http://strlen.com/ 2012-05-17T21:49:13+02:00 http://strlen.com/ http://strlen.com/lib/images/favicon.ico text/html 2009-06-19T10:01:13+02:00 http://strlen.com/aardappel-language Concurrent Tree Space Transformation The research I've done for my PhD involves designing and implementing a new language, which computes by concurrently reducing trees (using a form of tree-rewriting) which sit together in tree-spaces (bags) and communicate amongst eachother (exchanging parts of themselves, in Linda-like fashion). The language is 100% graphical and linear as well. My thesis on this topic: (pdf, 1310k), and the first public version of the implementation (zip, 367k). I have r… text/html 2009-06-18T22:46:23+02:00 http://strlen.com/about-me Hi. I am Wouter van Oortmerssen. I currently teach at the Guildhall. Before that, I worked on crazy engine & programming language tech for companies like Crytek GmbH and Amiga Inc. I have a PhD in CS (programming language design and implementation). text/html 2009-06-19T10:00:03+02:00 http://strlen.com/amiga-e Amiga E is a programming language and compiler I started creating for the Amiga in '91, released publicly in '93, and released as open source in '97. It was most similar to C++, in the sense that it was fast and weakly typed, and had a rich set of features from procedural, object oriented and functional programming languages. text/html 2009-06-19T10:00:40+02:00 http://strlen.com/bla-language (A language & compiler I worked on for my Masters in '95:) Available material The paper on Bla: pdf, ps or dvi format, layout for `letter' papersize (about 66 pages). Versions on A4 (40 pages) are available (pdf, ps or dvi). If all this doesn't suit your output medium, then you can have a go at it yourself using the LaTeX2e source. If all else fails, download the dokkenou source which is very well readably as ascii. text/html 2010-07-15T02:58:34+02:00 http://strlen.com/bulk-fisheye-remapper A tool I wrote to serve my own needs remapping raw fisheye photos to different projections. It is rather user unfriendly and only does exactly what I need it to. You have been warned. It is currently mostly hardcoded to: * a crop factor of 1.5 (Nikon DX APS-C). It will probably do ok with Canon's 1.6 factor cameras, but if you have a full frame or other ratio camera, you're out of luck. * an 8mm fisheye for said camera, i.e. clipped circular images. If your fisheye lens is full frame or fu… text/html 2010-07-15T00:13:42+02:00 http://strlen.com/consumed-by-greed CONSUMED BY GREED Short version / USP: Consumed by Greed is a realtime strategy game designed from the ground up with quick, arcade / console style controls and gameplay style. Long version: Though in essence an RTS in the sense that the gameplay involves building stationary and mobile units, resources, and battles, the similarities with PC based RTS games end there. Consumed by Greed is played entirely with a D-PAD and 2 or 3 action buttons, and has no need for the heavy mouse based controls … text/html 2010-07-06T06:43:46+02:00 http://strlen.com/false-language The False Programming Language I designed this language in '93 with two particular objectives: confusing everyone with an obfuscated syntax, and designing an as powerful language as possible with a tiny implementation: in this case a compiler executable of just 1024 bytes (!), written in pure 68000 assembler. text/html 2009-06-19T10:17:33+02:00 http://strlen.com/far-cry A game I worked on for Crytek in 2002 & 2003. text/html 2009-07-05T21:13:02+02:00 http://strlen.com/favourite-games Wouter's Favourite Games List: I must have played hundreds of games in the last 20 years, but I am not one for persisting and finishing them. Most games I toss aside after 1-5 hrs of play when I feel they aren't good. For the enormous amounts of games that exist, there are suprisingly few really good ones, I guess what sets the above ones aside from the rest is that they got quite a bit more intense playtime from me than most games. text/html 2010-10-30T04:45:38+02:00 http://strlen.com/game-design-experiments roguelike framework A “framework”, because I wanted to be experimenting with a variety of things * easy ways to control teams in a roguelike fashion. Here you can control groups much like in an RTS, with the difference that the group orders get executed in lock step with the manual movement of your main player character. Functionality for group formations and such. * more interesting random levels: for some reason most roguelikes put enormous effort into items and