Medieval Programming

Many computer games just recycle old ideas. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is the same. Really no new ideas. Old game concept, old game mode, old game engine, even an old storyline. But wait. There is something really interesting.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 allows you to customize your alter ego. Okay, old idea, many other games do that as well. The really interesting part is that they have webcam support.

You can take a frontal picture of yourself, get quite precise instructions how to set up lighting and how to position your head. The same for a 90degree left turned head. After you are done taking these two pictures the game prompts you to click a few points (about 6) on each picture. After doing so you will get your own head put onto your character. Surprisingly this works really well. I assume the points required try to get the outline and a few spots in between for placing the picture as texture on the head wireframe.

Want to see my picture? the skin is slightly darker as I took it late in the night

The quality is more than I did expect. Of course people are use to my long hair, while this elite soldier does have a nearly shaved hairstyle.

There are many aspects of this feature that are interesting:

• Was this really on the feature list for the game?
• Why did this feature make into the game but most of the rest is totally buggy?
• Why does it work really well?
• Are we going to see more of this customization in future games?

Thanks for that quote, Nick, that one was delighting my morning.

I am a bit frustrated.

I actually do like web page layouts that prevent scrolling of some content. Why? Because i have a 1680 resolution here and I really appreciate that some navigation stays in place. Even for small resolutions the loss of a few pixels is a gain of usability.

So far I have only seen and used two different techniques that do not use frames of any kind.

1. Div-Puzzle
   In a Div-Puzzle you use some amount of divs to fill the screen. All these divs stay in place, most likely using an absolute css positioning. There is quite likely a “content” div that will be the only one that has a visible overflow.
   While this div puzzle works nice for many designs I tried so far it exposes some issues:
   1. Browser Quirks
      There are quite a lot of hacks required to get this working correctly and place all the puzzle pieces where they should belong in all browsers.
   2. 100% Issue
      It is even more complicated to get 100% width and/or height on all those elements where you want. Its possible, but depending on the nesting not very nice.
   3. Scroll Detection
      While many PC browsers manage to find out that there is only one div that can be scrolled, mobile browsers hardly can deal with that. Also scrolling wheel sometimes only works when the mouse is over the main scrolling div. Also the scrollbar will mess up the design. If its not only being it ugly looking, its also of different width when its not there. iPhone uses need to double scroll to be able to scroll inside.
2. Fixed-Framing
   In this technique, you put all your main stuff to the body element. This is good for browsers, because that is what they want to have. In addition you build some divs that contain navigation or just background images. These divs get a fixed position and a higher z-index than the body. In addition the body gets some padding so it makes sure that no content will be under the frame. This solution seems to have less downsides for me:
   1. Format
      As the padding is required for this solution to work only rectangular window from the frame is easily possible.
   2. Browser Display
      At least my S60 browser displays the frame initially fine. But on scrolling it has redraw issues, hiding the content which is scrolled over (but which is actually fixed on a higher z-layer)

Are there any other good ideas for realizing a nice layout like the ones I implemented on www.tempus-vivit.net or www.hma-info.de ?

Especially I am interested in “legal footer” solutions. I can live with the footer beeing relatively positioned to the end of the page, lets say with some 30 pixels spacing. However on larger resolutions, where the main content of the page filles only 50% of it, I still want the footer to be at the bottom of the page, as I think having the footer in the center of the screen distracts and looks ugly

I am very happy that I was invited as speaker to the symfony camp conference this year. The conference is happening on the 12th and 13th of September at Dutch Open Projects.

Fabien will have a talk on symfony 1.2 release, and as I am the release manager for 1.2, I am pretty sure I will have some appearance there.

But I also will have an own session about “Performance”. I am not sure on what exactly I will put focus, but I got already some slides prepared Perhaps somebody has ideas, wishes, questions?

Performance is actually a very nice topic, so I can share expertise of codecentric, as we do a lot of performance consulting and trainings.

As I am talking about it some more shameless advertising. codecentric also published a press release about us 5 people starting in July. And, yes, I also have a Team-Page now

So, hope to see you at the camp! Or hear from you with content for the presentation (don’t worry, I have enough in case nobody wants something specific)! Or get some Java inquiries

I yesterday published my first post in our corporate blog. It was an attempt to compare Java and PHP, using some historic backgrounds and comparing the evolution.

Even if it came out close in favour of Java, its really interesting to see that its pretty hard to compare those langages, because the language actually doesnt matter that much nowadays. I think we are about to reach the next level of programming language. Its the framework abstraction level. You no longer choose cobol for accounting and c++ for games, but you can choose between a financial and a gaming framework in any language.

Please be gentle with that blog post. Its not meant as criticism on either Java or PHP and sure its far from perfect. Thats basically the point of blogging. you can write about things you might have thought through, but which isnt really on a solid foundation

Hewlett-Packard was so kind to invite us to the new film from Dreamworks: Kung-Fu Panda.

While the film itself is nice, and from technology point of view very good, I am still shocked that this is supposed to be a film for kids. Okay there are very cute animals jumping around, but 3/4 of the playtime were martial arts scenes. I think they copied quite a lot from Matrix films, Neo fighting Agent Smith. At least thats what the exaggeration of violence shows. Not many original Kung-Fu films show the Kung-Fu Masters jumping kilometers up and landing with making a crater.

Of course there was a non violent aspect in the film that would have fit for a kids movie: Trust your own strength. Believe in yourself.

But for me, this film never would have been rated Teen. if you are unsure wether to watch it with your children, here my main critism:

• Intro sequence shows a Panda bear killing thousands of attacking black shapes/animals. Also the commendatory uses wording like killing annihilate
• The evil character fights against a lot of guards, that will get their weapons returned to them. E.g. on scene where the guard was smashed with their own mace into their head.
• The fight between good and bad is about life and death. This is reflected in how the scenes are made up and the wording used. Its not about beating the opponent, its about killing the enemy.
• The fights are not won because of wits the good characters show, but about sheer power or strength. This also leads to very exaggerated fighting scenes like described above.

So from my perspective Dreamsworks either failed to make a Kids movie or did apply the wrong label to it.

If you expect something like martial arts film, or a mix of Matrix and Star Wars (Master Yoda is back ) but with cute animated animals, then this film is something for you.