Latest Photos On the Portland Spirit Hotel Monaco elevator Checking out the river. Posing with my sister at the bottom of the trail in front of th... At the observation point overlooking the falls. All smiles before encountering the extremely choppy waters. Suiting up to watch some whales. View of Mt. Rainier from Crystal Mountain, with some dude on th... Dramatic existential pose at Whistler.

	GDC 2008, Day 3 Posted on 2/23/2008 1:14:52 AM I started out the day this time with a talk from Phil Wilkins (SCEA) on the camera system in God of War 2. This lecture was really impressive, I walked out of there knowing more or less how the entire system worked. For the uninitiated, the development of this game was done mainly by the designers and the artists because of the tools developers wrote to focus the engine on this one game rather than a general purpose uber engine. Artists were able to define their own “safe zones” outside which the player would never travel which immensely simplified collisions. Camera zones also work the same way and all these things are authored in Maya which makes their workflow much smoother. Following that, I attended the Crysis talk where they went into a lot of the effects that made the game stand out from the rest. These included all their water techniques, frozen surfaces, and different post process effects like camera and object motion blur, screen space sun shafts, and color grading. The underwater portion of the session was the most involved since it involved a combination of techniques for underwater light scattering, surface animation and tessellation, reflection and refraction, god rays, caustics, and camera and object interaction with the water. The most surprising part was that they did a full Tessendorf animation model that is normally only done in the film industry. The pre-lunch session I attended dealt with tips and tricks in Autodesk Maya. The first half was done by a guy from Insomniac, the studio that created Resistance: Fall of Man. He went into some of the ways they make their lives easier such as making rough rigs so that animators can “sketch” how the character will pose and move. The second half was done by someone from Autodesk. He basically showed how to use the new features in Maya 2008 to increase your productivity. There are a lot of cool additions that I am looking forward to such as the ability to change the display size of vertices, a multimode that lets you select different component types without switching (face, edge, vertex), and most importantly having transforms be in relation to the component’s normal and not object space. After getting lunch and typing the previous part of this blog, I headed over to a Visual Arts talk about Team Fortress 2 and their stylization. I went to this one as a big fan of the game and its art style but it turned out to be one of the best talks in the show. Jason Mitchell went into a lot of detail behind the motivation for their art direction and what different aspects of it were inspired by. The characters were inspired by early 20th century illustrations like those of Norman Rockwell but mainly J.C. Leyendecker. He pointed out stuff like the way cloth folds, the rim lighting, and the reddish terminators on skin (where light regions begin to go dark). For the environment, he cited Spirited Away as a big inspiration for the impressionist texturing on all the materials, such as visible brush strokes on surfaces. Their choice for colors and class styles were meant to easily distinguish between teams and classes and to make the properties of each class obvious. For example, the Heavy is clearly slow but has a lot of health because of his size, and the large gun makes it apparent that he packs quite a punch. Jason then went into the actual implementation of their lighting model, which was a treat since I expected this to be purely an art talk. They also pointed out what I did when I played the game, you easily start calling the different classes “characters” because they leave that big an impression on you through their dialogue and unique style. The day and the conference were wrapped up with an AI talk by the Bungie guys. The tool and encounter (battle) system they wrote were very impressive. They have what they call a Plinko machine where squads of AI are fed through and are propagated to different tasks based on function, priority, and a few other variables. Squads also fallback in stages to different zones as the player mows through them. The design of this system was very elegant and powerful, whereas a finite state machine would be very ugly for some of the scenarios they presented. I had a blast at GDC and I’m very sad to see it come to an end. I will gladly give up my opportunity to go to SIGGRAPH if it means going to GDC every year. I feel that I get a lot more out of the lectures here while at the same time having a blast playing games and talking to developers. Bye San Francisco! Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	GDC 2008, Day 2 Posted on 2/22/2008 1:02:51 AM The schedule for the day looked something like this: Procedural Data Generation in Far Cry 2 Keynote: The Next 20 Years of Gaming From Mundane to Epic: The Making of the Starcraft 2 Cinematic Teaser Fast Water Simulation using Heightfields Lighting and Materials in Halo 3 Another walk of the main expo floor… The keynote made me want to read Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near. His talk had little to do with games but it was very fascinating. He talked about the exponential trends in biology, evolution, and technology. The singularity in question is humans surpassing biology. He gave examples of genome manipulation and how we will soon fully simulate the human brain. The Blizzard cinematic team’s attention to detail is just incredible. So much went into that Starcraft II trailer. I got to play the IGF games from yesterday on the expo floor at the end of the day. I have to say my favorite one so far is Synaesthete. It’s a very stylized Robotron-esque rhythm game where you shoot enemies and bosses by hitting keys to the beat of very well composed music. It was very addictive, nice to look at, and extremely fun. Some other games that I had a good time with included Fez, Fret Nice, and Audiosurf. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	GDC 2008, Day 1 Posted on 2/21/2008 2:21:39 AM The morning started out with a talk from Intel titled Optimizing DirectX Multi-core Architectures. The lecture focused mainly on threading your graphics code in order to fully take advantage of multi-core systems. The graphics portion of a game application usually makes up about 35-45% of CPU time so making this as fast as possible is a good thing. Intel talked about using VTune and PIX to profile games, and interestingly enough they are releasing a PIX plug-in soon that allows you to use their counters from within PIX. The case study was on GRIN, a Swedish engine that is being used on the new Bionic Commando game. They talked about making their renderer multithreaded and the challenges faced in this process. They use a deferred rendering system which allows them to have a job queue and have messages with matching actions that do not block. The only blocking call is a flush between frames that executes the job queue and renders the frame. I then had to work at the Microsoft career booth for a few hours. I got a chance to talk to a lot of interesting people, mainly college students looking for entry level jobs and artists. After my shift there, I grabbed some lunch and came back to talk to some people at the career expo. I was able to converse a bit with an HR guy from Blizzard, and he had some questions for me as well about DirectX. Valve was another company I was interested in talking to, but their booth was more formal and they were mainly taking resumes and setting up meetings. The 2:30 session I attended was about the high-level shading features in the new versions of 3DS Max and Maya. The talk was split in two for both products. For Max they talked about how to annotate shaders to work with their built-in shadow maps, and how to use MAXScript to change the UIs artists use for DirectX materials. The annotations used a template syntax on the variables and texture objects, with attributes that Max expects in shaders. The Maya portion of the talk was mainly about new features. It seemed like a lot of little things like being able to send your normals as color data, in order to enable diagnostic scenarios such as visualizing normals or easier normal maps. Another neat addition was the ability to map actions to right-click, allowing for even more workflow customization. The lectures for the day for myself were wrapped up by Marty O’Donnel talking about audio in Halo 3. All the main sound guys from the Halo team were there including Mike Salvatori. They talked about the challenges of porting their sound engine to the Xbox 360, including the fact that the 360 doesn’t have DSP hardware. Their tools were quite interesting, especially Guerilla which is their system for creating dynamic music. They have a ton of music loops that can be started and stopped by the engine, including alternate tracks for each loop. With some time to spare before the IGF and Game Developer’s Choice Awards, I decided to check out at least part of the main expo. I only got to explore less than half of the floor but a few things caught my eye. The first was a product by Mova called Contour. It’s a facial animation capture system that uses phosphorous makeup instead of markers to capture motion. The results shown at the booth were very impressive even at lower geometric detail. There was also a product from Gametank called Guitar Rising. It lets you plug in a real electric guitar through an audio port and has a Guitar Hero like interface with tablature notation. The guys that work there said they’d be releasing a retail product later this year although what they had present at the booth seemed a bit rough. They did have a ton of songs transcribed at different difficulties and it looked like a lot of fun. The Intel booth featured a tech demo of Farcry 2 which surprisingly doesn’t use the Crysis engine. This new engine features a dynamic weather system, complete with gathering storms that include clouds getting denser as rain and fog start appearing. Even the trees (which can be dynamically