actions, yet no effort… text/html 2010-07-15T00:07:08+02:00 http://strlen.com/game-design-ideas This page is a repository for random game design ideas / docs of mine that are mostly unimplemented, but at least somewhat readable (most of my docs are in “brainstorm” format that only makes sense to me). If anyone ever steals any of these ideas I'd be absolutely thrilled and honored, be sure to let me know :) [translation: I am a firm believer that (unimplemented) ideas are useless, hence why I dump them here for entertainment value.] text/html 2010-07-14T22:54:07+02:00 http://strlen.com/games-engines-editors-maps ArrayArray[][][]ArrayArrayArray[] Here are some of the game related projects I have worked on: Engine Work * With many others, the CryEngine for Far Cry. * The Cube and Cube 2 / Sauerbraten engines * A specialized top down engine for strategy games (see GREED Game). * 2 different hacks to the quake engine: Fisheye Quake and PanQuake * Random graphics experiments and very old engine prototypes. text/html 2012-02-25T20:54:01+02:00 http://strlen.com/garage-sale Hi. This page contains our current items for sale... contact me (aardappel at gmail) if you want any of them. The indicated price (if any) is what the item approximately goes for on Ebay, but if I know you personally you'll get 20% off. Feel free to haggle. text/html 2011-01-20T22:24:31+02:00 http://strlen.com/graphics-experiments Geometry Shaders some fun geometry shaders: fisheye projection (hardcoded subdiv, since no tesselator available), and triangle edge based sketching. NanoCube I started the cube engine(s) with lofty goals of utter simplicity and cubic worlds, but but I failed on both those accounts. Nanocube was a project purely for the sake of trying to write a full FPS game in the fewest lines of code possible, making everything (including animated characters) out of cube. This failed too, when L… text/html 2009-06-19T09:29:06+02:00 http://strlen.com/greed-game-design GREED A high speed turn-based strategy action game By Wouter van Oortmerssen Executive summary GREED combines instant action hack & slash fun along the lines of Diablo with strategical depth similar to Advance Wars using a single, continuous, modeless game mechanic. It achieves speed by having the player only control one central character that drives the turns, and retains the strategy by allowing the player to deploy troops on the fly as battles demand it. text/html 2010-07-15T00:28:16+02:00 http://strlen.com/greed-game A turn based action game. Imagine taking Nethack, Advance Wars, Diablo, Pokemon, Pikmin, and Magic The Gathering, mixing them up real good, and you get GREED. It is turn based for that all important strategic & tactical fun, but the way it is controlled allows it to be played very fast such that it almost feels like an action game. text/html 2011-05-12T03:16:47+02:00 http://strlen.com/home Welcome to Wouter van Oortmerssen's Wiki! I am a Dutch programmer living in Texas, mostly known for my programming languages, games, engines & tools. Professional Career Currently I lecture at the SMU Guildhall. I teach my students how to build engine components (such as shader systems, skeletal character animation, scripting compilers), and supervise their Master's projects. I am also part owner of a tech consulting company, dot3 labs, LLC. text/html 2009-06-18T04:45:22+02:00 http://strlen.com/java-style-classes-in-c Java Style Classes in C++ You can argue night and day about whether C++ is a good language, but for some reason, I have grown to really like it. This may sound especially strange from someone who has looked at several hundred language designs and designed quite a few himself, but the C++ language design makes a lot of sense (most C++ haters simply don't understand the language deeply enough to see the elegance in it), and maybe more importantly, implementation quality for it is sadly still gen… text/html 2010-07-13T01:24:49+02:00 http://strlen.com/language-design-overview This page basically gives a historical overview of all the programming languages I have designed (and sometimes implemented) over the years. Some of them, notably E, False, Bla, Aardappel and SHEEP have their own pages. [REVERSE chronological]: * KNOFLOOK (oct 2004-2009) A tree based graphical programming language/environment whose primary aim is to do away with explicit abstractions completely. The environment allows programming by cut&paste, keeping code factored automatically, with no ne… text/html 2010-07-14T23:25:47+02:00 http://strlen.com/math-card-game