I just decided to release all the code for my Settlers 1 clone to GitHub. You can find more info here. It’s working, and semi-playable, but still pretty far from the full experience. I don’t know if I’ll ever get time to finish it, but at least now someone also can pick it up and hopefully do something nice with it.
I finally had some time to throw a new release of Redshift together. The most important change, for most of you, is probably the Geoclue location provider by Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre. The old GNOME clock location provider has stopped working for many, as Ubuntu no longer includes a clock applet in the unity desktop. This is fixed now with this new location provider, which should work right out-of-the-box on Ubuntu Natty systems.
Other news are:
So you’ve just created a Flattr account and now you can’t find anything to flattr? Are you using free software every day? Raphaël Hertzog (of Debian fame) is running a monthly Flattr FOSS newsletter where he recommends free software to flattr. You can see all the previous newsletter posts here.
If you don’t know what Flattr is, have a look here.
I have made some tools for calculating AccurateRip checksums as described here available here: http://github.com/jonls/accuraterip-tools. There is also a tool in the repository for calculating the kind of CRC32 that is included in EAC log files.
The code is the documentation, but it should be easy enough to follow. The tools read raw CD audio data from stdin. Track lengths must be given in sector size.
<raw audio output> | ar_crc <offset> <track 1 length> .. <track N length> <raw audio output> | ckcdda <track 1 length> .. <track N length> <raw audio output> | eac_crc32
The raw audio output can for example be produced from FLAC files in the following manner:
flac --decode --stdout --force-raw-format --endian=little --sign=signed Track*.flac
I hope to release Redshift 1.6.1 before the end of the month. It will include some small bug fixes, updated documentation and updated translations, but for this to happen I will need your help:
Redshift will look for a configuration file in “~/.config/redshift.conf” (or in XDG_CONFIG_HOME if that has been set). A different configuration file can be loaded with the command line option “-c”. Here is an example:
; Global settings [redshift] temp-day=5700 temp-night=3500 transition=1 gamma=0.8:0.7:0.8 location-provider=manual adjustment-method=vidmode ; The location provider and adjustment method settings ; are in their own sections. [manual] lat=55.0 lon=12.0 [vidmode] screen=1
When porting Redshift to Windows I ran into trouble when setting a color temperature lower than about 4500K. The problem is that Windows sets limitations on what kinds of gamma adjustments can be made, probably as a means of protecting the user against evil programs that invert the colors, blank the display, or play some other annoying trick with the gamma ramps. This kind of limitation is perhaps understandable, but the problem is the complete lack of documentation of this feature (SetDeviceGammaRamp on MSDN). A program that tries to set a gamma ramp that is not allowed will simply fail with a generic error leaving the programmer wondering what went wrong.
There are workarounds, but you will not find them anywhere unless you have the patience to work your way through assembly listings of Windows DLLs. So here they are, for your convenience; these two tricks will work at least on a Windows 7 machine:
So if you want to run the experimental build of Redshift on Windows, you need to use one of the above methods if you want to use the same color temperatures as are available on the linux version.
I had wanted to release redshift 1.5 last month but for various reasons I never got around to it. Today I received a very generous donation which reminded me that I really needed to get this release out. The source is available from the launchpad project page as usual. Packages for Ubuntu Lucid are available in the PPA. The contributors for this release are: Francesco Marella, Gabriel de Perthuis, aleth and the translators.
Thank you contributors and donators! (btw, the donation will be spent on hosting for this website).
I’ve released redshift 1.4 today. The source is available from the launchpad project page as usual. Packages for Ubuntu Lucid are available in the PPA. There’s lots of exiting new stuff in this release thanks to several contributors: Francesco Marella, Dan Helfman and all the translators.
redshift -h for more information.configure options for GUI changed; see configure --help for more information.UPDATE: 1.4.1 released. It includes mono icons for Ubuntu (by Joern Konopka); the status icon toggles to show whether Redshift is on or off; and it has updated translations: Spanish (Fernando Ossandon), Russian (Чистый).
Update: More info here.
Here’s a quick preview of something I’ve been working on.
As you can see, it uses the graphics from the original game. It is beginning to approach a state where it’s actually playable. Here’s some more screens for your viewing pleasure:
The Google Maps API can be used for other things than maps.
The tiles were created with this python script: http://gist.github.com/618639. It will convert a PNG image to PNG tiles. The script depends on pycairo to do the cutting and scaling of the images. This example converts master.png to tiles of size 256×256 with 1 being the minimum zoom level and 4 being the maximum zoom:
$ pngmaptiler.py master.png 256 256 1 4