No.. I haven’t forget you! I think of you every day, night and if I’m honest all the time. You and you and you and especially you who are reading these lines. This is going to be sort blog entry. I want you to know what you should start doing! Yes just stop being social in internet. Get out of your comfort zone and start spank the monkey (oh.. sorry not spank the monkey this is children approved blog..) er.. learning new stuff. (more…)
Author Archive
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November 27th, 2015 by Tuukka PasanenThis my code take it! Contributing to Open Source project
August 28th, 2015 by Tuukka PasanenYou want to be an Open Source developer? Want to hack up some nasty code. Make everyone obey your order and take over the world. I was young back when I entered these shallow waters and how green I was back then.. oh boy! (more…)
Oh hell! It’s open source project
August 18th, 2015 by Tuukka PasanenThis was supposed to be survival guide to open source and free software world but I realized I’m not that good citizen of open source world that I can give any advises to others. What I’m giving are hint’s what I have learn along the years. So why I’m not very good open source citizen? I read several projects mail lists but only topics that I like and make contributions but not with rage but when I feel like it. I answer few mails that I receive about open source in limited time frame that I have (which sometimes can be too long) and use many projects with out giving anything back. I prefer license to steal and freedom as value not as in beer.
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Digital game distribution
July 8th, 2015 by Tuukka PasanenUnReal World RPG have come long way how it have been distributed digitally since it started on 1992. First it was on multiple BBS as Shareware application and if you ordered then it was delivered by 4 disks by mail and you copied them to your hard disk. It was pure DOS application at that time. Game author Sami Maaranen have been always modern about this kind of things you could send order by email or normal mail on late ’90. After millennium real digital revolution started. (more…)
Ever wanted to be a Dj with open source touch?
April 29th, 2015 by Tuukka PasanenThere are plenty of Dj software available on Internet. Most popular I think are Traktor and VirtualDJ. Those are no brainier to choose and don’t support Linux. Because I’m old fart and I started doing my dang long time a go with Technics vinyl-players (and still play my gigs with them). They work as they have always worked great but I though that I need new geeky Dj system with digital vinyls because many interesting release doesn’t do vinyls anymore and I don’t like CD-format. Summarizing all of that I wanted something that what is open source and I can still attach my digital vinyls to it (so it should work with Serato or Traktor vinyls).
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UnReal World RPG and propiertary applications in linux ecosystem part SDL2 take 2
April 1st, 2015 by Tuukka PasanenMy opinion is Simple Direct Layer 2 library is awesome piece of code. SDL2 delivers 99.9% what it promises. When SDL2 works it makes good habit to stay away your mind but now I want to talk about when SDL2 doesn’t work and when you want to deliver closed source application.
It seems that there is some problems with OpenGL/DirectX and other accelerations APIs that they don’t play together without tweaking and researching ways to make them work. Okay this ain’t SDL2 fault completely this manufacturer problem again but.. you use SDL2 to get rid of hardware problems.
All those problems are solvable with current SDL2 version but again they takes lots of time and someone who is willing to debug application in non-working machine and remember this is normal stuff in development and not a big thing. But it’s big thing when you are about to releasing your new bling bling game with megalomanic blitting and your surfaces starts to blink every time you blit with some random machines. Even in not so bling bling UnReal Wolrd RPG you have problem with that but they are solved now but I builded many many Mac OS X and Linux builds before problem was traced to SDL2 related. If you are Apple people I point my finger to you. What the heck you are doing to openGL in Mac OS X??
SDL2 is what open source library but their biggest problems (in my opinion) are these: Hey Wiki is nice but have proper Doxygen or something documentation (which should be official), You have Bugzilla but there is no connection (or I just didn’t noticed) how bugs and Mercurial repository communicate each other and where/how you communicate with you users (mailinglists are so 90′ how about posting some news)?
What this leads is people post patches to Bugzilla where they get to nowhere and other one are using them because they solve their problem. This leads in situation where there is unofficial SDL2 libraries that are not compatible with each other. This is normal situation in open source world and SDL2 is under ZLib license so you can do it but what happens when they fix something that was broken to official SDL2 library and you using older one in development that is patched to work?
This is not SDL2 specific thing it’s very common situation with many open source projects (and yes they tend to have limited man power if you like to fix them you can! Learn to communicate with those people like I should with SDL2 people) but in a way SDL2 have deep connection with Valve (They use it in Linux steam client at least) and Steam ain’t small company they should but power behind this or let it go.
At the end remember this ain’t rant against SDL2 or SDL2 developers. They are doing hard work for you getting mostly nothing out of it. Because Eastern is all about pain and unhappiness so this was my contribution to that or no not really people!! Life is too short for sadness so have a lot’s of fun all eastern!
Linux audio library smackdown part4: LibAO
March 2nd, 2015 by Tuukka PasanenLast time I’ve took look at Simple Direct Layer and how to get audio out of it. If SDL still feels little bit too hard to cope with I think I have solutions for you: libAO. Besides being no brainier with API libAO provides huge list of supported operating systems.
