.August.01.2004.: And yes, another link has been added. This is to the blog site of a Filipino game designer Gabby Dizon. Gabby is part of the Anino Entertainment team who recently came out with the first Filipino PC game here... .

A new tutorial is nearly finished...watch out for it.... I'll announce it again (as my previous tutorials did) on GameDev.net and FlipCode.com. Hopefully, they still announce these stuffs as I notice that GameDev.net's news is more focused on industry news now.

.July.03.2004.: A new link has been added to the links page. It is a link to toymaker.info. Keith Ditchburn (the site's owner) and I have agreed to swap links on our sites. Keith used to be a game programmer (whose last game was "Emperor Battle for Dune" published by Westwood Studios) and is now a lecturer on games programming. His site has got resources and various information useful for game developer wannabes and professionals alike.

Not much else is happening right now. I'm learning J2ME programming (MIDP 1.0 right now). Developing a game for the mentioned platform reminds me of developing a Java applet .

Oh yeah, I've also added one screenshot of MantisGL. The previous screenshots weren't showing its ability to blend different textures on the terrain. Hope you guys like it.

.June.22.2004.: Oh men...I got sick for two days...I started to get feverish on, guess what, my graduation day! (what are the chances of that happening?!? ). I had to skip work two days...my head hurt and my stomach wasn't feeling all that well either. Anyway, I'm OK now.

I'm thinking of opening a new category on my tutorials page, one that will deal with digital image processing. I've started dabbling with it a few days back and it's not as hard as many people think (those image correlation, Sobel/Roberts edge-detection, Hausdorff bitmap image matching, Gaussian blurs, etc.). And I'm not talking about how to do it in Adobe PhotoShop...I'm a developer, not an artist.... I'm no expert in this field, mind you, and I still need references for the equations for each method. Prerequisite might be the knowledge of SDL_image though.

Hmm...maybe a simple tutorial on SDL_image should be done first...oh well, these are just plans that I wish to do for this site. Nothing concrete yet.

.May.30.2004.: I started work last May 17...yes, real life work . There are mornings that I still think like a student (you know, when you wake up and you're too sleepy you want to skip class -- this I can't do anymore ).

Oh well, redevelopment of MantisGL is halted again, until I have time. When that will be, I do not know... Too bad, I was starting to get (as the slang goes) "in the groove" for its development.

.May.15.2004.: I was able to make my (then) 3-pass multitexturing fallback into (now) just 2-passes! . I just adjusted the generated image tone value up by 45% (ie, scaling the texture's RGB values by 45%). Previously, the extra 1 pass was for adding brightness to output of blending...now I can control the brightness by setting up the alpha value of the first texture in the first pass.

Changing the texture gamma values turned out to be easier than I thought. You just have to select the GL_COLOR matrix and scale the RGB values before calling your glTexImage2D() function in OpenGL .

.May.13.2004.: I added a fallback method for my terrain multitexturing...the fallback uses 3-pass blending (3-pass is a bit high, I think )...I tried doing it in two passes, but the results weren't near the quality of result when using the ARB_multitexture extension...only in 3-pass was I able to make it look nearly the same w/the rendering quality in using ARB_multitexture.

To those who don't know yet, a fallback is what your code goes to when a specific feature is not supported by hardware. In my case, when a video card doesn't support hardware multitexturing, I go to OpenGL blending to do my multitexturing needs.

Framerate is cut by half when using the 3-pass blending fallback (no, I am not surprised, just disappointed at the loss of framerates ).

.May.12.2004.: Yet another screenshot of my MantisGL engine has been added on its projects page. The engine now compresses images (S3TC compression) that I wish to use before sending the image to the video RAM. It also now has detail texture support (which is what the screenshot shows...).

I have been busy with my engine, and might write some tutorials on what I have learned. So keep coming back for updates .

It seems no one is joining my forum.... Oh well, maybe if I get more tutorials up. .

.May.09.2004.: I updated the projects page on my MantisGL engine. I am rewriting the whole thing from scratch, this time, coding for portability (for support in Linux). I have chosen to replace all Win32 API codes with that of SDL 1.2.7 (which is a cool library, if you don't know yet -- check it out: http://www.libsdl.org).

I also added three new screenshots on my MantisGL, check them out here.

.May.04.2004.: Hey! We're back online! No new stuff yet since last time (which was a long long time ago hehe -- I doubt most of you even knew this site existed!). Well, this site was previously located at http://nomad.openglforums.com, but openglforums.com shut down.

I got a new URL (but of course you know that already ). I tried working on a PostNuke version of the site, but it seems it was more of a hassle to work on PostNuke than just updating this old site with Notepad.

I'll probably try continue writing the tutorials. I installed my own forum! It's a pity openglforums.com had to close down though...it was a good OpenGL user community....

Anyway, keep coming back, I just might have a new tutorial in a few days. Ciao!