About my Acer c200 notebook...

I have an Acer C200 Notebook. I bought it, because I wanted to have a tablet PC.

The hardware was quite cheap (for a tablet pc) and the hardware is not too bad.
The soundchip is horrible - on maximum volume I can hardly understand what is said in a movie if I watch a DVD, even if I attach external speakers. Only if these have an amplifier, the sound output is ok.
The LC display is great - great colors, great contrasts, good view, even outside. The tablet (wacom driven) is also working quite well, except for some inaccuracies at the borders of the screen, but that's ok, I don't use the borders anyway when painting.

However, all the rest of this piece of s*** hardware sucks so badly, that I don't even know where to start.

The tip of the iceberg came today, when I wanted to clean up my HD a bit. I stumbled uppon a directory named "book". What's that I thought? Uhhu, a manual for the notebook. I believe noone reads that stuff. But its no reason why it has to be incorrect or so useless. Actually, I only opened the PDF for just a few seconds, just for determining if I could throw that 1.8mb into the trash. And what do I read here on page 30?

Regeln der Lautstärke
Das Einstellen der Lautstärke ist so einfach wie das Drücken von Tasten. Weitere Informationen über das Regeln der Lautstärke finden Sie in "Hotkeys" auf Seite 26.

translated:

Volumecontrol
Adjusting the speaker volume is just as simple as pressing keys. Further information about adjusting the volume can be found in "Hotkeys" on page 26.

What the hell? Couldn't they just tell me HOW to do it there? Its not that it uses a whole paragraph to explain, in fact, the explanation could even be shorter than this reference.
Anyway, so I scrolled up, stumbling about how to make a € sign. It is [alt gr]+[e] - on really every (german) keyboard I worked with so far. But not on this notebook - if the manual would be correct, but it isn't. It says the euro sign is placed on the "5" key, showing a photo of a keyboard that is different from mine. Taking a closer look, the keyboard is not at all like my keyboard - I guess the photograph shows the US version (but the resolution is crappy and I don't now the exact US layout). Well done localisation team. You are translating manuals for how long now? Ten years? Have you ever figured out, that the keyboards are replaced by localised keyboards, having a total different layout? It can't be so hard to put an entry on the top of the agenda for translating hardware manuals that says "check for localised hardware (KEYBOARD!!!!)".

Oh, but where was I? Awwhh, right, setting the volume. Let's see, page 26... ah on page 27 it says that I should press the [fn] key + [up/down]. Seems to be correct - but it doesn't work for me. Why not? Because the software that acer provides is much worse than anything I've seen before. When I started my notebook today, the CPU had 100% usage, because some Acer software was running like crazy, slowing down everything else (no, that wouldn't have stoped if I wouldn't have stopped the process). Guess what - the software which was hanging provides overlay graphics showing the volume of my speaker if I change the volume using the hotkeys, and once I shot down the (not working anyway) software, the hotkeys for setting the volume doesn't work anymore (which works only if the software runs correctly). What doesn't really matter, since it does not make any sense setting the volume to a different level than maximum, since otherwise I cannot hear anything, even WITH my amplified external speakers.

But wait, didn't I deinstall the acer software (reason for that later) - oh yes, but I reinstalled the hotkey software a few weeks ago, because I was totally desperate for another problem, this time a hardware problem. Oh yeah, the hardware that is not CPU, graphics adapter or LC Display is so badly designed that it hurts (oh well, the DVD seems to be working, but I hardly use it and really: what could be done wrong THERE?). For instance, the display is opened in reverse manner. Unlike other tablet PCs that have a builtin keyboard, the display is opening differently for the C200. The display is not lying flat on the keyboard like for other notebooks (where I experinced that the keyboard left its marks on the screen - thank you, DELL), the display is always showing to the top. A quick drawing to clearify this:


