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)

	Halo 3 Posted on 10/2/2007 5:57:29 AM Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know Halo 3 came out last week. I have to admit, until this game my Halo experience was limited to multiplayer. I never really had the patience to go through the campaign when there was so much fragging to do online. It wasn’t until I was pressured into doing the campaigns from some people that I actually bothered to look up the story. With the imminent launch of Halo 3, there were a few synopsis sites available. I found a very good one on the Xbox.com forums that went over the games and books in chronological order. I was surprisingly intrigued by this universe and found myself even more hyped up for Halo 3, since now I wanted to know how the story ended on top of killing people online. Through the Alpha/Beta/Epsilon I was able to experience most of the multiplayer elements, but the one I was most excited about was online co-op. I ended up finishing the game with friends online most of the way, and it was kept intense by playing it through in Legendary difficulty. There are quite a few features that I really enjoyed such as the common lobby, experience system, Forge, and Film modes. The film mode is very impressive in that you can take clips and screenshots and share them online, not just on the Xbox but through Bungie’s site as well. I was also very satisfied with the story, although the final boss (won’t spoil it for anyone) was disappointing. The cutscenes were all very well done, especially the confrontation with the Prophet of Truth. It was very Hollywood. One thing that did bother me were the static backdrops in some of the last few cutscenes, especially an obvious one that had fire that wasn’t even moving. One final thing to note, I was very glad I got the limited edition at the company store. The “Making Of” featurette on the bonus disc was very inspiring and insightful. Marty O’Donnell is a genius both technically and musically, the score made the game that much better. Speaking of Halo music, I recorded this tonight, a version of the piano diddy from the announcement trailer and some parts of the game. It was also the first time I used my Yamaha as a MIDI device rather than line-in. I had some issues with low-end noise when going through ACID, but I tried to mask it as much as I could through the EQ. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Post-Process Volumetric Lighting Posted on 9/9/2007 4:07:41 AM Another article implementation, this time from GPU Gems 3. This effect basically casts a ray from the current pixel to the light source and does weighted accumulation sampling along that ray. The nice part is that occluders are automatically handled this way in screen space. There are some annoying artifacts with this technique, like dark streaking. This is somewhat alleviated by doing a pre-pass with all your objects and background rendered black with no lighting, and just your light in color. Once the ray pass is done and you combine with your scene you can further dampen this artifact by texturing. The other notable artifact is banding when you increase the density of your samples to extend the god ray effect. The more expensive way to fix this, at least on Shader Model 3.0 and above hardware, is to just more texture lookups along the ray. In my version of the effect, I do a blur on the light ray pass in order to smooth out the banding somewhat and give it a softer look overall. This technique can produce some nice results, but I feel it's a bit too expensive if you want to emphasize light ray length without banding. For a more subtle light scattering effect it might be a good solution. In any case, here's a video: Latest Comment Left by Ahmed Ismaiel on 9/14/2007 4:04:32 PM hi ,i really like this effect , i'm make a demo for Ogre Engine and i would like to integrate this effect .please let me know if you can help .my e-mail is ahmed_ismaiel [at] hotmail [dot] com View All Comments(1)

	Adaptive Glare Posted on 9/4/2007 3:46:50 PM I implemented this article from ShaderX3, which is the bloom effect used in FarCry before shader model 3.0 and hardware HDR support. It works by: Render the scene to an off-screen render target. Downsample the image to 2x2 and 1/64 of the original size. Using the 2x2, gather the average luminosity and store it in a 1x1 render target or some shader constant (you can get the luma component of a color by doing a dot product with (0.3, 0.59, 0.11)). Using the 1/64 downsampled render, extract the bright pixels by setting some threshold of luminosity and scaling it based on the amount of glare desired and average luminosity of the scene. Apply a blur to this result, I just used a simple box filter. Add the blurred texture to the original render of the scene proportional to the luminosity of each pixel so that it’s not too bright. There should also be some interpolation between changing scene luminosity so there is no popping effect but instead a gradual brightening of the scene. Here are some screen captures from my implementation, I need to make the application more interactive and code up interpolation before I post in on here though. