classic movies I never heard about before. I got the hint form the website of the Gebäude 9, where they have a very delicious movie series. Dig there, you maybe you will find something interesting.

Paris just gave me this news. The documentary “Reformat the Planet” about the Blipfestival is online for one week. So take the chance to check out the movie!

A very nice game idea had the people at Booblebrook. “Coign of Vantage” is a puzzle game, where you have the rotate a 3-dimensional object. With the mouse you have to find the right perspective, because the colored fields, that are dispersed in that “virtual 3D-box” are a pixel image. And you can see it, if you rotate that cube into the right perspective. A mouse only, no click game. The 3D-logic somehow also reminds me on Fez.

For me the game lacks some gameplay-tweaks to be a long term entertaining one, but idea and implementation are good. Try to make the sounds it plays, when you rotate the cube, for yourself “whoo-whoo”. It’ll gonna be fun.

The game starts in a browser with flash, so you are only one click away. “Coign of Vantage” by the way means something like “the right advantageous position for oberservation or action”, but in oldschool and very complicated English.

I am working on the third incarnation of my loved pixeleditor Smoove. The first version did I code on the Sony PSP using PSPLua. On a PSP with homebrew equipped, you are able to pixel on the go and save the results as bmp-file on memory stick.

That was nice, but performance limited due to Lua. Back in that days I obtained myself an Nintendo DS and was very passionate about homebrew on the DS. It was more like: “A pixeleditor right? Let’s make use of the stylo + touchscreen-bonus!”. My idea was to make Smoove DS a full-grown on-the-go application for doing tilemaps, sprites, animations and gamemaps. Unfortunately I began having troubles with reading and writing files. And what’s the use of making artwork, without the ability to save? At least I liked the usability of setting and playing with the pixels.

Go with the flow.

Three weeks ago to began, giving Smoove a third chance. This time my decision was, to use the power of the web to get things going. I use a combination of Ruby on Rails and ActionScript / FLEX. The thing you are able to play with Smoove Online at the moment is the very first release. You can draw tiles, edit palettes, shift and flip the tiles. The best feature is, that you can import and export the graphics you made in a simple markup-format. With this you can exchange graphics with friends, beloved ones or co-workers in a straightforward style. You can also change the size of the canvas with the import, play with it a little. If you like, there is a newsletter available. Subscribe to get the latest news upon the development of Smoove. There is much room for improvement! The next thing I want to implement is reading and writing the data to files – so the same obstacle the Smoove DS failed upon. Wish me luck.

UPDATE:
The Smoove-project lives on under the name HiScore Pixeleditor on iOS.