Wouter's amazing math card game (2 players) Note: this game I have actually implemented/tested, and it can be quite deep and a lot of fun. The deck consists of 2 sets (red and blue) of 35 cards each, for a total of 70 cards. The red cards are: type amount cards starters 4 [-2] [0] [2] [4] numbers 11 2 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 6 8 10 operators 11 + + + - - - * * / / ? terminators 4 = = = = modifiers 5 cancel cancel invert invert swap To start a game, each player shuffles their de… text/html 2009-06-19T09:58:27+02:00 http://strlen.com/mobile-games Some mobile phone games I have made. First is tentatively called “First Strike”, and is a turn based strategy game (all the programming, some of the game design). Has a lot in common with Advance Wars, but goes well beyond that. For Symbian currently, but who knows what I'll port it to (an OpenGL development version exists). Second is a racing/action game for j2me... (just programming). Third is a quake-engine based first person shooter called Meat (by bobbeetec) that I did all the level design … text/html 2010-03-09T03:19:28+02:00 http://strlen.com/music-understood-by-numbers If there is one topic I am quite ignorant about, it is probably music. One reason for that is I never learned to play an instrument (other than the computer :), because traditional music notation has always seemed highly inelegant to me, for something as elegant as music, so I refused to deal with it. I still wanted to understand music however, but since no book talked about it in my “language”, I did what every programmer would: write some code to figure it all out on the basis of just numbers.… text/html 2010-07-07T01:46:45+02:00 http://strlen.com/old-photos Compositions Array Array Array Array Array Array Array Array Wideangle shots Array Array Array Array Array Array Array Array Array Array Macro & Plants Array Array Array Array Array Array Array Scenic Array Array Array Array Array Array Various Array Array Array Array Array text/html 2010-07-15T02:57:49+02:00 http://strlen.com/overview OverView is a tool in my history of attempts to create tools that allow us to deal with large amounts of information, and navigate them more efficiently. The idea behind this tool is rather simple: lay out the entire contents of the harddrive on a 2d plane, then allow the user to smoothly zoom into it (OverView uses OpenGL and animates the zoom actions): text/html 2011-08-25T00:49:25+02:00 http://strlen.com/perlin-combiners A little experiment in generating more interesting noise than standard perlin noise, by sampling the perlin noise function using itself. Most of the images below have higher res versions if you click on them. No source code, since this was just a quick hack, and both code & ui are not presentable. If you want to replicate my results, simply use your favourite noise function (the colour images were made with turbulence on top of perlin's standard noise function, with fixes from this paper applie… text/html 2010-07-15T02:59:01+02:00 http://strlen.com/photography My focus in photography is mostly on trying to create pictures that show more than you can normally see. I do that the easy way using fisheye lenses, and the hard way by creating massive compositions like the one below. I'll put more of this work online some day, for now if you want to see more there is my old photos page, and my holiday photo blog has plenty of examples of my fisheye based work (all transformed with my fisheye remapping tool). text/html 2010-07-15T01:21:21+02:00 http://strlen.com/productivity-tools Free Form Hierarchical Spreadsheet TreeSheets Automated time tracker ProcrastiTracker Zooming folder browser Overview Photography tools Bulk Fisheye Remapper and Video 2 Panorama text/html 2010-07-07T02:10:27+02:00 http://strlen.com/programming-languages [][][][][][][] One of my all time great hobbies is designing and implementing programming languages, I have been doing this for over 20 years now. I wrote my first compiler on the C16, followed by several more on the Amiga, most well known of which is Amiga E, and suprisingly, my False Language. text/html 2010-07-13T03:10:43+02:00 http://strlen.com/random-music-generation I've been interested in procedural music since forever, and recently created this tool that allows you to pick your favourite snippets of random music and concatenate them into a “song”. My thinking: I am not any good at composing music, but I know what I like when I hear it. Since the computer is more creative random than humans, let