December 24, 2011    The season is upon us

3D Christmas in the City is a screensaver I wrote while working at Shortcut back in the year 2000 to promote their site gizmozone.com. It's a flight through a festively themed city with tiny cars driving around. And lots of snow. It was featured on MSN the year after and as a result got downloaded over a million times in a week.

This is the hardware accelerated version, only 11 years later. It doesn't have the neat portal clipping of the original, but it's fast enough to run on netbooks with slow Intel integrated graphics cards. And the simulation has been modified to run smooth at any frame rate. I've left out the music this time, so turn on your favourite christmas stream!

July 3, 2011    Impact Texture Studio 33.1

Impact Texture Studio is a texture designer application, producing (mostly) tileable images. It was originally created for MS-DOS with a Windows-like user interface in 1998/1999 to design procedurally generated textures for 64kb intros. Click here or on the blatantly oversized screenshot to download. (Windows 32 bit executable).

This is a maintenance update addressing some compatibility issues (see below) and adding some minor new features.

Changes in version 33.1:

• The import file browser shows a preview of the selected image file.
• Importing supports 32bpp .bmp images. Also fixed a potential problem with grayscale images.
• Vista / Windows 7 style main menu.
• Alt-tabbing when in a filter dialog preserves focus on the active element.
• Fixed timing issue when cancelling a filter dialog when the preview is being drawn.
• Workaround for crash when a new volume is detected on Windows 7.
• Fixed full screen flicker on startup.

Some example textures (click to download):

Impact Texture Studio on Pouët.

July 12, 2007    Impact Texture Studio 33

This is an almost complete rewrite of the Windows port of the original DOS version, using our new UI framework. It adds extra filters (that had been lying around since 1999), and Photoshop-style preview on the layer windows.

New in version 33:

• Imports images (.jpg, .gif, .bmp, .tga and .pcx formats) and rescales them to 256x256 in the currently selected layer. Please note that these are saved as raw data thus taking up 256kb per image.
• Export to .pcx and .jpg formats. (Used to be targa only). Targa writes an alpha channel if the texture is using it.
• Keeps history of recent files, supports dropping files from explorer, passing a file name on the command line.
• Background preview on the actual texture. Runs on a low priority thread.
• Redo. This means you can undo an entire texture and redoing each step to see how it was created.
• Added alpha channel to most filters. The generation filters now also work on this, and you can copy separate channels now to get something into the alpha channel. Note that empty new textures are fully opaque for backwards compatibility.
• Keyboard support for the dialogs, slider editboxes are now editable. Alt-1..6 changes focus window. Added some accelerator keys (listed in the menus).
• New filters: Copy Channel, Brick, Cells, Mandelbrot Fractal, Gaussian Blur, Maximum, Crystallize, Quantize, Gamma, Threshold, Tile X, Tile Y and Arbitrary Rotate.
• Better support for visual themes (and Windows Vista!).