Dojang Grand Opening

Master Amerson breaks a sheet of ice.

I don’t blog about my martial arts too much, but there’s a very exciting event coming up. Ownership has changed at my dojang, and we’re having a grand opening next weekend on September 12. If you’re in the area, come on down to see the new changes.

The dojang is now owned and operated by Master Jason Ladd. Here’s the website. Master Ladd’s background is in Tang Soo Do which is the primary art taught at the school. There are also supplemental programs taught by other instructors in the following areas. From 10AM to 12PM, we’ll have tables set up with all the instructors available to talk to you about their programs.

• Tai Chi
• Isshinryu Karate
• Okinawan Weapons
• Arnis
• Judo
• Brazilian Jiujitsu
• Zumba Fitness

This is a great opportunity to come meet all the instructors at one time and get a feel for what type of martial arts or fitness program is right for you. I guarantee that we have something you’ll love.

If you’re lucky, we may even do some cool demos like the picture above. dba

Vegas, Baby!

It’s vacation time, and I’m in Vegas. Here are the updates while I have some time on Katie’s laptop.

• Carrot Top
• Food, Lots of It
• I’m Up!

Comedy

Many mocked me, but I held fast. Last night, we went to see Carrot Top’s show at the Luxor. He’s amazingly good. If you remember him from the late 80s, then it’s still a lot of prop comedy. He spent the first 10 minutes running around the stage with crazy props. However, the bulk of his act was pure stand up. He’s really good. I laughed until I cried, and even those in our group who thought they were humoring me had a great time. If you’re in town, I highly recommend.

Lots of Grub

Las Vegas has branded itself as destination for dining. It’s certainly true. We had a delicious meal at Tender last night off of their Prix Fixe menu. I never thought I’d enjoy a flat iron steak that much, but it was delcious. Tonight is Brazilian steak house, and tomorrow is French. I intend to come home 5 lbs. heavier.

Winner!

As of this writing, I’m up 350% in the casinos. Tomorrow will completely change that, but let’s gloat for now.

Suck it, Vegas! I’m a winner. dba

Shipping Product, It’s an Afterthought… Sort of

Today’s Topics:

• Triangle Game Conference
• Black Belts
• Kites
• Gamebryo LightSpeed!

Triangle Game Conference

The Triangle Game Conference occurred over the past two days. I attended on Thursday. The conference was a great chance to gather with some other developers in the area and interact. The highlight session, excluding those from co-workers, was Martin Mittring discussing deferred lighting in CryEngine3. Mainly, I wanted to point out what a great accomplishment the conference was for all who organized it and what it means for North Carolina as a game development hub. I’ve always maintained that NC was one of the top 5 areas for game development in the United States, and this is another indication.

Black Belts

We’re graduating a class of black belts tomorrow at IMAA. I may even do a demo. If you’re in the area and want to check it out, come by at 10AM.

Kites!

When I was younger, I needed a job. I found one at the local kite shop. Kiting turned into a passion for me. I amassed a large collection of several dozen kites of varying complexity, quality, and artistry. I started out focusing on dual line kites and got into radical flying where you dump the wind from your sail to perform tricks with slack lines. From there I explored quad line kiting and single line kiting a bit. When a friend was moving to China and needed to dump his collection, I managed to get some flexifoils and get into  power kiting. It’s fun but dangerous.

Over the years, I’ve flown less and less. Two weeks ago, however, I got a chance to fly again. Since then I’ve had another outing, and I’m hooked on the feeling again. Kiting is truly relaxing and cathartic for me. It’s a great thing to get completely away from your computer, your phone, and pretty much everything to commune with the wind. Whether you’re flying something stable in a smooth breeze or going radical in a light wind, being in touch with the kite at the other end of the lines is amazing. I’m hoping to fly again this weekend if the weather permits. If you’re in the Raleigh area and want to fly, let me know. I’d love to meet up at Lake Crabtree and share my refound passion.