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Next Gen, Part One Posted on 8/27/2007 3:45:54 AM I spent Sunday implementing normal mapping in my game. It’s one of those techniques where I know how it works but I never really tried to do it myself. Shadow maps is another one of those, but I didn’t have time for that this weekend. What’s cool is that implementing this let’s me add pretty much any tangent space technique later on. Generating the actual normal maps for the tiles was straightforward enough, I just made a grayscale version of the tile textures and found a height-to-normal plugin for Paint.NET. The normals were still too noisy so I applied a gaussian blur to the texture in order to smooth it out a bit. Here are the results: And a closer look with the direction of the light perpendicular to the surface normal (the shot above was an angle of about 30-45 degrees): Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Maya, Pathfinding Posted on 8/24/2007 7:06:27 PM I’ve been a bit more hyped up to do game development work since Gamefest and hanging out with people from work. It didn’t really hit me until recently how important the content pipeline is when working on a serious game, although you’re always hearing about it in articles and the sort. This was apparent when I started learning Maya (along with some of my coworkers) and Softimage XSI and seeing how powerful those tools really are beyond basic modeling. Getting identical results including shaders and animations into a game engine is critical, or else time is just wasted by the artists in tweaking for factor x and y in the export process. In any case, I’m really impressed by Maya and I’m not sure I can go back to using Milkshape even for low poly work. I just wish it wasn’t so buggy when running on laptop display drivers, that’s OpenGL for you. I haven’t really decided which product I will stick with though, Softimage XSI Mod Tool is free and lets you export while free Maya offering doesn’t. I’m hoping we can score a Maya license through work. I worked on Lost Maze some more last night, finally implementing the path finding code. I used A* since that’s what I’m used to and the dataset is small enough. Finding the shortest path is overkill but still handy, since I just need to know if a path exists in the turn phase where you move your character and the path information for AI which doesn’t necessarily have to be the shortest. It’s funny that no matter how experienced you are you’ll still make silly mistakes in the implementation of an algorithm, it’s how fast you discover and correct them where your experience matters. For example, part of A* in pseudocode: while open list isn’t empty          choose node P with lowest combined G and H scores in open          find adjacent nodes to P          for each adjacent node                if node isn’t in closed add it, set G to P.G + dist(P,adj), previous to P                if node is already in open, update it like above if new G would be less           Add P to closed list and remove it from open list The obvious problem you’d have with this that’s easiest to debug is an indefinite hang. The only possible cause of this is an infinite loop in the main loop, which is an open list that never empties and therefore you would make sure you’re actually removing P from the open list. There are more subtle bugs, which in combination with other issues can be very difficult to track down. For example, I had a case where I wanted to verify a simple path to a piece to the immediate right of my position that was visually connected (the roads in the screenshots). However, my pathfinding was saying that this path didn’t exist. My open directions per tile is a bit field with functions that check and rotate them, etc. so I used the immediate window to call the check function for each direction on the troublesome tile while debugging and realized I initialized that particular tile type with the wrong open directions. That still didn’t correct the problem, at least visually. After that, I saw that the pathfinding was correct in rejecting the path, it was my vertical texture coordinates that were backwards so the tile textures were all applied upside down. If you’ve seen the screenshots you’d note that there is no obvious right side up with those tiles. In any case, that was fun to debug and fix, and the minutes it took me last night could’ve been hours a few years ago. I started taking piano lessons this week, more on that later. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Piano Man Posted on 8/17/2007 1:53:05 PM I’ve been trying to learn piano for the last few months on my own, just reading and playing books and sheet music. Throughout my life I’ve jumped from instrument to instrument but I think I’m going to stick to this. There’s just a lot more freedom musically with the piano compared to the sax and guitar (to a lesser extent), which is not surprising since a musician with just his/her voice and a piano can blow you away musically and emotionally. A really good solo guitarist can convey the same thing, but even then there’s still something missing. This was really apparent when I was listening to Ben Folds new live album. It was just him and a grand playing his newer solo stuff and the old Ben Folds Five songs and he tore it up. The sound was just full and didn’t need a backing band at all. Anyway, back in May or June I got a Yamaha YPG-525: I really love the samples used in a lot of the voices, especially the grand pianos and soprano sax. There are a lot of cool synth voices too, and the recording and accompaniment features are great. Here’s a clip of me playing the Brick riff on it using the main grand piano voice. I actually got a real piano too which is getting moved over to my place tomorrow, it’s a Winter spinet I got for real cheap on Craigslist. It’s no Steinway but good enough for now so I can play on real piano keys until its night time then I can practice on my digital. Latest Comment Left by Pingus on 8/22/2007 3:50:48 PM that's a nice hobby. keep it up, I'll like to hear you play the piano one day. that is my favorite instrument.. maybe you would know because i love Cold Play.. Nora Jones and all sorts of bands that include piano View All Comments(1)

