As no one picked up the developement on the winamp plugin after I released the sourcecode and new alienware laptops keep coming out every year, so I decided to put a litte bit more work into the winamp alienfx plugin. With this update users are able to add support for new laptops themselfs by editing a xml file. I will explain here how to create the xml file.
To download the plugin go to the original post: AlienFX Winamp plugin
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First of all don't take this article to negative. I really like the D programming language and often when I have to go back to C++ coding im sitting in front the code thinking "Oh this would be so much easier in D" or "This could be solved much cleaner in D".
I recently completed 3 Projects using the D 2.0 programming language:
- A implementation of the Light Propagation Volumes algorithm
- A 3d multiplayer cross platfrom (windows / linux) space shooter
- A lisp interpreter (with almost all Scheme features)

The two 3D projects have been done using OpenGL and are very performance critical. You only get to spend 16ms every frame until it has to be completely rendered otherwise you won't reach fluent framerates. The lisp interpreter was performance critical too, but more of a test how good D is usable as a systems programming language.

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With some help of Nils Reichert I was able to modifiy my AlienFX Winamp plugin so that it now supports the M17X R3. It should also support the M15X R3 now as the used AlienFX devices should be the same. You can find the download locations in my old post:

>>> Winamp AlienFX Plugin <<<

I also decided to release the source code for both the plugin itself and the led tester I've written, so that someone else can continue the developement as I don't have time for it anymore. You can freely modifiy the programm under the following conditions:

• you have to name me as original author
• you may not use it for anything commercial
• you have to distribute it under the same conditions then I do

AlienFX Winamp Plugin von Benjamin Thaut steht unter einer Creative Commons Namensnennung-Nicht-kommerziell-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen 3.0 Deutschland Lizenz.

Sourcecode: AlienFX-Winamp-plugin-source.zip

For a university project I implemented the Light Propagation Volumes technique implemented in CryEngine 3 to simulate indirect illumination. I wrote this demo from scratch using OpenGL and the D programming language.

The paper about the alogrithm can be found here:
http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/~dachsbcn/download/lpv.pdf

The model and textures have been taken from the crytek site: http://www.crytek.com/cryengine/cryengine3/downloads

You can download the application for windows including the full sourcecode and documentation here:
lpv-release.zip
To fly around in the scene klick into the 3d window and press M to activate the mouse, then you can fly around using the WASD keys and the mouse. To deactivate the mouse looking press M again.
For everything else you can use the GUI.



Implementation of Light Propagation Volumes von Benjamin Thaut steht unter einer Creative Commons Namensnennung 3.0 Unported Lizenz.
Beruht auf einem Inhalt unter www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de.

I wrote a small piece of sourcecode that generates stacktraces in D 2.0 under windows. It works both with the pdb and cv debug symbol format. For Exceptions that are derived from the Error or Exception class the trace information is automatically appended, this causes all builtin D errors to get a stacktrace information. The only point where this does not work is the Access Vioaltion error, as it does not call the stacktrace callback function for some reason.

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I made plugin for Alienwares AlienFX Device that comes with every Alienware laptop and computer. Currently the following models are supported:

• Area51 m15x
• All Powerfull m15x
• All Powerfull m17x
• All Powerfull m11x

A demonstration of the plugin by Lord_Zath form NBR (www.notebookreview.com) can be found at:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLymX4fLVtc

Download: vis_alienfx.zip (257 kb)

Please be shure to read the README file. It contains important instructions howto setup and configure the plugin! Also I want to thank Lord_Zath for helping me test the plugin and writing the README file. A thank you also goes to all the people on NBR which are taking part in the developement of this plugin.

If you have a Alienware laptop / computer that is not yet supported and you are willing to help me developing the support for it, please contact me, and I will built in the support for your model.

Update 31.10.2010: Fixed that the plugin is crashing winamp when closing winamp or stopping the plugin. The plugin now also automatically detects on which alienware laptop it is running.

I wanted to hook the WinApi funktion CreateFile, CloseHandle, ReadFile and WriteFile to decode a device protocol. So I searched for a hooking library in the internet. Unfortunately the only good one for c++ was detour from Mircrosoft which was free only for x86 non comercial use. As my laptop runs with a x64 Windows Vista this was no option for me. So I found easyhook, a c# hooking library. It was quite easy to achive the first success with it, but then I had a few small problems for which I want to describe the solutions here.
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Some time ago I've created a plugin for pidgin which counts the keystrokes per minute while you are typing a message and displays the value. It also creates a small statistic over it.

Source (Linux & Windows) + Binaries (Windows only): keysperminute.zip

I just finished my AlienFX-Notfication plugin for pidgin. It notifies the user of a new message by using the leds provided by an alienfx device.

Currently only the version for the Alienware Mx15x Laptop model is aviable as I lack the information for the other laptops and pc's.

Update: I managed to fix the bug which sometimes caused the AlienFX-Device to crash.

Download: (more...)

As a futher test of the engine I'm currently developing with a friend I wrote this mandelbrot explorer. I've implemented software double support inside the mandelbrot shader to avoid the early percission loss. Unfortunately I had to notice that the percission loss is due to the lack of percission during passing the arguments to the shader. Because I had yet no time to also implement pseudo doubles on the cpu, it's currently disabled.

You can download the application at: http://3d.benjamin-thaut.de/Files/mandelbrot.zip