Gamebryo LightSpeed

Last but not least, Gamebryo LightSpeed is gold! I will espouse the virtues of our new product in another post. For now, I’ll just say that I’m very glad to have finished things and shipped. It’s been a long effort. The product is amazing as has been the effort of the entire time. I’m lucky to work with all the talented and passionate folks at Emergent, and I’m looking forward to the reaction in the market.

No plans this weekend. Heaven. dba

Bittersweet Return

After missing several Wednesday Updates, I’m back to blogging. Unfortunately, I have sad news to impart on my return. Let me first say that I’ve always been a proponent of Microsoft. Whenever anyone spoke ill of the Xbox 360, I was there to defend it. My launch 360 has served me well since November 2005 until… well, tonight. Red Ring of Death for me, and I’m outside the warranty.

[Update] I went looking for my new 360 today, and I’m not sure what to buy. If anyone has suggestions, let me know. I can save some bread and get an arcade since my current HDD is fine. However, I’ve heard that I want a bigger HDD now that I can load games onto it, so I was thinking I should get an Elite with the 120GB HDD.  I then  heard there was a bundle coming soon, and I would like Fable II which would effectively be a $50 discount on an Elite. I just don’t know when that bundle drops. Advice would be appreciated from those who have done this shopping of late.

I guess tomorrow is a good time to shop for a new one with a bigger hard drive. dba

Song Fight! Hajime!

Constant six day work weeks combined with too many hours a day has made content on my blog scarce again. One of the things keeping me going is a new game that Adam and I came up with. We call it the song fight. The premise is basically that at random times we’ll each turn on a song from our office. The other player in turn must pick a related song. We’ve been going back and forth for a week or more now, so I figured I’d post this Song Fight.

1. Transformers Theme by Vince Di Cola – Dan
2. G.I. Joe the Movie Theme by Ford Kinder – Adam
3. House Full of Bullets by Joe Satriani
4. Red House by Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, and Eric Johnson
5. Get Out of My House by The Streets
6. Where the Streets Have No Name by U2
7. Electric Avenue by Eddy Grant
8. Big Yellow Taxi by Amy Grant
9. What the Cowgirls Do by Vince Gill
10. Wanted Dead of Alive by Bon Jovi (Adam argued that Jon Bon Jovi basically was a cowgirl justifying this song choice.)
11. Dead and Bloated by Stone Temple Pilots
12. Happy Birthday by Weird Al Yankovic
13. Gansta’s Paradise by Coolio
14. Mama Said Knock You Out by LL Cool J
15. Laid by James
16. Wait for Me by Rebecca St. James
17. I Can’t Fight This Feeling by REO Speedwagon
18. I’m Feeling This by Blink 182
19. I Touch Myself by The Divinyls
20. Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger
21. Crazy by Gnarls Barkley
22. Crazy by Seal Performed by Alanis Morisette
23. Insane in the Brain by Cypress Hill
24. Get the F#@& Outta Dodge by Public Enemy
25. My Own Worst Enemy by Lit
26. Drunk Girl by Something Corporate
27. Santana DVX by The Lonely Island

At this point, I declared myself the winner of this fight… mostly because I was out of whiteboard space and needed to clean up. It’s on Adam now to start the next volley.

Time to erase. dba

Low Tech Is Good

I’ve been a bit scarce of late due to some extra hours on things. One of them is keeping the current version of Gamebryo moving through our end cycles. Over the past weekend, we had a big push on documentation. As part of the effort, we decided to go low tech on some things, and I think it was a good idea. Sometimes, seeing all the work you need to accomplish up on a whiteboard and getting everyone in a room together really helps.  We really powered through a lot of doc this weekend. To the team that reads this blog, great job!

Picking a task from the whiteboards.

Tasks Crossed Off

Who Killed This List?

The other thing taking up time is Fallout 3. dba

The Lo-Def Post

• 1080p is bad.
• Fallout 3

You Can’t See It

Someone on a mailing list of friends asked about HDTVs the other day. I gave what is part of my standard answer. If you’re more than 2 feet away from the TV for each 10 inches of diagonal, 1080p is a waste of money. You can’t see it. Someone asked what I meant, so I wrote up the math. It’s worth sharing here… so that someone on the internet can tell me I’m wrong. I’m sure I forgot to multiply or divide by 2 somewhere.