grown) have branches sway harder and fly off as the wind speed increases. Finally, I got to play the new Smash Bros. which plays horribly on a WiiMote/Classic Controller but was very fun nonetheless. The super moves triggered by the Smash Orb were very cool. To wrap up the day, I went to the IGF/GDC awards. This is the part that surprised me the most. Seeing all these small teams of 1-5 making these incredibly fun and innovative games really inspired me to dedicate myself more to game development. Most of the awards were won by World of Goo and Crayon Physics Deluxe won the main IGF prize. The GDC awards featured commercial games, with Bioshock and Portal dominating. Portal won game of the year here. Both ceremonies had incredible comic relief, with IGF featuring skits from Mega64 and Game Developer’s Choice recruited Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation (Escapist magazine) to do three shorts for them. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Everywhere You Look Posted on 2/19/2008 3:08:58 AM I checked in to Villa Florence in San Francisco today. Jeny and I were dead tired from waking up to catch an early flight, but we managed to walk around the Union Square area a little bit. We now have an idea of where everything is for when we actually do some sightseeing tomorrow. Of course, I need to swing by the convention center to pick up my GDC passes. There's the main conference pass and the exhibitor pass for the career expo I need to do some time in for the greater recruiting good. I have all the talks I'm going to attend in Outlook (and therefore on my Blackjack) so I'm good to go. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	GDC 2008 Posted on 1/18/2008 1:49:29 AM The powers that be finally gave me clearance to book my trip to Game Developers Conference.  I’ll be heading to San Francisco on February 18 and I’ll hopefully have time to see the city before the conference gets going.  Other than the expo and IGF, I narrowed down the seemingly endless list of lectures to the following that I am interested in.  Most likely I’ll be documenting the trip through notes and pictures, partially for a trip report for work. ·         Building a Better Battle: HALO 3 AI Objectives ·         CRYSIS Next-Gen Effects ·         Designing and Implementing a Dynamic Camera System ·         E Pluribus Unum: Matchmaking in HALO 3 ·         Fast Water Simulation for Games Using Height Fields ·         Lighting and Material of HALO 3 ·         Lightmap Compression in HALO 3 ·         Optimizing DirectX Rendering on Multi-Core Hardware Sponsored by Intel ·         Procedural Data Generation in FAR CRY 2 ·         Real-Time Depth-Buffer-Based Ambient Occlusion ·         Stylization with a Purpose: The Illustrative World of TEAM FORTRESS 2 ·         The Art and Technology Behind Bioshock's Special Effects ·         The Technology of FINAL FANTASY ·         Threading QUAKE 4 and QUAKE WARS Sponsored by Intel ·         Truer Impostors ·         Audio Post-Mortem: HALO 3 ·         Creating Scalable and Dynamic Graphics for WORLD IN CONFLICT ·         Development - SUPER SMASH BROS. BRAWL ·         FABLE 2 –The Big Three Features Revealed ·         From Mundane to Epic: The Making of the STARCRAFT II Cinematic Teaser ·         How to Create an Industry: The Making of the Brown Box and PONG ·         Procedural Music in SPORE ·         Rules of Engagement: Blizzard's Approach to Multiplayer Game Design ·         Standing the Test of Time: A Q&A with Sid Meier ·         Writing Great Design Documents Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Site Updates and Winter Reading Posted on 1/17/2008 5:25:20 AM You may have noticed the site design has been modified slightly. I’ve been meaning to clean it up and make it a bit more modern in style. Hopefully, I’ve maintained its character somewhat. For the two of you that care. Some other changes I’ve made in the past month include the ShareThis button and the Twitter badge. Please feel free to Digg anything, and as always I welcome comments. I’ve read (and in the process of reading) some good books that I’ll probably talk about in later posts. Mostly books that I missed the boat on and that have been sitting on my shelf for some time. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card Code Complete, 2nd ed. by Steve McConnell … and random H.P. Lovecraft short stories There are also a couple books I’m going to pick up this week based on Time’s top 10 lists for 2007 and recommendations. Who knows when I’ll get to them. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	The Social Web Posted on 1/10/2008 5:01:17 AM Humans really are social animals. The internet today, and even more so in the future I imagine, is all about sharing yourself with others. The most successful websites in the last few years have also been the most social. Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Digg. It’s all about getting connected with your friends and possibly making new ones, and on a stranger level it’s about advertising yourself to the world. Even sites that are not oriented at social networking have some sort of profile page. Of course, this is no big revelation; this direction has been quite obvious and almost natural in the evolution of the web. But is it being executed correctly? What ties all these things together? When I created a Myspace account about 3 years ago, I wasn’t that late to the party. I resisted it at first because I saw how people were addicted to checking it all the time and constantly bothering their friends, and found it a bit silly because of that. However, I was leaving Miami soon to start my career up here and wanted a way to stay in touch with people. So I filled out my profile and had fun with it for a small while, it was great finding people from high school on there and catching up with them. Even the ridiculously cluttered profiles didn’t bug me that much. But then Myspace got too popular… and with internet popularity spam and smut closely follow. I never befriended people on there that I didn’t know in person, but it was annoying nonetheless. That and the whole subculture I didn’t want to be associated with, preteens checking their profiles from phones they don’t need to own to begin with. Around that same time people were suggesting I join Facebook. Again, I resisted. Another social network? I had already gone through all the trouble of profiling myself on Myspace. I mean, I had and still have a LinkedIn account, but that’s mainly professional and strictly business contacts that I know directly. Facebook came first and all, but the purpose remains the same. Eventually I caved to my curiosity, since you can’t see anything on Facebook without creating an account first. I was surprised to find I actually like Facebook. The interface is much cleaner and faster, the open platform has bred some quality “applications” which mostly serve to interact and connect with your friends, and I don’t feel like a teeny-bopper when I check my profile. As good as Facebook is (and is growing to be despite walking the privacy line), I am still not too crazy about social networks. On the content side, there’s nothing I think that is completely broken. Sites like YouTube and Flickr make it easy to upload and share your media with the world. Embedding a flash control of an application like YouTube or Twitter wherever you want always impresses the hell out of me. The amount of compression on YouTube videos is bothersome at times, but hopefully increasing bandwidth and server space will correct that in the future. My beef is with having to flesh out profiles and reestablish links to friends every time you move to a new site. If you blog on one of those sites then what do you do? Keep both of them up to date? Drop the others altogether and delete your accounts there? What about all the friends you have that aren’t on your preferred site? The easy solution is to ignore the Facebooks and Myspaces altogether. Just put up a blog like this one, keep all your photos and other personal tidbits on there, and call it a day. Your blog isn’t in danger of shutting down unless you want it to. Maybe Facebook shutting down is a bit extreme, but a design or privacy decision some site makes might lead you to delete your account there. When you maintain an independent blog, then that’s your home on the internet if your friends want to keep up with you. But we all know it’s not that simple. What these sites provide is an almost direct connection to your friends. There’s a liquid interaction between everyone’s profile pages, moreso on Facebook than Myspace of course. You can comment on almost everything, share almost anything, play games with your friends, all from one site. More importantly, some people want exactly that and only that. Those people don’t want to blog, much less pay for hosting or make yet another account on a free blogging service. No one can really blame people for craving this interaction; it’s only natural and the reason why socially oriented sites are on top. There are no solutions that aren’t selfish if you prefer one site over the other. You might like Facebook or Myspace more but not all your friends will agree and move to your preferred site. The only resolution is to suck it up. It’s the price you pay for being a part of the social web, where the needs of the many far outweigh your own. Here are my Facebook and Myspace profiles. Oh and yea, this blog. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	DX10 Honors Posted on 11/15/2007 2:59:29 PM DX10 is on Popular Science's Best of What's New 2007 list under Computing. That and the Technical Emmy we won earlier in the year are definite morale boosters. I'm glad the work we do is seen as impactful outside of our team. Once DX10 hardware and Vista is more commonplace which would cause game developers focus more on the new API we should see some real killer apps. When DX10 isn't considered a port or afterthought, games utilizing it will probably differentiate themselves a lot more from DX9 both visually and performance-wise. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Super Tesla Bros. Posted on 11/6/2007 7:40:46 PM Latest Comment Left by jerry on 1/11/2008 1:03:54 AM wow, that is such an awesome way to play music, probably takes a ton of power though View All Comments(1)

For older posts, visit the Archive section.