the computer do the composing, and me do the picking. text/html 2010-09-27T23:58:00+02:00 http://strlen.com/random-rants-notes-articles This page is a repository for rants, tips, ideas, designs that I wanted to share with certain groups of people, that don't have a home anywhere else. Sloppy - Rating the sloppiness of a code base and finding the worst spots Perlin Combiners Java Style Classes in C++ text/html 2009-06-19T10:01:28+02:00 http://strlen.com/sheep-language New scripting/querying/ipc/programming language I created for Amiga Inc. There is no publicly available material right now, except for an introductory article at Amiga World, an interview at OSNews.com, and this released screenshot of an early sheep beta in action. SHEEP will have familiar beginner friendly syntax and semantics coupled with multimethods, automatic memory management without garbage collection (linearity), powerful datatypes, pattern matching, strong and dynamic typing living toge… text/html 2011-08-25T01:10:13+02:00 http://strlen.com/simplex-dof Created with a “depth of field” version of my layered noise function (using simplex, see here for perlin). text/html 2010-12-28T12:12:52+02:00 http://strlen.com/sloppy This tool will scan all source code in a folder and generate a report on how “sloppy” the code is... sloppiness being a measurement of a repetitive code style: under abstraction (copy / pasting) and over abstraction (pointless complexity). It does its analysis on a token level, i.e. strips away all white-space & comments, and parses all syntactical elements into its smallest indivisible units, such as “if” ”(” “count” ”==” “100” ”)”, etc. text/html 2010-07-05T02:28:18+02:00 http://strlen.com/time-management-tips-etc [written mostly from a student/programmer perspective, but can be useful for anyone] Dividing up your time Cut up the time you have in blocks that are your most effective time unit. For a programmer, working less than 1 hour for example will not allow you to get up to speed, working more than 8 hours on a single topic will most certainly degrade your productivity. For me, the ideal block size is probably 3-4 hours, your mileage will vary. Schedule your blocks in the week such that there is 30… text/html 2009-06-18T04:50:34+02:00 http://strlen.com/trusted-communities Trusted communities: the only way one can effectively combat cheating The problem with multiplayer Multiplayer games have the problem that for performance reasons, some of the code and data (in many cases, MOST of the code and data) has to run on the client. The client is an untrusted environment. No amount of protection is ever going to be completely secure against tampering on the client by an experienced person. Open source multiplayer games have the additional problem that a lot of inform… text/html 2010-07-14T23:37:14+02:00 http://strlen.com/ultimate-card-game The Ultimate Card Game (tm) Magic the Gathering (MtG) is pretty much already the ultimate card game. Very few games (of any kind) can compete in terms of depth of play. There are however a couple of design parameters which can be improved upon: * Turn complexity: MtG has 12 phases per turn, each of which can be stacked by “instants”, making some turns endlessly complex. Most of this complexity is needed however to allow the deep gameplay, so any simplifications must be careful not to throw … text/html 2010-07-05T02:15:21+02:00 http://strlen.com/ultimate-collaboration-tool [update: it seems something rather similar to this is being implemented by google: Google Wave!] People that want to work together want to communicate, and produce useful outcomes from that communication. Often these are 2 separate steps, and we would benefit from them being more streamlined. text/html 2010-07-15T02:58:11+02:00 http://strlen.com/video-2-panorama This tool takes a video and converts it into a panorama by taking the middle slice of pixels out of each video frame and concatenating those into an image. This allows you to create pictures as if the lens surrounds an object, which is not possible with any physical lens (kind of like the opposite of fisheye! :) text/html 2011-12-05T19:33:19+02:00 http://strlen.com/wadc-editor A programming language for the construction of Doom maps. Integrated environment, shows you what the map described by the program looks like at the press of a key, and gives visual feedback about errors. Saves .wad files that only need to be BSP'ed. The programming language is a cross between a macro preprocessor and a lazy functional programming language.