Visual acuity is measured in arcminutes per line pair. 20/20 vision has an acuity of about 2 arcminutes per line pair. That means that for alternating pairs of black and white lines occupying a 1 degree angle of your field of view, you can see 30 pairs at 20/20 but 31 pairs would resolve into a bit of a gray mass.

What does that mean for your TV? If a pair of scanlines on your TV subtends an angle smaller than 2 arcminutes, then you likely can’t resolve them from each other. Your eye will average them together. Since the subtended angle is a function of your distance from the TV, the farther you are from the TV, the bigger your TV needs to be. Let’s do the trig on that.

2 arcminutes is .0333 degrees. For a pair of scanlines subtending an angle, theta, the following formula holds:

Tan(theta/2) = heightOfScanline / distanceFromTV.

For .0333 degrees, the minimum resolution, this means .000291 = heightOfScanline / distanceFromTV. Once we know the height of the scanline, we can calculate the maximum distance we can sit from that TV and see that scanline at 20/20 vision.

Next up, how tall is a scanline? It’s heightOfTV / 1080. Since widescreens are 16:9 aspect ratios, we can use simple trig to tell us. A TV can be divided into two right triangles with angles of 90, 60.6, and 29.4. By some trig,

heightOfTV = diagonalLength * sin(29.4).

So, our scanlines are:

heightOfScanline = diagonalLength * .49 / 1080

If we recombine all that, we get the following formula for the minimum TV size at a given distance to see 1080p. Just plug in about how far you are from the TV to know if it’s worth your cash.

diagonalLength = .641 * distanceFromTV

Hint: It’s likely not worth your cash to get 1080p.

The Wasteland Beckons

I’ve been playing Fallout 3 quite a bit. There’s plenty of reviews on the matter for you to read. I just wanted to give a public shout out to Bethesda. It’s a great game. I think they’ve really captured the spirit of the first two titles and brought them into this generation. There are some rough edges, particularly in the first hour, but I’m overall thrilled and impressed with the title. I’m really looking forward to the downloadable content as well since I’ll probably finish my playthrough around the time it drops.

Thursday is the new Wednesday. dba

Post Christmas Miscellany

Arising from the food coma that is Christmas in the Amerson family, here’s some miscellaneous bits about furniture shopping for the weekend.

Some Tips for Furniture Shopping in the Raleigh Area

Theresa and I need a dining room table. Right now, we’re using an heirloom dropleaf table from my great-grandmother which is dwarfed by the room. Since we’re hoping to host larger gatherings, we need something that will seat 8 or 10. Over the last month, we’ve hit up a number of places. We eventually settled on this table. It’s got a really cool finish on the top which is unfortunately hard to see in the pictures. I’ve also learned some important tips for furniture shopping around Raleigh.

• Go to Whitley Galleries first.
  • http://www.whitleygalleries.com/
  • It’s a whole city block. When you walk in, they give you a map.
  • It is a small drive out to Zebulon, but it’s worth it for sheer breadth of selection.
• Check out Wayside Furniture House next.
  • http://www.waysidefurniturehouse.com/
  • Selection is smaller, but they can order things. Pricing is great.
  • Ask for George. He’s awesome.
• Go to Glenwood Ave./US-70 last.
  • There are a ton of places out there, but it’s such a pain.

Meant to post Friday, but I forgot. dba

NVISION: Day Three

NVISION is over, and it’s been a pretty good ride as far as I can tell. I am sitting in my room drinking some wine and relaxing. (Unfortunately, the wine isn’t something I can expense to my company. It’s a luxury. However, I’m willing to debate if management wants to do so. You know … in my imagination.) Regardless, I had a good time today.

