My personal projects
Vintage Story (2016 - now)
In February 2016 I have begun to put all my focus into making my Vintagecraft mod a standalone game. This will add whole new degree of freedom to express my love for detail and procedural generation. I can also go way beyond what would have been possible with only modding Minecraft and has far greater potential in allowing me to work full-time on it. I am extremely eager to see the results of my work in action and to see the game being played by others. No matter the outcome, the coming times will definitely be exciting!
[Update 2020]
Media Coverage: GamingOnLinux, GameStar, RockPaperShotGun, TechRadar, PowerUpGaming
You can follow my progress at vintagestory.at
Minecraft Mod: Butterfly Mania (2012 - 2017)
My Wife has been begging me to make a Butterfly Mod for Minecraft for like a year, until I finally gave in ;-)
This modification adds butterflies to the blocky world of Minecraft. With the help of my wife we created around 200 realistic behaving butterflies based on real life species. Each butterfly has about 30 different properties that we manage in our own custom programmed butterfly managemenet software. With the help of this butterfly database, my Wife is now able to fully manage all the butterflies with their graphics and various properties without any knowledge in programming. With about 1.500 monthly downloads and many video reviews, our mod has gathered a sizeable amount of attention by now.
As of 2017, progress is unlikley to continue, so I can focus all my energy on Vintage Story. Butterfly Mania will eventually be partially or fully implemented in our new game.
For more information, check out the mod description in the official minecraft forums.
Minecraft Mod: Vintagecraft (2014 - 2016)
Dissatified with the direction that our (my wife and I) favorite game Minecraft is going, and having discovered the awesome potential through TerraFirmaCraft we both set out to produce a complete overhaul that suited our vision. For one of the first versions we received an overwhelming response by the Minecraft Community.
It is a brand new and highly interesting challenge for us to create realistic and procedurally generated worlds where players can delve into exploring new lands, survive it's dangerous inhabitants and thrive from it's rich resources.
Our modification is open source and available for download for everyone. Descriptions of the game mechanics and players guides are slowly being added to the official Wiki Site.
ForgeTheWorld (2013 - 2016?)
One of my dearest projects, as it is a spiritual sucessor to my first large scale web platform named ClonkForge that I created in 2002, FTW is a huge task as I am working alone on it with high goals in mind. It's aim is to be a different kind of project hosting platform made from scratch.
This project is currently on hold as I'm focusing all my energy on my Vintagecraft Standalone Project
Implemented so far: Custom MVC Architecture, Basic comment System, User login/register, Simple Project register/edit, Privileges+Roles System, Forum System, System wide category configuration, User Avatars, Per-Project Category System, User Wall System.
Anego CMS (2008 – 2016)
I've been working on an experimental and open source content management system named Anego CMS. My vision was to build a simple but fast, themable and pluggable CMS that avoids slow full page loads which are common practice in 99% of nowadays content management systems. In 2011 I've reached that goal and keep maintaining the project ever since. I've marked 2016 as the official end as I probably won't be adding any new signifcant features.
For me personally, Anego had become the perfect choice for setting up small scale business Websites. This very website is run by Anego. Other implementations include, but are not limited to, my wife's website saraty.com and my mothers former restaurant website freihofsulz.at.
If you would like to it try out, the source code is available on Github. A setup script is provided.
Google Summer of Code (2011)
I was accepted to the Google Summer of Code 2011 which is, quoting the original website, "a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects". I proposed a project for phpMyAdmin to build a database monitoring and optimization tool within phpMyAdmin's status page. The final result allows phpMyAdmin users to dive into the flood of queries as they are executed by the database server in real time. What usually requires special software to identify performance issues now can be done from within the same familiar database administration enviroment many have known for years.
The screenshot to the right shows the majority of what I have been working on that summer. It was a very joyful project to complete and I'm very pleased with the results as it actually assisted me years later during my working career.
Early day Projects (2001 - 2010)
Clonk Era
My first programming experiences came from a 2D Sandbox game named Clonk for which I published up to 60 various modifications, of which some are more elaborate and some less so ;-)
PHP Era
Besides the many little php projects that I made I also built up 2 major web platforms for the clonk community.
- Clonk Center: An allrounder site that offered mods as downloads, articles, screenshots, mod reviews and previews, a forum system, a comment system and more. Every community member was able to publish their own content after it was approved by a team of moderators. The whole system, including the forum, was coded from scratch in PHP. After more than 15 years of operation, I decided to shut it down as it was no longer actively used by the community.
- Clonk Forge: A Project hosting platform very similar to SourceForge/Github intended for clonk related projects. About 10 years after its creation I opened it up for any kind of projects and after almost 18 years this website is now also shut down due to low activity and growing maintenance costs.
Users of this site had access to create projects which came with their own private svn repository, forum system, bugtracker system, todolist system, comment system, various ways to customize their project site and more. The whole system, again, including the forum, was coded from scratch in PHP
C# Era
During my studies I got to learn C#, and thus I set out to build my own native todo list system that focused on usability and extensibility, I called it MyTodo. It had it's own plugin system, a system to sync lists across computers and a neat little feature that let's you put sticky posts on your desktop. It probably no longer works in Win7/Win10 though. Checkout the review of the tool by the german computer magazine Computerbild