Right, the keyboard is below the display and the display is always exposed to the environment. And no, the angle of the display cannot be changed, it knows only opened or closed. And the open state is not actually as open as it should be, instead, if the desk makes a jump (because I hit on the desk in anger of that crappy drivers that acer provides or if I just type for some time a longer text (like this rant)), the display closes suddenly and if I have my fingers on the keyboard, the display is rolling over my fingers (no joke, it really does, and sometimes it even hurts a bit). But thats no problem that software could fix (or make worse, which would be the case if Acer could provide some software for that too, calling it eClose or something stupid like that). Just another problem hides in the area below the display and just a little bit away from the keyboard: There was a tiny nipple that was used as a key, telling the operating system that the display is closed. Or not. Or closed. Or not. This actually happend all the time when the display was closed - the nipple was not pushed down properly by the display. Not bad? Well... the default configuration of the lousy notebook was, that the display (screen) rotates, so that the resolution changed from 1024x768 to 768x1024. Uhhu. I switched that off very quickly. It would just rotate (which takes pretty much time) the screen every time the notebook was moved a bit when it is in closed state (the sense of tablet pcs is, that one should carry them around making notes, remember?). However, another behaviour could not be changed (or I failed finding it): If set to standby, the notebook powers on if the display state changes from opened to closed or the way back. Great. And no, the bios settings couldn't change that.

Ok, but I have some understanding for these kind of problems, so I didn't complain. But the story doesn't end here, oh no. Yes, I know, the story is already long enough for a week of blog entries, so I stop here and continue tomorow. I guess it will be just as long as this one, if I can finish it at all...

Killing time

Modelling is somehow currently more attractive than doing the "should be done" work. It is quite lowpoly (<1.8k tris) and took me a couple of hours to accomplish. Have to continue coding now...

The final Image

The rendering, without glow, shadow or antialias - just as ingame

The wireframe

Spaceships

I modelled a few spaceships... These models have no use at the moment, but I still have a certain game in mind that I want to create, and having a few models then would be a plus. So if I feel some inspiration, I am modelling (instead of playing) a bit and this is the result:


This was the first ship that I've modelled using a technique that I developed for myself in the past. Making a model requires three steps:
1. modelling
2. uv unwrapping
3. texturing
I like the first part the most, while the second part is the one that I hate, while painting the texture itself is quite some fun.
Each step requires nearly an equal amount of time for me. However, the first part does not take the longest in most cases.
For these shipmodels, I used a different technique, using a texture atlas:



So the ship you see above was textured just using the texture here. I just moved the uvs in a way that each triangle takes the piece of texture it needs. The advantage of this is, that the uvunwrapping is fairly easy and that there is no additional texturing - even if more objects are created, and this is another advantage: Different objects can share the same texture. Like this:

Of course this has drawbacks - normalmapping is likley to be not working and it should be avoided to stretch the textures too much. Additional triangles might also be required for the purpose of texture mapping the right parts of the texture.

But it is also fun to work this way, since it does not require too much time to create a model, once the texture atlas exists. Maybe it is also possible to create different skins, altering this single texture and changing all the shipmodels using one texture. For example, if two teams are required, the texture could either contain red colored texture components or bluecolored. Or the type of texture could be changed, more rusty for example.

incredible image viewing

Wow, this is amazing...

The best webbrowser in the world....

I made a safari today. A friend sent me a link:

• http://www.apple.com/safari/

I am currently using Firefox. I am not happy with it. When I use my PC, I often just use the standby button (it's a notebook) and just continue the next day. Additionally, I don't shut down programs either. So every application I use is running for hours and hours - or even days.
I switched to Firefox years ago - maybe it was v.6 back then or something like that. However, I don't like it much anymore. Some certain features don't work any more (i.e. find as you type has changed - in early versions it was quite easy to browse using a keyboard: type the link and press enter - I haven't figured out how that is working with the new versions...). But worst is: It requires huge amounts of memory - like 700 mb. Having one Gb RAM in total, the FF has a severe impact on the overall performance. After testing a bit (opening googlemaps as a tab and closing it again) it looked like the browser has a memoryleak.

Anyway, so when I saw that Safari add, I thought - give it a shot, maybe it is a good browser without memoryproblems. So I downloaded it (noticing that it is quite small) and started it.
I played a bit around - using my mousewheel and doing a few clicks trying out shortcuts I am used to. Its been really short 30 seconds - it merrily crashed just then after I pressed [ctrl]+[d].

But its the best browser in the world.