I kicked the day off with Corinne Yu’s presentation for integrating physics into Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway. Corinne is opinionated and outspoken, but she’s got some good ideas on what types of physics matter for games. Basically, her argument is that physicis don’t matter if they have a non-deterministic effect on gameplay. I don’t agree with her 100% since I think that “fluff” physics which only add effects and which are rendering-only or client-side physics do matter. They are viscercal, and visceral physics matter from the standpoint of sheer user experience. However, I agree that they don’t impact the core gameplay and game experience.

That concept rolled into our panel on physics in games. We had a great discussion about the nature of physics for games. I drew three main conclusions from the panel.

• Physics must serve game design,
• AI, Animation, and Physics must share data.
• Synchronizing physics from server to client is still not solved.

Those are some big issues, and I think we can continue to discuss them in the future. Independent of us or with us.

Bart Muzzin of Firaxis Games proceeded to talk about how he integrated physics into Civilizations Revolutions. Bart’s talk was great because it was very grounded. He didn’t talk about what he might do. He talked about what he did in a shipping title. It takes a lot of courage to talk about the compromises of a shipping title because they are never as impressive as the promises of technology that doesn’t exist but might be in a future title. Bart’s talk focused on the pipeline of Civ for consoles and some very real issues. I give him my full respect and endorsement for doing a talk about issues that are solved. I look forward to talking with him more in the future. I look forward to how his knowledge can make games and Gamebryo better.. His talk was free of speculation, and it was all about reality. Awesome!

I wrapped the day headed over to NVIDIA’s headquarters to share my thoughts on CUDA. Again, that’s some confidential stuff that I can’t blog about, but I’m excited about what it means for CUDA, the industry, and my colleagues. Things are looking good because it means we’ll be able to leverage CUDA for more exciting computation and more exciting games.

I should drink less wine. It’s Benton-Lane, btw. dba.

NVISION: Day Two

The second day of NVISION was a pretty good one although my actual attendance at the conference was pretty brief. I had a top secret meeting in the morning before my talk. I can’t talk about that… blah … blah… have to kill you… blah … blah. In the afternoon, I popped up the highway to visit a potential customer and sell some software or, as I like to call it, keep getting paychecks. That was a pretty good meeting overall, but it did involve a minor bit of scrambling since I didn’t realize I was supposed to demo from my laptop. I spent the first thirty minutes of the meeting rebuilding the tools that they wanted to see while answering questions about the product. I’m a multitasker.

On to the show…

I gave my talk on integrating stream processing via Floodgate with CUDA at 11AM. I think it was pretty well received. Since it was early in the show, the room wasn’t divided like it will be today. Even though I was scheduled in Almaden Room 1, I had access to both sides and double the capacity. Seated capacity was around 90, and I think I filled 50 of those. Not bad considering 50 would have maxed out the half of the room I was scheduled in. I got some good questions afterwards from attendees. One, from Sebastien at NVIDIA, is definitely worth a follow-up here. Is CUDA a good way to get introduced to the concepts in compute shaders for D3D11? I gave a qualified yes, but I think it begs some more research. After my talk, I sat through Tim Sweeney’s talk on Unreal’s tool chain. There wasn’t much changed since I saw it at Gamefest a few years back, but there were some cool new features. SSAO. Soft bodies.

There was one minor wrinkle to my talk. While setting up my demos, I ran into a issue that wouldn’t let me run the demo on a computer that didn’t have Gamebryo installed. The irony of the situation is that someone told me about the issue last week, and I said it was no big deal. You live, you learn. Luckily, I solved it by copying a few data files around and adding a bit of batch file magic. %~d0 can be your friend. I’ll give bonus points to any colleague at Emergent that’s reading this and can guess what was happening based on my spartan description above.

Today should be more informative. I’ll be spending all day in the Game Developer track. One of our licensees is talking about physics integration, and I’m on a panel talking about physics. I have to go prep for that now. The day ends with a chat over at NVIDIA about CUDA. I’ve got some feedback for them from my work, and I’m really excited to have a chance to share with them and make CUDA better for everyone. Having done so much middleware, I know how crucial customer input can be. I’m excited to return the favor.

How about beer rather than bonus points to the first who guesses the bug? dba.