It might seem a big step, but it’s not. I was quite amazed that I could create faster programs with more ease. Will this be the end of my Visual Basic 6 time? I don’t know yet, but Borland C++ Builder is pretty good!

I’m not going to explain in detail what the website is about, but I’m hosting it for Heero. Even though it’s not fully done yet, please take a look!

http://pixelcore.dgmproductions.org/

I’ve got an invite from Microsoft today, asking if I would like to participate in the MSN Messenger 8 Beta test. Ofcourse I would.. Why not? I have been using it for a few hours now. I must say.. i’m not sure what I think about it.

There’s a new function called File Sharing. Instead of just sending a couple of files, you’re actually sharing files.. you’re setting up something that can best be compared with a mini ftp. Except for the fact that I can’t test it, since nobody I know has Messenger 8… So I had to go to options and disable the File Sharing function (so I could send files again normally).

When you first run it, it looks orange/gray. Bad color choise in my opinion. The orange reminds me of the dutch national soccer team. Anyway, luckily it’s easily changable, so it’s blue now. Much better I really must say.

The giant logo saying “Windows Live Messenger” with my avatar underneith could be a bit smaller… With the ad at the bottom it doesn’t leave much space for my contact list. There is also no way to see the difference of somebody being Away or Busy, unless you put your mouse over their names.

Those tabs on the side are overly annoying.. but those are in MSN 7.5 to, so it doesn’t really count. Only it seems that they keep adding more and more. There is a function to move them… now all I need is a function to RE-move them. Well, I guess microsoft just needs his sponsors. The color of the icon changed. It’s dark-green now. I guess it’s ok.

MSN 8 is actually quite good. It’s fast, it starts faster, uses 0% of my processor (as far as that is even possible), and takes up less ram than msn 7.5. After all it’s still beta, and I just have to get used to this quite big change for MSN. I’ve seen the old GUI for years, and now they completely changed it. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing.

I’ll post again about this some time later on, when i’ve had more experience with it. Yes.. I do have invites. If you e-mail me I might hand one out, but I cant promise anything. Friends first right?

I’ve set up my own IRC server. Feel free to join, or create your own channels for personal use! DCC is disabled for security reasons.

irc://irc.dgmproductions.org

or join our general channel:

irc://irc.dgmproductions.org/haxinids

I thought i’d post again. First of all Merry X-mas to you all! But that’s not the real reason i’m posting this. There is 2 more things I wan’t to say.

First of all, dgm3dengine.com is no longer under my controll. I’ve seen it change into a spam site as soon as I cancelled my webhosting. I’ve had various e-mails asking about it. So once again: the sourceforge project site is still there, but it’s no longer updated. Atleast not for a long time.

Second, while waiting for a release stable version of the Torque Shader Engine, we’re working on a multiplayer game called Haxinids. You can read more about this on the haxinids project page kindly hosted at sourceforge.net. Screenshots are allready available there.

Oh yea.. Happy new year

As I am nearing the end of the year, I desided to switch hosts from lycos to sohosted. I had dgm3dengine.com with them for a year, and I really liked their services. This year the site should be a lot faster (with a higher uptime of 99.94% measured over the year on dgm3dengine.com). The DGM 3D Engine page will be replaced with a page on this website. Next year this domain will be free again.. so I’m not responsible anymore for whatever is on it.

I am planning to update my projects section, adding old ones (that weren’t on yet), and adding my new ones. I’m also planning to put tutorials on this website. About various things, from small Visual Basic tricks to programming for the STK-500 (Atmel AVR Microcontroller). I learned working with the STK-500 at school. It’s hard to believe that I’m a university student for over 2 months now. It all goes so fast! Well I guess that’s a good sign.

In the meantime I bought a Torque Shader Engine lisence to. I am hoping to finish my MMORPG in there one day. But looking at the engine’s state right now, I’ll probably wait untill a real release or atleast a release candidate (close to 1.0).

Should you have any questions, email me on robindegen@dgmproductions.org. (The spam bots are going to be all over me now! haha)

For people that are interrested, I just checked my site on W3C:

I’ve allways found this a very difficuled program to work with. But thanks to Lennart Moerkens (one of the modellers on the MMORPG dev team) I know the basics and I can actually model and animate in it. I will be making buildings in both hammer and 3D studio Max. I think it will take another year before I can actually model something like a monster, but atleast I know the basics now.