I am happy to announce that today, little more than a year after the start, the blog reached 100.000 visitors. I would like to thank you for all the people who visited, commented and helped the evolution of the site!

Again, there was quite a pause in the flow of articles. This is because I’m currently working on a project that consumes most of my spare time and unfortunately takes away time from the update of the blog as well. I would like to take the opportunity and say a few words about this project…

During the last month I worked on the development of an Android game that I plan to release in the near future. It is my first serious try in developing games for handhelds and I hope people will like it. Unfortunately, I’m also one of those fanatic developers who were always interested in game development and always targeted the high end PC gaming industry.

Like many fellow developers, despite my knowledge and enthusiasm, I also struggled with lack of resources, especially considering non-programming related stuff like artwork, which resulted in several partly finished but abandoned projects. This is the reason why I finally settled down in first concentrating on less-demanding yet interesting portions of the industry: mobile game development.

While making games for mobile platforms is usually less ground-breaking and revolutionary, at least I can finally publish something to the end-users in the hope that the gathered experience and notoriety may enable me to target also PC gaming in the future. But this is not all about it… In fact, despite the difficulty of targeting an embedded platform, developing games for phones is great fun and I can advise it to every developer to at least try it out.

Stay tuned for news about the project, especially if you own an Android phone!

Happy Birthday !!

After a quite long, about two months intermission, let me celebrate for a moment the birthday of the blog. It was roughly a year ago that I started the RasterGrid Blogosphere with the wish to have a forum where I can share my experience and ideas with others. Meanwhile, I posted several programming related articles about graphics, multiprocessing and published a few demo applications. However, this is not the best part of it… The thing that I’m most proud of is that the blog now has many returning visitors whom I was somehow able to help and that I’ve received a lot of feedback and ideas from you. I’m especially pleased because the list of people who contacted me via the comments section or via e-mail contains several great personalities of the industry with who I wouldn’t be able to meet if I would not start this project. Thank you all for this!

I’m really happy to announce that I will continue to bring you topics in the second season of the RasterGrid Blogosphere.

Most probably you’ve noticed that I haven’t written for a while. Sorry for that, sometimes it is really difficult to allocate time to sit down and write, especially because I always tried to focus on quality, what I hope I more or less did. I also wanted to publish much more demonstration applications but making these even takes more time than just writing. Actually many topics have been dropped from the content of the previous year just because they would have been valuable only if they would be accompanied by source code as well.

Now let’s not talk anymore about the past, let’s concentrate what will come in 2011. While I don’t want to make any more promises about average number of posts per month as it didn’t work in the past either, I still would like to indicate about what I will write.

As you may observed, even though the blog was started as a general programming related blog, at the end I could not deny myself and it ended up in more like a graphics programming blog. Sorry for that if you expected more general programming articles as I will most probably continue in this fashion in the new year having the following key topics:

• More advanced graphics programming articles with focus on OpenGL 3+ and possibly on OpenGL ES and DX11.
• More graphics demos showcasing advanced rendering techniques, focusing more on OpenGL 4+ functionality.
• New! More tutorial-style articles about less-complicated graphics topics after seeing the popularity of my article written about Gaussian blur. Those who read my curriculum vitae know that besides working at Nokia Siemens Networks, I’m doing my master degree about computer graphics and image processing. Meanwhile, I had to make a few programming exercises related to computer geometry and signal processing and as they are quite basic ones that showcase a particular topic I would like to share these codes with you as well as part of the tutorial sessions.
• New! Another new thing that will come with the new year that is based on your, the reader’s request is the new Tools category that will contain articles about various development tools, especially focusing on applications and libraries that ease and assist OpenGL development.
• As time will allow and as inspiration will be available, I will write also about general programming related articles. The following domains are on my wish-list: OO patterns “why” and “when”s, more unit testing, asynchronous pipelines and other multiprocessing models, etc.

Of course, the list is not something written in stone, every idea is welcomed!

Thanks again for your attendance and interest so far!

I am proud to announce that the number of visits has just gone over 10000. I would like to share that I haven’t expected such a great success in less than two months. I can hardly thank this enough to all my occasional and especially for my returning visitors!

