Anders Lundgren

Ever got curious on something and then you’re unable to let it go until you’ve tried it out? Thought so. For me it started with the extracting of the FreeDB archive. What a beast! You start with a small innocent tar.bz2 archive of about 440 Mb. Extract the bz2 archive and you get something quite big, about 3.2 Gb tar archive, and it is now that you start thinking about the nagging about reading the FAQ before extracting. What a newbie can’t extract a simple archive?! Then I ran out of inodes on my partition… Cute.

The fact that the database contains almost 2 million files (2,000,000) is really a problem. If you don’t run out of disc space due to the overhead you’ll run out of inodes like I did. I was frankly surprised when the disc was full, I had 25 Gb free when I started and I had plenty of space left when it stoped. This was a partition using FAT32. Now I had a peek at the FAQ…

Next try, extracting to a partition using ext2, and this time I didn’t ran out of something. Thus it took my old disc several hours to extract all files. Now then? Here I was with a directory wasting about 7.4 Gb of disc space. Why is it distributed in this way? I would prefer to have the data in a MySQL database. There are some parsers out there for those of you that want to take the easy way out, but what’s the fun with that? So I wrote my own in Java and it is now released under the GPL, read more about the Viba IT FreeDB to MySQL parser.

Now when the week-end is drawing near my tip for you is to try it out. It’s not every day you’ll have the possibility to play around with this amount of data. For your information, once parsed and imported into MySQL the disc usage for the data will only be about 1.5 Gb including indicies for all tables. Nice, huh?

For the last couple of days I’ve been looking around for open-source 3D engines, comparing and reading. This is an early step in my crazy plans of making an open 3D game. If the game ever will be realized is yet to be seen, but the research is very interesting though. There are a bunch of open-source 3D engines out there and the ones I’ve been looking at are Crystal Space, Irrlicht, Ogre and Panda. Since you probably don’t want to change the 3D engine in your project once on the road, you’ll have to do some research before the project is started. It isn’t easy to compare these engines, you’ll have to have good knowledge about your own project so you know your exact needs - now and in the future. It’s painful to walk in too small shoes.
Below is a table over the 3D engines mentioned above. This table is not ment to be a comparison between these 3D engines, it’s just a summary. The data was collected at mars 14th, 2006. The last column is just the number of hits on Google and thus doesn’t really say anything.

Some of the 3d engines also have wrappers so that you can use your favorite programming language to develop software using the engine. Since the wrapper only handles the communication between the 3D engine and your code the loss in performance isn’t overwhelming. The actual loss depends in the implementation so I’ll say nothing further about that.

Do you know of another 3D engine or did I miss something? Then let me know.