	Ads Posted on 8/1/2007 6:22:01 PM The two or three people that actually frequent this site may have noticed that I added some content ads to the site. It's really just a curiosity, since I'll probably make 50 cents a year, so who knows how long I'll leave them on. Naturally, I tried to go with Microsoft adCenter but it turns out we're not even shipping content ads until later in the year. I probably won't make Google much money anyway. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Another Lost Maze Update Posted on 7/24/2007 4:58:43 AM While I was in Miami I worked on my game a bit, although I found I was most productive on the plane rides since well… there’s not much else to do. Anyway, some additions include the implementation of turns and game state. The rules for movement and tile rotation are more or less in place. I made some crappy models of a sphere and a box in Milkshape to represent the players and treasures, mainly to assist in debugging. Overall, I’m still happy with my “just code” approach since it’s been painless to clean up or make classes out of chunks of code so far. I found that once I write up the path verification code that will aid in getting a lot done, so I’ll probably do that next. I think I might author up some quick normal maps just to make these screenshots look better until I have my own models, it's all I can think of when I see the stone in those tiles. I’m hoping to have something available for download soon, once this thing actually resembles a game. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	More XNA Experimentation, Rock Band! Posted on 7/5/2007 2:53:45 AM I added another rendering path to Lost Maze for rendering quads, which allowed me to mess with the meat of the XNA framework. The luxuries of XNA become apparent here, where otherwise cumbersome tasks are simplified but still robust. For example, the main Graphics class (not a device context, which is defined elsewhere) allows you to have "preferred" settings for display mode and multisampling. This almost eliminates the need for enumeration since it tries to match your preferred settings, and if you want finer control of these features you still have the option of querying display modes, multisample quality levels and sample counts. XNA uses a managed version of the D3DX Effects Framework, which gives you all the functionality found there along with the BasicEffect. For simple things (like rendering quads for example) it's basically all you need, you set most of the render state through the effect along with the transformation matrices and just surround your draw calls with a Begin() and End() for the Effect and it's passes. Overall, there are a lot of amenities which make developing for XNA a very smooth and enjoyable experience. In any case, here’s a screenshot. It also works with the Xbox controller now (the wireless receiver for Windows is very neat), click for a larger version: This video is everywhere now, but it doesn’t make it any less cool. Rock Band looks like it’s going to be a party game staple; I can’t wait to get my hands on it. The drums look very sleek, I like how they opted to just color the rim of the individual drums rather than apply the color code to the entire thing. I hope Harmonix (or a third party) makes a cheap stand for that mic so that someone playing guitar or drums can sing. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Comments are back, UPS strikes again Posted on 6/26/2007 3:37:16 AM I brought the commenting feature back, I didn't add any filtering but now you have to type the text you see in an image when you post. This won't get rid of manual spamming but should fend off the spambots that were my major problem anyway. I can deal with deleting a comment here and there but not 20 a day. In any case, don't let the extra step in the process deter you from commenting. I enjoy reading the little blurbs people used to leave, and feedback is appreciated with my projects. My new corner desk came in today, and UPS left their calling card all over it and it's box. I knew it was going to be trouble when I got home and saw the box, the corners and edges were worn out and torn in places. Upon opening it there was crushed styrofoam everywhere and I began my search for the damage. It didn't take me too long: Thankfully, the manufacturer is nice enough to insure their shipments so I should be able to report this and get a replacement part. In case it's not blatantly obvious from my tone, I've had trouble with UPS in the past, worst of which being when I shipped my computer back to Miami after my internship. It came back literally crushed but I happened to insure it and got $1000 from them, some of which I used to buy the Geforce 6800 I have in my desktop machine. Yes I know, but at the time it was the hot new shit. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Assets, huh-huh Posted on 6/25/2007 5:32:28 AM I've worked a little on The Lost Maze, basically all the code for rotating and pushing tiles and a lot of thinking on the design. Since I scanned some of the pieces I did a sprite render of random tiles just for the hell of it, click for a larger version. What's interesting is that all the tiles with three entry points had a picture of some treasure on it so I had to edit that out on the one that I scanned. There were a total of four assets borrowed from the Labyrinth board game; three tiles (corner, straight, T-junction) and a card that I can edit the center out of. My goal was to have a good chunk of interaction done this weekend, but I got sidetracked with organizing the new apartment and putting up the wall cabinet before my new desk gets here. This goal included allowing input and rendering for the rotation and pushing done, using the Xbox360 pad and mouse/keyboard. Oh, I got a Samsung Blackjack this weekend to replace my SMT 5600 that I got a good two years out of. I even talked Jeny into getting one over a Blackberry, mwahahaha. She's loving it though. AT&T has them for $75 after an instant rebate through Microsoft (as opposed to the regular mail-in) and only $24/mo for unlimited 3G instead of $40/mo. I have to say I'm enjoying the 3G network more than I thought, I don't know how anyone can go back to sluggish mobile browsing after experiencing this. High marks on the phone in my opinion, except for the impossible-to-remove-without-a-jackhammer battery cover. This is a much more polished Windows Mobile experience, not limited to just the higher resolution on the phone. Web browsing is much more tolerable on the landscape screen; combined with the speed of 3G and the full screen option in IE, searching for movie times and other common mobile web scenarios is much more productive and enjoyable. Installing all the apps I had before on the Blackjack leads me to this final thought directed to lazy mobile programmers: Query the screen dimensions on the device! Malformed windows and black bars on the sides are gross. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	The Lost Maze Posted on 6/21/2007 3:46:05 PM I started working on an XNA game based on Labyrinth just because I haven't worked on a recreational project in a while. I also plan on adding extra features and making the maze shifting work somewhat differently from the board game. It was nice actually using my source control setup at home again and learning a new API. Part of the reason to finally start this project (I've been thinking about it for a while) is that I was playing Halo 2 on Vista and was impressed by how easily the Xbox controller integrates into the experience and how the 360 experience is tied in to the game, down to pressing the guide button to bring up your profile. I literally plugged the control into a USB port and started playing with it right away. That experience motivated me somewhat to decide on XNA as my hardware API for this project, in order to have this unified experience on both Windows and Xbox, not to mention the free platform you get when you write your game with XNA. I've written some of the game classes already and have only messed with the actual XNA framework for a bit, but enough to grasp how it all works. The built-in (sort of) resource management with the Content pipeline and XACT is pretty neat and facilitates the approach I'm taking with this project. I tend to focus on creating this robust engine before working on a game and the game itself ends up getting little or no attention. This time around I'm doing very little for infrastructure and just concentrating on what I need for this particular project, a side-effect of that being the discovery of features I could design if I were to make some general purpose XNA engine. I expect to jump into some of the graphics code sometime this week, and the nice thing about making a video game out of a board game is free textures! I still need to scan all the pieces and cards, but that shouldn't take to long since processing after that just means making them all the same size and caking in some alpha for the rounded corners of the cards and maze tiles. These will be just placeholders of course since I don't want a cease and desist letter from Ravensburger. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Comments disabled Posted on 4/14/2007 8:02:58 PM There was way too much spamming in my comments section so I disabled it until I can code up some filters. Oh and here's Chester's film debut... Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	So This Is The New Year Posted on 1/22/2007 5:25:15 AM Much belated, but welcome to 2007. The winter season is in full effect and I'm back to weekly snowboarding, blowing fifty bucks a pop on lift tickets. I got Jeny to join me this time around which is great, shes learning more everytime we go up. For the 1 or 2 people that actually read this that don't know, we're getting engaged now and getting married sometime in 2008, most likely summer. I started messing around in the park last season and this season I'm going to try and do more there, I tried the halfpipe this weekend (went back and forth but never really went airborne) and did the usual jumps. I have to work up the courage to take the bigger jumps (or just the same ones at higher speeds) and try some rails. Also, I realized I dont hate moguls as much as I thought I did, just the real icy ones. Once you plan ahead while navigating around them its pretty fun making the fast turns necessary to not dash into one and get launched into a chain reaction of pain. With the death of my Creative Zen, I was forced into the research zone for a new player. With my library fast approaching the 100GB mark, I decided to not opt for a player that can hold all my music which broadened the search a bit. Long story short, I opted for the 2nd gen iPod Shuffle for the gym/running/boarding and the Zune for the car/work/poker and just general use. Despite all the flack it gets (mainly for being a MS product) the Zune is a great device. You can't beat that interface and video resolution, even though I don't watch much video on it I love having the large display of my album art. That being said, I love my Shuffle. It feels like theres nothing at the end of my headphones which is a great feeling when you're active and don't want a player bouncing around in your pocket or having an awkward mass on your arm. It also made me realize how much I hate iTunes, I can go on and on but I'll just mention my number one pet peeve with it; I have to run a third-party app to update my library if I add files or change tags outside of iTunes. Way to force the iTunes store down people's throat Apple! Naturally, I was ecstatic when I installed the Zune equivalent and discovered it was a souped of version of Media Player 11, I love that interface. It's also real cool how they integrated Media Connect, so now I can listen to my library painlessly from another computer from WMP11 or Xbox360. I'd also like to thank Burton for making the greatest snowboarding invention ever, the audio beanie. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Hold 'em Live Posted on 9/2/2006 8:28:38 PM Looking forward to the title since it was announced early this year I downloaded Texas Hold ‘em for Xbox Live Arcade last week while it was free. The game itself serves a functional purpose and it’s not too flashy but the interface isn’t too bad. However, it’s sad that you can get more realistic poker play from the AI in single player than from the donkeys you run into online. The tournament strategy I’ve employed is let the all-in and overbetting dumbasses take themselves out and play only monster pre-flop hands (big aces, high pocket pairs) and I always end up taking first or second. The second place usually results from a said dumbass calling my all-in heads up raise with a hand like T2 and hitting a two pair or set on the river. Needless to say, I’ve stuck to playing online at Full Tilt and keep my distance from this game. I think I’ll keep playing the single player mode to get the rest of the achievements, but I’m afraid if I play it anymore online my poker play will actually degrade with each tournament. Even if I continued playing, the bugs I’ve heard of will probably drive me away eventually. People have been employing the standard modem standby trick to drop everyone from tourneys and winning them right away. Outside of modem trickery there’s also a “feature” that makes you lose your ring game buy-in if you disconnect, which makes no sense since in a ring game you can cash out at anytime and there’s no potential exploit for people to purposely disconnect. I think I’ll wait for the WSOP game to come out to get my Xbox poker fix, I played it at Gamefest and the face capture technology is really good, it was funny seeing our program manager stand up on an all-in against Chris Ferguson. It’s also possible to get tells from people since your hand isn’t always displayed on the screen, you have to lift your cards off the table which then goes to the Pocket Cam view to show you your cards, which your opponents can see you do and potentially determine your checking for a made flush or what not. The higher price point might keep the donkeys away from this one and keep the kids on the XBLA version. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Tool Set Posted on 8/31/2006 4:37:26 AM Drove all the way to The Gorge to see Tool last Sunday. Here's the set list before I forget, the show was friggin intense: Stinkfist The Pot Forty Six & Two Jambi Opiate <--- wow! Rosetta Stoned Schism Sober Lateralus Vicarious Aenema Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Game Related Microsoft Releases Posted on 8/30/2006 8:01:41 PM Some good steps for the game industry in the form of new Microsoft products were released this week. Windows Marketplace launched on Monday and the XNA Game Studio Express beta is available for download today. Windows Marketplace is mainly a front end for customers to download applications tested by Microsoft and therefore considered free of malware, and also as a store for purchasing more popular apps and games. That in itself isn’t a big deal, but along with the Marketplace launch comes Digital Locker, a buy and play anywhere system similar to Steam. Right now, there are some big games available, namely WoW and some MMORPGS, along with other new/popular games like Fear, Call of Duty 2, and Civilization IV. I can’t say how much I love this delivery system over buying the game at the store and dealing with multiple CD/DVD installs and product keys. I’ll take the extra download time over the clutter and fiddling with discs and keys any day. I see this service really taking off if they get more developers on board committed to providing a simultaneous digital release along with the traditional box and media release as soon the game comes out. And of course XNA Game Studio Express beta has launched. I haven’t tried it yet since I’m still at work at the moment but I’ve decided to use this for my current work, you can’t beat targeting two platforms with more or less the same code. A few downsides to the beta release however, namely no support for Xbox 360 retail development (which is coming this holiday when the XNA Creator's Club is launched I suppose), the XNA Content Pipeline is absent which is not too big a deal unless you have a hardcore tool pipeline for your art, and right now you can’t develop on Vista. Nevertheless, this stops no one from getting their code up and running on Windows while assuming it will work on Xbox 360. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Conan at the Emmys Posted on 8/28/2006 7:49:13 PM I missed the Emmys since I was at PAX on Sunday and then drove 2 hours to see Tool but this opening montage is hilarious. I knew Conan would do something crazy, I wish I would've remembered to set the DVR. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Busy Summer Posted on 8/16/2006 6:50:33 AM An understatement if there ever was one. Here’s some quick updates as to what’s going on for those who care: As far as work goes, things are bit hectic as we approach more and more deadlines along the path to shipping Vista. I can’t go over milestones or specifics but the situation is wild nonetheless. I went to Vegas in July and won a couple hundred bucks playing poker. Actually, a lot of my gaming time lately has been spent playing no-limit hold ‘em online at Full Tilt Poker. I was already into poker but I’ve been become somewhat of a student of the game, reading books and playing a lot of hands in order to get better. Like I needed another hobby. Took yet another trip, this time to Boston for SIGGRAPH 2006, this was my first since I’ve never been able to afford it. Ironically enough, when I can all expenses are paid for by the company. The conference was very interesting, I tried to attend only the talks relevant to real-time rendering and luckily enough the Advanced Real-time Rendering course was probably the part of the conference I got the most out of. Most of the course consisted of talks by ATI, the most interesting and practical to me being the simulation of a multilayered gooey (or organic) object, in the case of the demo a beating heart. Basically depth parallax and blur were using to give the illusion of layers represented by two sets