Thiemo Mättig

Thiemo Mättig

It must have been 2009 – eight years ago – when I stopped working on our Glow game project for various reasons. But I could never stop thinking of it. These days I finally made a backup of the abandoned Windows machine that still holds the development environment. I found tons of unreleased stuff, including large hero renderings of the in-game characters and enemies. But even if this is something I promised to release next, this is not where I wanted to start. Instead I dug up the tool chain I build in C# and Delphi 9: A generator for grass tiles, roots, debris and such. Others for waving flags, water falls and rain. A random map generator that is also capable of rendering nice overview maps. I updated all tools and fixed the most obvious reasons for them to crash, added examples, a build script for Mono on Linux (I love how that just works), as well as a CC-BY-SA license.

One thing I learned while doing this was that I changed the XML formats the game internally uses, shortly before I stopped working on the project in 2009. The change was totally worth it (I got rid of literally millions of string comparisons), but now I have levels as well as configuration files in two formats lying around, and basically my entire tool chain only supports the older one.

Don't do that. Think of the consequences first, map your tool chain, carefully plan the migration, and then do it fast. Don't wait eight years.

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I'm still running Ubuntu 12 (don't ask), and wanted to try a Wacom Intuous Draw (CTL-490) tablet. For future reference, here is what I did.
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There are still some <img border="1"> in the photo section of my website, an HTML attribute that is deprecated since 17 years, I believe. To lazy to fix it I found a really nice way to make it feel like it's part of an up to date web standard: By adding something like img[border="1"] { border: 2px dashed red; } to my CSS I can turn it into a custom boolean attribute that enables whatever image border I want. Neat. Not entirely valid HTML 5, because the standard requires custom attributes to start with data-…, but works.
Here is an other minor art asset I want to re-release, this time under a free license: the Shatterboxx TrueType font we use for all text in our indie game Glow.

Here is a sample of my extended version of the font:

Font sample with special characters and umlauts
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As I told you I plan to release the majority of the art assets from our action platformer »Glow« under a Creative Commons license. I'm proud to present the first two assets: a series of high-res wallpaper images I created in 2007, as well as all images ever published in the Glow 1.666 developers weblog. I will collect everything related to Glow on an overview page in the games section of my website.
How to disable the thumbnail generation for video and PDF files in Ubuntus file manager?
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