Office Management Simulator

since 2020 · active · game design godot

Office Management Simulator is a simulation game in which you manage the office space of a growing company. You keep productivity high while trying to address the needs of your employees.

The game is implemented in the Godot game engine and is at an early prototyping stage. I think there is a lot of potential in the emerging game-play and humor that comes from trying to fulfill the absurd, conflicting needs of a company and its employees.

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Totem/Grilo Arte+7 Plugin

2009 – 2017 · finished · gnome open source vala

This plugin for the GNOME video player Totem allowed you to watch the video streams of the Franco-German TV channel Arte from within the player. Sadly, the Arte+7 service is only available to IP addresses in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland. The source was hosted on Gitorious, which has since shut down, but you can find a copy on GitHub.

The plugin supported Totem versions 2 and 3. Later it was refactored into a Grilo plugin to provide the streaming capability to other Linux video players.

webdesign.wenner.ch

2004 – 2014 · finished · web design

Hand-crafted PHP and MySQL sites, and later Joomla-based ones. Some were paid work, some were built for the fun of it. It started in 2004 with the family's own pages — wenner.ch and the sub-domains sitting under it, including 3DGraphicDesign.ch — and turned into a small side business under webdesign.wenner.ch between 2011 and 2014, offering design and maintenance.

The references listed on that page were the Fahrschule Shabani in Schaffhausen (Joomla 3, custom template), the Feuerwehr Dürnten (Joomla 2.5, custom template), the language school of Claudia Koch and Rhian Davies (custom CMS with online registration) and the Jugendparlament Schaffhausen (Joomla).

Fortunately most of these websites are no longer online.

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Orxonox - ETH Open Source Game Development Lab

2006 – 2013 · finished · game design open source blender

Orxonox is a mix between a spacecraft shooter, a vertical scroller and a first-person shooter. It is developed by ETH students. In my job as a teaching assistant, I created educational material for C++ development and 3D content creation, and mentored students. For more information, visit orxonox.net.

Orxonox Gameplay Compilation 2013

On-Surface-Magnetochemistry Visuals

2012 – 2013 · finished · science blender animation

I designed the inside cover of Chemical Science, Volume 3, Issue 11 (November 2012). It visualizes the effects described in the paper "On-surface coordination chemistry of planar molecular spin systems: novel magnetochemical effects induced by axial ligands" by Christian et al.

I also created a 3D animation for the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (JPCL) Perspective in 2013; it is featured in this YouTube video.

Music Retargeting and Synthesis

March 2012 – September 2012 · finished · computer graphics eth science music

In my master thesis Music Retargeting and Synthesis at the ETH Zürich Computer Graphics Lab I explored applying computer graphics methods to music. The approach worked and was later condensed into the paper Scalable Music: Automatic Music Retargeting and Synthesis, published at Eurographics 2013.

Thesis Abstract

Music is an important part of many computer graphics applications like animation, film or computer games. Yet, many advancements in computer graphics have not been generalized appropriately to the audio domain. In this thesis we propose a novel method for dynamic content-aware rescaling and reassembly of music. The method is inspired by the recent works in image retargeting, video reshuffling and character animation. Given a certain target length and ad- ditional constraints, such as music structure or importance, the proposed method performs a global optimization to find an assembly of the input music that fulfills the constraints with the best possible quality. Low and high-level features are extracted from the audio signal in order to build a graph, which encodes the constraints and potential forward and backward jumps. The desired music is synthesized using a k-stops shortest path algorithm. The algorithm runs in real time and it creates results with imperceptible transitions. We show applications such as shortening and enlarging the duration (up to infinity), music reshuffling, removal of vocal parts and video editing with audio alignment.

Snow Simulation @ ETH

2011 · finished · eth simulation

As part of the Physically-Based Simulation lecture at ETH Zürich, Martina, Fabian and I implemented a small project: we decided to simulate snowfall and accumulation in real time. The wind field is calculated by solving the Navier–Stokes equations on a 3D grid.

The result can also be downloaded as a video file.

Photo Blog

7 November 2006 – 2 January 2010 · finished · photography

Experiments in photography and photo editing.

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Pidgin One-Time Pad Plug-in

2008 – 2010 · finished · open source security

Pidgin-paranoia is a plug-in for the instant messenger Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim) that uses one-time pads to encrypt your conversations. A project for paranoid people, like me.