There is so much audio systems supported that you won’t be dissapointed but as much as I like everyone use Roaraudio. I don’t see it’s happening really soon (sorry roar you had your time in fame) but supporting Roaraudio doesn’t mean that libAO is obsolete. It’s far from being obsolete. Libao supports OSS, ALSA and Pulseaudio out of the box and only problem is license is GPL 2.0+ so it’s no-go for proprietary development.
History
LibAO is developed under Xiph umbrella. Xiph is the organization who brought you Ogg/Vorbis, FLAC, Theora and currently they are hammering together next generation video codec Daala. Opus-audio codec standard is also Xiph project. LibAO rised from Xiph’s need multi-platform audio output library for Vorbis-audio codec. In this point if you don’t have any glue what I just said in last sentences I think you should take your spoon and start shovelling about Open Source audio codecs.
Becaus of the history libAO only has output mode and doesn’t use any callbacks. It doesn’t have fancy Float32 mode (as much as I understood) but that doesn’t say it’s bad thing. It works as expected you just feed bytes and after while you hear them from your speakers.
What about API
Supported outputs: Alsa, Oss, Jack, Mac OS X, Windows
License: GNU General Public license 2.0+
As said libAO API is difficult to describe since there almost ain’t NAN of it. You initialize, ask output device, put in your mode settings and start feeding data. Pulseaudio simple is almost easy as this but it’s still more difficult if you compare it to libAO. LibAO doesn’t support recording so only output and there must be a way to use another device than default but it’s not very easy to find or I was too lazy to dig it out.
So who wants to use libAO? People in hurry and don’t mind GPL-license, someone with very very tiny need of just getting audio out and people how hate bloat.
Summary: So if you hate bloat and again license doesn’t make you unhappy please use this library. Still libAO has kind of same problem that ALSA has. It’s mature, usable and ready for hardcore torturing but is it sexy? No! Is fresh? No, No! Is something that will change it API every week or hour?
After this I have to choose what to bring next. I have FFmpeg, Gstreamer and VLC in row. If you have opinion about next framework let me know.
Linux audio library smackdown part3: SDL
February 5th, 2015 by Tuukka PasanenHow many of you remember Loki Games/Entertaiment/Software? Hands up now! I’m still waiting.. wuhuu hands up now! Loki.. Loki! Oh still no hands.. what a pity (Damn how old Am I?). Ok I Admit! It was before Steam, before Internet was this huge fast beast for watching videos, telling how you are doing right now and sharing photos.
Loki only shipped CD’s for installing your application and there wasn’t hot fixes waiting when you got CD from post or yes there where but I had to wait and wait for 200 MB blob to download for ages with my 57600 modem. All the time I thought that I’ll boot Windows for playing Castle Wolfestein. It was long before before Linux have any gaming community what so ever. There weren’t Firefox or Chrome available and Google was just starting to own our lifes. So it was dark days of late ’90 (we had electricity thanks for asking).
Loki was founded on 1998 and it got on bankruptcy on 2001 after IT bubble blowed. Loki changed Linux in good way. One thing that they left behind was called Simple Direct Layer (SDL1). SDL layer sits top on Xorg that makes creating games more ease. You can port your game to Windows and Mac OS X with little effort. Current version of SDL is SDL2.
Good thing about SDL is that it abstracts drawing to screen in Windows, Mac OS X and X-windows. SDL1 was all about pixel buffers but SDL2 is all about surfaces and acceleration. It support many more OSes but that’s not the what we are looking at today. So how do you playing audio out of SDL1/2?. Good thing is audio interface stayed same through conversion from SDL1 to SDL2. They only added few bugs and float point audio in SDL2. SDL1 have recording but I didn’t manage to make it work so if anyone with more patience than me can lead me to correct path I would be happy puppy. Here is SDL Github location: https://github.com/illuusio/linux-audio-example/tree/master/sdl (more…)
Linux audio library smackdown part2: Pulseaudio
January 27th, 2015 by Tuukka PasanenOh yes.. those were great times! Open Sound System was rocking my Linux based sound system and I was having a time of my life. Like we all know good doesn’t last long. Soon after happiness I find out that OSS couldn’t do recording and playing (full duplex) same time. Fiery same time this was working on Windows 98 very well. I was shocked how the heck my Linux box is so borked? Luckily times were changing and this time they formed only better. ALSA was about to take over OSS in Kernel version 2.6. Why I’m talking about ALSA and OSS when I should talk about Pulseaudio? Read further to find out why or go examples for Pulseaudio here: https://github.com/illuusio/linux-audio-example/tree/master/pulseaudio (more…)
Linux audio library smackdown part1: Portaudio
January 16th, 2015 by Tuukka PasanenCommon disinformation people tends to believe in is that Linux Audio is in bad shape. Actually it’s not. They are right ALSA is getting bit rusty and it’s not top of the notch but list of supported sound cards is long. There have been speak about next generation audio API for Linux but nothing is really happening (I’m happy if you prove me wrong!). Last year I had task to evaluate different Linux audio libraries for playing audio and recording. So these articles try to make some light to my journey and what did I found. inpatient can go to Github https://github.com/illuusio/linux-audio-example/tree/master/portaudio. There is other library examples also but only Portaudio is currently updated to my last version. I wrote same very simple application to test every audio library. I’ll upgrade rest of the examples and add also Xiph libao and GStreamer. (more…)