SIGGRAPH 2009 – Coming Soon

I’m heading down to SIGGRAPH this year, and it’s shaping up to be a good time. It’s in New Orleans which never hurts. There’s also a ton of interesting content this year. Here are a few of the courses and talks that I’m interested in attending:

• Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games I – This is actually a two part course that will take up all of Monday, but it should be fun.
• Color Imaging – Color science has always interested me, but I’ve never had a chance to really sit down and learn or work with it.
• Efficient Substitutes for Subdivision Surfaces – A colleague wanted me to attend this one. I’m hoping to go, but it really depends on whether I get some pre-reading done on the topic.
• Beyond Programmable Shading I – Another two part course on Thursday about the evolution of the graphics pipeline.
• Rendering, Real Fast Rendering, Rendering and Visualization – I’ll hit up a mix of these. I’m interested in some of the bounding volume hierarchy work in there since I’ve been reading up on those for some upcoming Gamebryo work.
• I haven’t even gotten around to scanning through the actual technical papers.

Also, I’ll be on the ground solo this year, so I’m looking for cool folks to hang out and keep dinners interesting. If you’re in town for the show and want to grab a bite, let me know.

I will not promise to live blog the conference at this point. dba

E3 Podcast

At Vince’s insistence on Friday, we recorded a podcast on short notice. You can find it over here. We cover E3 announcements amongst other things.

Did you know that a Zune can’t play a wave file? dba

Quick Shot

Despite attempting to be more productive and treat my time as more valuable, I haven’t carved out enough time to update the blog well. However, I do have a cool picture from my Vegas Vactation to share. While we were there, Theresa and I met up with Damon and Mel who were up for the weekend from LA. We decided to hit the Minus 5 Ice Lounge for some fun. Here’s the pic.

Dan at Minus 5 Ice Lounge

The walls, ice.

The glasses, ice.

The furniture, ice.

Those furs, well, they are fur. If they weren’t, you would stick to the ice which probably wouldn’t work well.

Side note, Damon spins electronic music, mostly house and trance, in southern California. If you’re looking for some good tunes, check out DJ Skywalker.

Apparently, the ice glasses are made in New Zealand and shipped to Vegas. I’ve yet to figure out the economics of that. 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

Come See Me at GDC

I’m revisiting some of my old work with CUDA from NVISION last August at GDC this year. Come check out the session with NVIDIA. Here’s the link to the GDC site. The talk i’s on Thursday from 4:30 to 5:30 in Room 3016 West Hall.

My life is GPU accelerated. 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