It was hosted on SourceForge, with a backup on the Internet Archive

The last release (0.4.0) came out on 2009-09-08. You can download it here:

• Source code
• Binary package for 64-bit Linux (Debian)
• Binary package for 32-bit Linux (Debian)

GNOME Water Temperature Applet

2008 – 2010 · finished · gnome open source python

The Water Temperature Applet displays water temperatures of rivers, lakes and oceans in your GNOME 2 panel. I wrote it so I always know when I should go swimming in the Rhine — and to learn the Python programming language.

It was hosted on sourceforge.net. The GNOME 2 panel it plugs into no longer exists.

The last release, 0.5.2, was published on 2009-09-03:

• Source code
• Binary package (Debian)

Gedit XML-Tools Plug-in

2009 – 2010 · finished · gnome open source python

This plug-in for the editor gedit provides XML Schema (XSD) validation and an XPath query editor. It could have been extended with other XML tooling, but the motivation never materialised.

It was hosted as XML-Tools on launchpad.net.

Google Summer of Code

June 2009 – August 2009 · finished · gnome open source

During Google Summer of Code (GSoC), I extended Libchamplain, a C library that provides a ClutterActor for displaying maps. The goal of the project was to add support for rendering OpenStreetMap XML data locally. Local rendering lets clients create maps with custom content and color themes.

The progress was documented on the blog foregroundnoise.wordpress.com/gsoc-2009, which is no longer online. As part of the programme, I got the opportunity to visit GUADEC in Las Palmas. It was a great conference — my thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me.

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Fingertier

2009 · finished · open source vala music

Fingertier (German for the Aye-aye) is a minimal, finger-friendly music player for mobile devices. It is inspired by the Apple iPod Shuffle. It was optimised for smartphones with small touch screens, such as the Openmoko Freerunner. It is implemented in Vala and uses GLib, GTK and GStreamer.

The app features MP3, Ogg and FLAC file format support (in theory, any format supported by GStreamer). It has buttons for play/pause, previous and next, as well as a sorted playlist, volume control, tags and album-cover display.

It was hosted on Google Code and now lives on in the Google Code Archive.

ETH Raytracer Contest 2009

2009 · finished · blender rendering computer graphics eth

In the "Computer Graphics" lecture at ETH Zürich, Fabian (smf68.ch) and I had to implement a raytracer from scratch. In the final week of the course we rendered a video, which was the winning submission in the closing rendering contest.

The result can also be downloaded as a video file.

3D Graphics Portfolio Page

2004 – 2008 · finished · 3d 3ds max web design

3DGraphicDesign.ch was my 3D portfolio, online from 2004 to 2008 under the alias Nowic. The site itself was hand-written PHP: a file-based news engine, a visitor counter that overflowed, and a guestbook that in the end held more spam than greetings.

What it showed was mostly work in progress. Alongside the finished projects — the Deus Ex Online prologue, NanoAge, the Kanti Rebuild level and the Roman bath house of Juliomagus, each of which has its own entry here — there were four galleries of loose models: low-polygon objects built for games, high-polygon renderings, a work-in-progress and junkyard section, and a page of wallpapers and websites.

The pictures below are what remains of those galleries after the images that belong to a project are set aside. They are the things that never found a game to be in: a train station for an isometric Transport Tycoon clone, a futuristic racing bike for a game that was frozen, a Cessna, a Lamborghini Diablo that proved patches were the wrong tool, a wind turbine, a toilet, and the first two storeys of my family's house.

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3D Reconstruction of the Roman Bath House of Juliomagus

August 2003 – December 2003 · finished · archaeology 3ds max rendering animation

In the last year of high school in Switzerland, every student writes a graduation thesis. Driven by my interest in 3D graphics, I chose art as my subject, although the work is grounded in history just as much. Not far from my hometown lie the remains of a Roman village called Juliomagus (German) — today's Schleitheim, in the canton of Schaffhausen — among them its bath house.

I researched the site and rebuilt the entire bath house in 3D Studio Max, producing both still images and animated fly-throughs. The textures were painted in Photoshop, some of them based on photo references. The work won the school award for the best thesis in the subject of art in 2003.

The rendering output was severely limited by the computers I had available — a Pentium 4 with 1.8 GHz and 512 MB of RAM.

