Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Summary Update March 2010

Uh, the month of March 2010 is almost over and I did not write a post in the entire month.

Mhh.. I have actually a bunch of things to write about, but did not get around actually doing it. Well, I will provide some brief updates.

Megatro III Release

Megatro3scrshot

I released another Megatro Intro pack with my latest OSDM productions. The menu system was coded by myself again and I hope that I was also able to improve on it since Megatro II. For details and download links check out the dedicated page for this release.

Since the release of Megatro III I did create already several other productions as well. You might want to check out my OSDM homepage to check it out.

OSDM Vector Object Resources

Vector Objects for OSDM are hard to create and have more than one person already driven close to insanity. But there are some lights at the end of the tunnel, which could help until a vector object editor will be implemented into OSDM itself.

  • Creation of Vector Objects Tutorial written by Wildcop (in German only, unfortunately)
  • Notes to 3D Vectors (from the OSDM feature notes at the OSDM Wiki)
  • VOBJ Tool V1.5beta written by me, which provides some nice features that make the work with the VOBJ data files much easier. Features like Merge of 2 VOBJ files, cloning of objects, shifting, flipping, centering, rotating etc. Also new is a Vector Object Creator for the creation of some basic vector objects, such as Spheres, Torus’, Cubes and Pyramids. The tool is a beta and has some known and still not known bugs, just as a reminder. I only made it public, because everybody agreed so far that ANY help is better than nothing at all. I wrote it in VBScript and it uses IE for the interface. I then made an Executable out of it to make it easier to use and the original .VBS script file.
  • Excel 2007 Macro Worksheet – This one is also highly experimental and you can use it at your own risk. It has some nice features that make editing of vector objects easier, but also several more or less working features that can be described as “tests” on my part. I only decided to make it public, because I think that it is helpful, even in its current version, despite all its flaws and bugs and unfinished features.You must enable Macros in Excel 2007 in order to make the document work. It’s also saved with a XLSM extension for the same reason. To change the Macro security settings, click on the MS Office button in the upper left corner of Excel 2007, then click on the “Excel Options” button, which is not located on the left where you can find the “Open”, “Save” dialogs etc., but the lower right, next to the “Exit Excel” button. Select “Trust Center” from the options on the left, then “Trust Center Settings” at the lower right of the Trust Center home page. Then select “Macro Settings” on the right side again and adjust the settings in the page that opens accordingly. Yeah, Microsoft could not have buried it much deeper in Excel to make it hard to find.

Forced Blog Move/Change

Google Blogger announced that they are going to discontinue the support for FTP. That is how I operate my blog with Blogger. The files (the blog content) is hosted at my own web server and pushed by Google to via FTP to my server, if changes to the blog are made (e.g. new posts are posted or comments).

I always wanted to switch to Wordpress. Maybe its now the time to actually do it, but I am not sure yet. I might go with an alternative route that became available, such as the custom domain for blogger. The blog would be moved from RoySAC.com/blog to Blog.RoySAC.com or something like that and would reside on Google’s servers instead of mine. It should not make any difference to the look and feel of my blog, but I am still skeptical when it comes to this.

There is still some time to think about it.

Well, that’s it for now. I hope that I will be able to post something else that is new and interesting soon.

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

http://www.roysac.com/