of textures as moving closer and further to each other with certain physical properties. The technique, as a side effect of sorts of the blur, also gave the object a kind of subsurface scattering. ATI’s parallax occlusion mapping and Valve’s lighting model were also quite interesting. A couple of papers in the Shape Modeling and Texturing session did catch my eye though, namely Procedural Modeling of Buildings and one where plant models are generated out of images taken from around an actual plant. Emerging Technologies and the Electronic Theatre were very entertaining as well. I was at Gamefest today, where yesterday’s keynote announced the release of XNA Game Studio. This is pretty exciting news as it opens the 360 up to hobbyist game developers, with the ability to actually debug and run the games on the system for an annual rate of $99 which is peanuts when you think of the cost of any console dev kit. Beta signup is already open but you won’t be able to download the software until August 30th. XNA Game Studio uses the XNA Framework which is a new managed API that will replace Managed DX. I went to the talk that introduced the new tools and it looks like the component model will allow for some interesting code sharing in the community, basic stuff like a free-look camera and a model viewer were showcased but theres potential for some more complicated components to be created and shared by real users once it’s out. XNA is managed so no native C++ or DX, which is a small price to pay for write once and run on Windows and Xbox360. The only downside is that there’s no network functionality planned for the 360 in this initial release, but it seems like it will be there eventually. I bought a 2006 Toyota Prius and I love it, I went down to White River for Endfest (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mars Volta) which was a two hour drive total and had a near full tank of gas when I got home. Plus its probably the nerdiest car ever, with a power button instead of turn-key ignition and touch screen controls for everything. The energy and consumption indicators on the touch-screen are real cool too. The summer still isn’t over for me, I’m going to PAX in a couple of weeks and Tool that same weekend. I haven’t seen them in about 4 years so I’m excited about that concert. PAX is expected to become the new E3 as far as the US is concerned so this year and especially the next should be interesting. Me and some of the guys from work are gonna enter the Guitar Hero tournament along with the Halo 2 and Counterstrike team tournaments which is gonna be awesome. We probably won’t win but it will be fun. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Don't Fear the Reaper Posted on 6/23/2006 5:15:37 AM Blue Oyster Cult, Cherokees, and aliens that like to screw around with gravity and the very fabric of time and space. The demo for Prey hit yesterday and saying I’m sold is an understatement. The game tosses new gameplay mechanics at you left and right, the most innovative being the portals. Letting you peek through what’s on the other side and seamlessly traveling between the two destinations would have been enough, but the designers took it up a notch and made the portals transport you to an area with a different gravitational orientation, or as in one part of the demo where you end up inside what looks like a display case for some artifact. A portal on the side of the crate dumps you inside and shrinks you, and walking around this rock reveals another portal that drops on another part of the ship back in your normal size. Words don’t do this kind of level design any justice, you have to play it to believe it. It seems the final game with provide plenty of puzzle-solving goodness, a lot of them no doubt employing the spirit walk where you can leave your body behind and take control of your ethereal form. The game also does an excellent job in immersing the player, the story seems very interesting and the sound guys did a great job with the ambient noises and screams, and the production in general. The demo starts out in a bar where the jukebox sounds like it would in a room like that through a sound system generally found in a bar. Like what’s become typical of the genre, most of the storytelling happens in-engine and without cutscenes. It’s easy to notice the attention to detail in the animation of the characters, such as a small alien creature slipping while turning a corner since he’s anxious to go eat your face. It just goes to prove that next-gen is not about the raw technology (although it is pretty) but about what your artists can do with the beefy hardware. Prey uses an improved version of the Doom 3 engine, which seems to run a lot faster than the original. The geometric detail and abundance of normal maps is on par with Doom 3, but I can actually run this game on my monitor’s native resolution of 1280x1024 at full detail and get a decent framerate. First-person shooters usually fall into the same category as RTS’s for me, I usually get them for the multiplayer portion and play only part of the story mode. However, this game will probably be one of the exceptions to that rule mostly due to the engrossing story and the insane level design that takes advantage of truly innovative gameplay. If the demo is any indication, this is easily the game of the year. Latest Comment Left by Lenny on 7/21/2006 3:10:55 PM Perfect Dark has better multiplayer though. View All Comments(1)

