Author Archives: Benjamin Thaut

Winamp AlienFX Plugin

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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.

Easyhook tipps and tricks

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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.
Continue reading →

Pidgin AlienFX-Notification Plugin

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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: Continue reading →

Mandelbrot Explorer

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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: https://www.benjamin-thaut.de/Files/mandelbrot.zip

NE.S.W.A.K.TE.K.

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Currently im creating a game Engine together with a friend for learning porpuses and fun. Because I read the article “Write games not engines” I decided to write a small tetris game with our engine to test the mechanics. During this process I found many flaws and bugs in the engine and fixed them. Also I had lots of ideas how to improve our engine.

The whole game logic is written in lua. Also all draw calls are made by lua. The engine collects the draw calls and executes them later. The engine setup is also done by lua. So the engine is not restricted to forward rendering or deferrend rendering. For this game deferrend rendering was used for learning porpuses. Also I implemented 2 post processing shaders. A edge detection shader and a glow shader. The input is also managed by lua, so it was very easy to write a configurable input system. Even axis of controlers can be used for binary key events because I wrote a small converter in lua.
For small games it is planed to do the logic and draw calls completely in lua. If we some day plan on doing a bigger game like an ego shooter or something like that, more of the logic moves into the C++ code to maintain good speed.

The shaders are generated out of xml files with the option to embed lua code into the xml file, to be able to generate many diferrend shaders out of the same file. In this game this feature was used for the differend qualities of the outline shader.

A huge effort was also taken to use multi threading in the engine. I wrote a task manager that collects all the taks and executes them in the right order, depending on their dependencies to other tasks. To use mutli threading in lua, we wrote data synchronzing commands for lua. Because the multi threading code just went usable recently, this game still runs single threaded because it’s developement startet earlier before.

All displayed strings are indentified by a string name and saved in extern files so this game can be easly puplished in different languages. Currently the game comes with the fowolling languages: german, english and russian.

I know that in this game many things could be solved better, but it was never the aim to go for perfection. Instead this game was only developed to test and improve the engine, to learn lua and for fun.

You can download the game at: http://stuff.benjamin-thaut.de/neswaktek.zip

GPU Particle System Demo

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I’ve read the paper “cascade demo secretes” by Nvidia and wanted to implement a particle system entirely on the gpu myself. So I wrote this small demo. Basicly it works like this:

  • Vertexbuffer1 is rendered.
  • the geometry shader processes the information (recomputes particle positions, speeds, etc.)
  • the result is written into vertexbuffer2 by transform feedback
  • vertexbuffer2 is drawn
  • the geometry shader creates out of a point a billboard with 4 vertices
  • fragment shader renders the billboard with the texture on it
  • vertexbuffer1 and vertexbuffer2 are swaped

Needed Extensions:

  • EXT_gpu_shader4
  • NV_transform_feedback
  • EXT_geometry_shader

Download:

Youtube Video:

OpenGL Wald Demo

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I wrote this small demo in the past year or so, don’t really know any more when I started.
During this time I developed my OpenGL and C++ Skills and rewrote certain parts of my small
framwork countless Times. Finally I want to start on my first game, so I declare this demo
as finished. I know there would be still much to do and to improve but I simply don’t want
to develop on this demo any more.

Currently it features
– XML shader system (from shader 2.0 to 4.0. System is captable of using geometry shaders but
I didn’t use it in this demo)
– real time shadows (I used a method to improve the quality of the shadows which was developed
by Thomas “Schrompf” Schulze – www.dreamworlds.de)
– Small GUI (used for the value and camera editors)
– value and camera editor (for easily chaning parts of the demo)
– terrain rendering with smooth blending between two detail levels
– Water with “correct” reflections
– some sort of pseudo instancing for the gras. Uses new draw_instanced extension if aviable
– Frustrum culling an lots of other standard stuff

Needed Extensions:

  • completely OpenGL 2.0

Download:

Youtube Video:

3 way mapping (GLSL)

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If you generate some data with the GPU or CPU, for example with the marching cubes algorithm, you don’t have texturecoordinates to texture the generated mesh. To solve this problem I wrote a 3 way mapping shader, which generates texturecoordinates, binormals and tangents only out of the vertex position and vertex normal. This technique was also presented in Nvidia’s “Cascades Demo Secrets” paper. To test the mapping I applied my parallax occlusion mapping shader.

Needed Extensions:

  • EXT_gpu_shader4 – only because of parallax occlusion mapping

Download:

3way-mappping.rfx (RenderMonkey 1.80)