When I’ve started to write this blog my primary intension was to share my knowledge and ideas, no matter if they are legitimate enough or not. I did this in the hope that the articles on this blog may help others. At the end, it turned out that me myself learned from it a lot as, thanks to You, I’ve got great improvement ideas and feedback about my writings.

During the last two months I’ve came up with articles that brought various feelings out of the Reader. I’ve met exhortatory comments that gave me great power to continue the progress. Sometimes also faced conflicts due to different points of view and opinion, but I think those were also very edifying for both me and others. Also, one of my best experiences were when You came up with excellent improvement ideas regarding to the presented source code or whatever. The only thing I feel sorry for is that I haven’t had sufficient time to write further articles. Unfortunately, I cannot promise that it will change in the future but I will do my best, and I hope the quality and the utility of my articles will improve over time.

As it turned out that a schedule of 2-3 articles per week rendered being impossible to fit in my time-frame, I will most probably try to stick to one post per week. As a foretaste, here are some topics that I would like to talk about in the near future:

• Further application of geometry shaders (cube rendering and some more nifty tricks)
• AMD tessellation demo with practical use cases
• WebGL, COLLADA and other good to know stuff regarding to portable graphics
• Physics and rigid body dynamics
• More info about some of the best unit test practices
• C++ messaging and state machines
• Maybe some further development software reviews

As the final word: thanks for being interested!

Almost a week ago I was talking about the problems with the server on which my blog is stored and I promised that it will be put to another server at least on Tuesday in order to not have any troubles with the reachability of the site. Unfortunately, due to environment problems this actually happened only during last night. Anyway, I am happy that the migration is over now and I hope it won’t happen again.

Since my last post on the topic things got even worse as in the last few days I observed several hours of outage. This was partially due to the fact that on Tuesday, on the day when the hosting service provider originally planned the migration of my site, one of the hard drives of the old server crashed. It seems that I don’t have luck with these kinds of things. Nevertheless, I am pleased to see that the popularity of my posts didn’t suffer that much because of the former instability of the web-server behind the blog.

As an update about what articles can you expect in the near future, I already mentioned geometry shader based culling methods earlier. Now I was working on the demo application for this upcoming topic in the last few days and it still need some time but next week or latest the week after the next week I will post the article about the technique and also publish the demo application with full source code.

Till then I will present some other technologies that I would like to cover during the lifetime of this blog, like WebGL, OpenCL and others. These will be more like introductions to the different domains and more specific subjects will most probably presented later. Also I would like to recap on the topic of managed languages and introduce some more advanced C++ quasi language extensions.

Finally, still looking forward to know what you would like to read about.

I started my blog about two weeks ago but already met some problems regarding to the availability of the site. It happened a few times that there was some problem with the Apache Server at the hosting company. This resulted in some short down times of the blog itself. I was saying that “okay, this is not that big problem” so I accepted the barely limited up-time of the server. But today something much worse happened. The server was down for hours, I don’t even know for how much time so I decided to make some action to prevent such problems in the future.

First of all, I would like to apologize for the discomfiture of all of my well respected readers as it probably made many of you annoyed to get an error message instead of the content of the page. I hope that irrespectively of the observed down times most of my old and new visitors have successfully reached my blog.

Anyway, I made the needed actions to prevent such problems in the future. The site will be moved to a different server until Tuesday and I wish that will solve all the technical troubles and from then the only problem that a reader of my blog can met will be related only to the content of the page but I hope that most of you can find some useful information in the articles anyway.

By the way, this is maybe the best time to encourage you to send me ideas and topics what you would like to see on the blog. Of course, if you come up with cooking ideas then probably not I am the most competent person to talk about it, but everything related to programming, graphics and related topics is welcome!

Just as a foretaste, I will talk in my upcoming articles about the following topics:

• Delegates, signals, messages and state-machines in C++
• Advanced culling methods on the GPU using geometry shaders
• My first impressions about WebGL
• GLSL shader development
• Some words about physics libraries

You can extend this list easily with your own list if you send me an e-mail to daniel.rakos@rastergrid.com. I am willing to share as much information as I can.

And one more thing: I would like to encourage you also to write comments on the articles even if your perspective is different from mine. We don’t have to agree, to be honest, I like to argue about any subject because I believe that it is the most natural way to improve both the knowledge of others and ourselves as well.