• Full Matura paper (German)
• Flight around the bath house: low quality, 4.87 MB, high quality, 45.0 MB
• Video of the inside: high quality, 32.3 MB

In German

Der Inhalt dieser Maturaarbeit ist die dreidimensionale Rekonstruktion der römischen Thermen von Juliomagus (Schleitheim) mithilfe eines Computerprogramms für dreidimensionale Darstellungen. Als Grundlage dienten die archäologischen Funde in Schleitheim (SH) sowie die allgemeinen Erkenntnisse über römische Thermen. Die rudimentär erhaltenen Überreste und die teilweise noch ausstehenden Grabungserkenntnisse verlangten nach gestalterischem Schliessen der Lücken unter Einbezug des allgemeinen Wissens über Thermen. Persönlich fand ich es faszinierend, Geschichtliches, Architektonisches, Fotografisches und Computergrafisches gestalterisch miteinander zu verbinden.

Die Arbeit gliedert sich in die archäologischen und historischen Grundlagen, die Beschreibung des zu rekonstruierenden Objekts – die Thermen von Iuliomagus –, die Erläuterung der verwendeten Computerwerkzeuge sowie die Darstellung der Arbeitsschritte bis zur fertigen Rekonstruktion. Da mir keine leistungsfähigen Render-Rechner zur Verfügung standen, sind die Videos weder sonderlich gut noch sehr lang geworden. Mit dieser Arbeit gewann ich den Preis für die beste Maturaarbeit im Bereich Bildnerisches Gestalten 2003 an der Kantonsschule Schaffhausen.

• 3D Rekonstruktion der römischen Thermen von Juliomagus
• Flug um die Thermenanlage: niedrige Qualität, 4.87 MB, hohe Qualität, 45.0 MB
• Video Thermenrundgang: hohe Qualität, 32.3 MB

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NanoAge - The Concern Wars

2001 – 2002 · abandoned · 3d game design

NanoAge - The Concern Wars was a MORPG (Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) set in a future version of Berlin. The game had a dark atmosphere and revolved around the fight between powerful global corporations and secret organisations. We built it on the Torque 3D engine from GarageGames, with a team of ten members and a number of freelancers.

The project was cancelled because most of the team members had become inactive — no time, no motivation. We had finished the first districts of Berlin, player models, weapons, decoration objects, the HUD and a lot of the story. It is a shame we had to stop — I would have liked to finish it.

My tasks were team management, concept art, modelling, texturing and animation.

The advertising boards were made for the fictional corporations of the game world: MedTech, GSC, Gaia, CIS and IIG.

• Official website www.nanoage-game.com on archive.org
• Project diary at giga.de on archive.org
• Hardware INC, one of the Nanoage companies www.hardwareinc.org on archive.org

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Deus Ex Online: Prologue

1999 – 2001 · finished · 3d game design modding

A modification of the very successful action/role-playing mix Deus Ex (Unreal Engine). We set out with big ambitions to build a massively multiplayer mod, close to a total conversion, but after several setbacks we decided to stop once the single-player preview version was finished.

That version was meant as an appetizer for the real game and tells the story leading up to DXO. It takes place in the final days of WWII: you are a prisoner in a secret German bunker and your goal is to survive and escape from this hell. It features five levels of action, a lot of background information, and a heartwarming story.

Features: new levels, new skins, new weapons, new objects, a new skill system, conversations, a new story and three different endings. My tasks involved 3D modelling and texturing.

Downloads:

• The modification. You need a copy of the Deus Ex game to play it.
• Trailer in high or low resolution

Links:

• Official website www.deusxonline.de on archive.org
• Interview with Mirza Sadovic (German) part 1, part 2 on archive.org
• Interview on gamigo.de on archive.org
• Interview on DXEditing.com on archive.org
• Articles on DeusExZone.info on archive.org

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Kanti Rebuild in Unreal Tournament

1999 – 2000 · abandoned · 3d game design modding

Our aim was to rebuild our high school buildings as an Unreal Tournament deathmatch level. We also planned to model many detailed 3D objects — cars, furniture and other decorations — to achieve a realistic look. My tasks involved team management, modelling, texturing and level design.

We finished the small buildings and started on the big ones, but as you can see, it was never completed — I left school in 2003 and we never took it up again. It would have been nice to run around the teachers' staff room with a rocket launcher, though.

Credits: Level design by Jaspi and Gummiente, object modelling by Nowic — together we were the "No Budget Studios" team.

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