Ruby, ruby, ruby ...

Yeah it's been a while since the last posting. I was lacking some inspiration on what to blog on or I was just too lazy or too busy to actually log in and blog on something that I wanted to, that is until now...

You might ask, whats up with the title? Well I remember the song written by a band called Keizer Chiefs (spelling) named: Ruby. Now that reminds me of the Ruby scripting language which lots of people on the web is going on about. A dynamic typed language with multiple ways of saying one thing.

I was among those who agreed that Ruby was stupid, until I wanted to do a few things in Windows which Python nor other scripting languages could offer (or easily accomplish), except Ruby. Some of us would mock the guy who presented a brief crash course in Ruby, saying that it is too dynamic for our taste and it would make debugging a nightmare, etc. but doing some code delving and with the latest Netbeans language addition, which is Ruby and Ruby on Rails of course, I started to see how cool Ruby actually is.
Usually I despised dynamic typed languages until I saw how it can increase productivity and coding speed for smallish scripts, which is what I wanted for automation.

"What kind of automation?" you may ask. Well ordinary and OLE automation. Sure AutoIT is great for GUI and other windows automation but the scripting language is very BASIC (pun intended) lacking structure and (as in, I need structures as in C or C++'s structures or atleast...) object orientation. With Ruby we have good OO support and with the 'win32ole' lib, you can kick VBA and do MS Office automation via Ruby instead. A good starting site is Ruby on Windows which covers Ruby automation in MS Office. I managed to convert Powerpoint slides to somewhat formatted Word docs via Ruby, just to give you an idea.

I think I'll post a couple of script snippets later on, on what I worked on with Ruby and AutoIT for others to see and for future reference.

Just to go back to Python, some of you might say that Python does have OLE automation... I had a look at it and it looked very nasty! I wouldn't touch it, unless I looked at the wrong files, and you need to download a library for Python to have OLE automation ability. With Ruby you use the OLE objects exactly as in VBA but within your Ruby context.

Currently I am trying to implement a few operations in Ruby to have Browse-For-Folder ability, Open-Dialog, and so on functionality by doing Windows API calls via the DL lib in Ruby. You can catch a quick course on DL here.

I hope this will help you as much as it helped me.
God Bless!

Final Project Update

Hey guys!
Its 1am now and I am pleased to report that my honours project is complete.
Well its not a Hugues Hoppe version op Geometry Clipmaps but atleast its got all the basics covered. And ok it doesn't looks so good but if one has time, many wonderful things can happen. He he. ;)

Well basically my terrain can move, without moving the camera... the computer gives the illusion that you are actually moving but actually you are standing still and the world moves around you.
I also added an elevation texture just to make things a bit more distinguishable.

Well I am demoing tomorrow (well later today ;) ) and I hope that my lecturer aproves my work.

Here are some screenshots:



Looks a bit better than the green one?



Here I moved it a bit.



Here I moved it some more.

Well, not much more to report I'm afraid. If you are interrested in learning what Geometry Clipmaps is and how it works, I would really suggest you do! It was a learning experience! He he.
Well, this is LA signing off now for bed.

Much better now

I sorta fixed it now.
Now my terrain looks much better!


Ordinary


Layered view

In case you didn't notice, it features a 1k x 1k Puget Sound terrain image.
I can go up to the 16k x 16k one aswell! Just need 1 Gig of RAM! ;)

Thanks for everyone's prayers! Glory be to God and may He bless all!

Project Update

Hey guys!
Remember I said that I will upload my project progress...
Well I finally have some good pics to show.
You will see that my landscape isn't 100% but atleast it looks much better than what I wanted to show you.
The first image is from above, ordinary.
The second is also from above but with layer colors.






My Geo-clipmap uses vertex textures and vertex buffer objects. Its written in C++ with OpenGL.

Here are also a few shots taken from my ray tracer:


Has reflections


Middle sphere has refraction


Just a cool image. Feel free to use it as a wallpaper.

I don't wanna brag about this (and please don't see it that I am, I really don't want to) but I enjoy making this stuff and to show what I made for others who are interrested, to encourage them to try and make better stuff. I might give some info about this later. Graphics is for the eye to enjoy! No wonder why they call it eye candy!

My project so far

Hey guys!
I just thought that I would share my project progress with all of you who keep on hearing about my project. Please don't see this as an attempt for me to brag. Besides, it keeps my blog active ;)

Anyway, here's two forum posts if you are interrested. The second link has some screenshots of what I have so far. Sure, it may not look like much but I was exploring the wonderful world of shaders and was busy getting my project layout well structured to prevent future problems with design issues and spaghetti code.

Rendering landscape from a texture:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=405078

I see no Red in Linux:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=406526

Also, I stumbled upon this great site which features cool OpenGL and Direct3D demos mostly with source code. It has a great framework to work from aswell which allows you to create something for OGL or D3D and has a linux port available using GTK (obviously if you choose OGL).
http://www.humus.ca/index.php?page=3D&&start=0

Hope you guys like it ;)
Oh, and please don't hesitate to contact me if you would like to know about something. Programming, Linux, Christianity... I'm open for discussion! I might be busy but I always have some time to answer a question or 2! If I can't answer it, just be patient, and I'll try to answer it to the best of my abilities.

Good day and God Bless!