	DS Lite and Co. Posted on 6/14/2006 3:55:57 AM I picked up my pre-ordered DS Lite on Sunday after standing in Gamestop for about a half hour since their DSL was down and they could only take cash. Makes me wish I would’ve just paid them in full last month. Opening the white box and getting through all the interior packaging revealed my glossy new toy. You might be thinking I’m a sucker for buying it when I already own a DS Phat (as it is now commonly known) but trust me this is a worthy upgrade. I can actually play stylus only games for a long period of time without my wrist getting tired and resorting to playing on a table. The Lite lives up to its name here, not only because of its weight but it’s smaller dimensions allow the fingers to support more of the system, with the weight evenly distributed. There are some changes to the D-Pad and buttons which I personally like although there have been mixed reviews about it, the buttons feel less flimsy now and more responsive. Other than ergonomics, the other selling point that came through for me was the brighter screens ala the revised GBA SP released last year. Brighter is an understatement. Indoors the screens are brilliant, every detail now clearly visible and making the colors appear much richer. I went for a ride on some bike trails that day and took a break to play some DS on a park bench without having to seek shelter to see the screens. Of course, the system is not without it’s faults. The DS Lite seems to have evolved similar to the Game Boy, the GBA carts now stick out from the bottom. While not a huge deal since the GBA games coming out are far and few between as the DS gains popularity, I like to have a GBA game in there like the Namco classics collection or FF Tactics without it protruding. The stylus, while larger in length and girth than the original, could have been longer. This is particularly annoying for games like Ouendan when your hand is blocking the screen as more and more circles are appearing waiting for your tap, a problem whose only solution on the DS Phat was buying a third-party retractable stylus. All in all, the DS Lite gets an A-/9.0/whatever from me. In summary, if you don’t own a DS yet get it and if you do own one… get it. Now that you’re getting it, here are some must-have games. There are more of course like Mario Kart DS and Castlevania, and others that might appeal to whatever your gaming tastes might be. Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! In short, like DDR but with a stylus and touch screen circles. Of course that description does no justice to the game which is tied together by crazy manga cutscenes and catchy J-Pop. The characters which change with every difficulty level are squads of male cheerleaders, no they don’t wear short shorts or tights but cool black trench coats and headsets. Each level is a stressful situation for someone in the city where their only hope is some motivation from these guys and their dance moves. There are two difficulty levels to unlock along with the two you start out with, on the last difficulty you are represented by traditional American female cheerleaders and it’s crazy hard as the dots are much smaller, come up right before they need to be hit, and the penalty for missing is much greater. Lots of replay value here. This game is in Japanese but navigating through the UI is fairly intuitive. There is an English version due out this year named Elite Beat Agents which is essentially a whole other game. If you’re holding out on this one awaiting the U.S. release then DON’T, the two games have no overlap other than the gameplay. Plus I’m willing to bet the Japanese version is a lot wackier than the U.S. release. Tetris DS Yes it’s the same game you’ve played about 20 different versions of but it’s so much more. The DS version has about a half dozen new gameplay modes, each paying tribute visually to a classic Nintendo franchise. I won’t talk too much about these modes as the real fun in this game is in the multiplayer arena, whether in person with your friends or online on Nintendo’s Wifi service. Online you get two-player head to head, four player mode with items, and the Push mode. If you think you’re good at Tetris then you have to try the four player mode. Basically, if you don’t quick-drop every piece you won’t last very long. There are more options when playing a local multiplayer game, which is a lot more fun if you can get enough people. A nice addition to most of the modes including the traditional Tetris you know and love is the piece-swap feature. This lets you swap the falling piece with the one you have saved (for example you can save that long piece for the Tetris until you can form the set up). Tetris never gets old so this cart won’t collect much dust if you’re a fan. New Super Mario Bros. I can’t recommend this one enough, especially if you grew up playing the original Super Mario games on NES and SNES. You definitely get that nostalgic feeling playing through this game, with the secret level exits that open up alternate routes on the map like Super Mario World, and the familiar jumping, coin, and fireball sounds that have been around since the beginning. Mario has some new powerups this time around, like the giant mushroom that pays visual homage to the mushroom from SMB1, this one makes you the size of the screens and you smash through the screen causing damage then rewarded with 1-ups. He also has the mini-mushroom which lets you get through tight tunnels and thin pipes, and the blue shell that lets you roll along slopes and the ground as a turtle shell knocking enemies and bricks out. While the graphics are in 3D, the sidescroller gameplay and visual style still make it feel like you’re playing the spiritual successor to Super Mario World. Of course, there’s a multiplayer mode in this one too, in fact there’s two of them. First off you have Mario vs. Luigi which lets you square off in the same level in a race to collect stars and steal them from the other Mario bro. The second mode is basically Mario Party without the annoying board game, a collection of mini-games played solely with the stylus. There are just so many of these mini-games that you can be entertained for hours playing with a friend allowing the game to randomly select them. They range from card games to whack-a-mole to sling-shooting Spineys into turtle shells on the top screen. Definitely pick this one up for some old-school fun. Latest Comment Left by Palithius on 8/11/2006 6:28:38 PM I love Mario, and concur with your NES/SNES sentiments. My only reservation is that Nintendo has not found any new frontiers. You buy a brand new system just to play Mario. View All Comments(1)

