1976-2024 : forty-nine years of miscellaneous stuffs

At home: Zillions of projects

This page is dedicated to the many projects I completed in parallel of my successive positions.

It could be some side projects in the company I worked for, or personal things I addressed in relation to my own personal interest.

1997: Asterix demo

Nov. 11th, 2005 23:18 by Stéphane de Luca — Permalink | TrackBack: https://stephanedeluca.com/trackback/343 — updated on Nov. 18th, 2018 03:17 exists for 19 years & 2 weeks ago - .
Asterix Infogrames Virtual studio

During the development of Commando I had to make a one week demo of Asterix for a pre-sale project for Infogrames Entertainment, back in 1997.

This project was targeting PCs and PlayStation One, so I took advantage of the engine I was developing: I plugged some artworks I have been made by an external studio in Paris and made use of motion captured animation from my former project Angel Quest.

I programmed an RTC (Real Time Camera) intro for the game, featuring a night and day management cycle, for which I also programmed a realtime fire effect.

I included some sound effects and in a couple of days I completed a short demo, where you were able to wander in the small village.

Look at the following screen shots:

1998 and 2005: Porting my game engine from PlayStation to PC

Nov. 11th, 2005 23:18 by Stéphane de Luca — Permalink | TrackBack: https://stephanedeluca.com/trackback/902 — updated on Nov. 18th, 2018 03:19 exists for 19 years & 2 weeks ago - .
Asterix WarStation

During the development of Commando and the one week demo of Asterix for Infogrames Entertainment, back in 1997, I spent one weekends and over the night work sessions to port the game engine to the PC.

WarStation™: First port, en route to Windows

I started with a port to Windows in C and DirectX, converting all the PlayStations libs (including sodlib, libGPU, etc.) and achieved the port in late 1998.

I ran Commando with no issue with great speed performances.

WarStation SdlImage: Second port, en route to Java

Seven years later, I ported the whole game engine to Java J2ME and succeeded to run it on the iMac Power PC and the Macbook 12” at incredible high performances performance.

I dropped DirectX of course, and ported the 3D code to openGL.

And during the July 2005 summer holiday I’ve had completed the port and ran the Asterix demo I wrote 8 years before for the PlayStation.

This demo became one of the unit test for my SdlImage™ video game visual booster technology.

Look at the following screen shots of Asterix/Java:

August 2005: a machine learning 3D app to crack the lotto

Aug. 25th, 2005 15:00 by Stéphane de Luca — Permalink | TrackBack: https://stephanedeluca.com/trackback/903 — updated on Apr. 22nd, 2019 15:00 exists for 19 years & 3 months ago - .
DNA lotto ML SdlLoto WarStation

During the summer 2005, I spent a month working on a way to improve my chances to win the French lottery and in August, I came up with SdlLoto.

SdlLoto: a realtime 3D visualisation with WarStation™ / Java

I used the WarStation port to Java I completed in July to develop SdlLoto.

I thought I could find a 3D visualisation that would help me in developing ideas I had.

Failling to find visual patterns

I initially thought I could find visual patterns in series of wining number, but I get to nowhere.

Machine learning: neural network and DNA-programming

Several years ago, I had explored genome programming on my HP4/CV in order to recognise letter glyphs.

For the lotto, I wanted to simulate multiple ways to draw 6 numbers and test it against all the previous actual wining draw I had in database.

I created millions of players, each picking a drawing method, and generated 1024 generations. Because the computing time was long, I made a server version of the sw and ran it on a server during the night. Once the best guess was ready I could run the 3D client version on my computer, get the guess numbers and play then for real.

In order to help tracing the whole process, I visualised the multiple genomes as a rolling bitmap image which I displayed at the bottom of the screen:

My conclusion was I really thrived to work on such a subject and learned tons of stuffs. But I never won the lottery though. No problem.

1991: High Screen 5 app prototyping tool

Feb. 11th, 1991 23:18 by Stéphane de Luca — Permalink | TrackBack: https://stephanedeluca.com/trackback/904 — updated on Nov. 18th, 2018 05:10 exists for 33 years & 9 months ago - .
Highscreen

During 1990-1991 I was developing for PCSoft HighScreen 5, a tool to make apps.

I was specifically in charge of HSMaquet, the app prototyping tool: 100% interactive, this interface builder was used by developers to speed up their app. They were creating the whole app screens and controllers and were able to link them with no additional code.

HSMaquet was able to generate the code to more than 20 languages, including Fortran, Cobol, Turbo Pascal, Microsoft Basic, etc. The developer could compile and link and demo his app to his customer within days.

I have found the ads in an old magazine:

1994: My book about Rolling Your Own Professional Video Game back in 1993

July. 23rd, 2006 22:09 by Stéphane de Luca — Permalink | TrackBack: https://stephanedeluca.com/trackback/344 — updated on Nov. 18th, 2018 05:26 exists for 18 years & 4 months ago - .
Addison Wesley Book

During 1993 and 1994 I wrote a book for Addison Wesley about how to create a professionnal video game on PCs.

At that time, you had to know a lot about the underlying hardware and to be fluent in assembly language and C or C++.

Reminding the Intel 386 and its 32-bit protected memory model for instance? In that mode, you were able to address all the memory at once, avoiding to deal with EMS (Extended Memory System).

And what about the various graphics card that were on the market at that time? Each chipset had to be adressed specifically with the relevant asm code and port management. And by 1993, no much — not to say none — information was available, including on the Internet.

The sound cards? Do you remember the Gravis Ultra Sound?

And what to say of the interrupts for DOS?

Read the excerpt (in french only) to see how — in this area, Bob Dylan was true — things have dramatically changed.

Download the excerpt