	Some Digital Indulgences Posted on 6/13/2006 2:56:03 AM There are several games keeping me occupied lately whenever I need to wind down, here are the main ones (or the ones I have something to say about anyway). Stop putting out good games damnit, I can barely keep up anymore! Tomb Raider: Legend Just got this from Gamefly after enjoying the demo a couple of months ago. They made some nice additions to the series that made the gameplay more enjoyable compared to previous entries. One of the more noticeable ones is the magnetic grapping hook that can latch on to objects of the game’s choosing. Would’ve been nice if it could grab on to arbitrary surfaces but fun nonetheless. The use of the Y button to emphasize or enhance certain actions is interesting too, for example mashing Y to regain your grip after an early jump onto a ledge or pressing Y at a certain point in an animation to travel faster along ropes or ledges. I appreciate the puzzles thus far being physics based rather than hitting random switches as in the previous games, which is what kept me from playing those too much. Combat remains more or less the same, no surprises there so far. Overall a pretty solid game for as much as I’ve played it, Xbox 360 achievements are also motivation for collecting all the metals and getting through the levels. Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War This game has been getting some heat from the review sites about outdated graphics and framerate issues, but it seems unfair to knock down their scores so much for something as shallow as that. The game just shipped this week and I happened to play the demo this past weekend, I didn’t get to finish it but it was a blast. Other games have tried to combine the RTS and action genres like Savage but Rise and Fall seems to have done the better job. Like every other RTS out these days, you have your army units and your heroes but you have the option here to enter Hero Mode which switches you to a third-person mode where you can hack-and-slash your way through the enemy. In the demo you control the Egyptians and one of their corresponding heroes is Cleopatra. I doubt the historical accuracy of Cleopatra walking around with a sickle and bows and arrows but it works, there are some areas of the level where only the hero can access and basically it turns into an action game until you complete some objective (in this case stealing a Roman boat to get your troops across a river). The RTS element isn’t as appealing as it should be but I’ll probably pick this one up if I get tired of the next game I’m gonna talk about. Rise of Legends This is probably the best of the bunch, pure RTS which takes the best of Rise of Nations and combines it with the latest popular elements like heroes and buildings with multiple upgrades and extensions. I enjoyed this game much more than the previous one just because it’s in a fantasy setting and isn’t tied down by silly things like reality and history. The developers came up with some really cool units and heroes and the three races feel very different from each other. The Risk-like tactical map between each battle is where all the upgrades and new units are developed, rather than magically obtaining them from one level to the next you actually have control of what you get. I like all the races so far since haven’t played enough matches to pick a favorite yet, although the popular one online seems to be the Cuotl and rightfully so since I tried a skirmish game with them and they’re crazy powerful. Basically, if you let any of their heroes level up all the way you’re dead. I got this one at around the same time as Battle for Middle Earth II and it definitely won out of those two, as much as I like them both. I know this is sacrilege in some circles, but this game kind of reminds me of Starcraft in that there is a lot of depth there. I am hoping the community playing this game gets larger and sticks around, what keeps me from playing any RTS longer than a few months other than Warcraft III and Starcraft is that after a while people lose interest and move on to something else. The community around those games and Blizzard games in general is just ridiculous, and it’s a worldwide affair. Uno You’re probably thinking “WTF?!” but seriously, this game is great on Live. It’s different from playing this game as a kid since there’s so much trash talk involved if you play with people you know, or if you’re brave with people you DON’T know. Oh wait, it’s just like playing it as a kid then… Anyway, as the first game to utilize the Xbox Live Vision camera it should prove an interesting experiment into what people are capable of doing when strangers from around the globe are watching. Scary thought, luckily the camera doesn’t ship for some time. The 35th anniversary deck is a worthy addition to the game, changes the gameplay up a bit if you get tired of original Uno rules. Basically it adds a 35th anniversary card to the deck which can be played as a wild card, and the subsequent play must be either a 3 or a 5 of any color. Guitar Hero I can never get tired of this game, I’m playing it through on Expert mode now and it’s just as fun as the hundreds of other times I played More Than A Feeling or Cowboys From Hell. It’s amazing how the finger dexterity and hand coordination transfer over to real guitar playing, I feel it’s actually improved my technique. Everyone is always skeptical or underestimates this game until they actually play it, everyone I show it to can’t put that Fisher Price-looking Gibson SG down. I actually feel that the sequel is coming out too soon, I can probably milk this one for another year with all the songs I haven’t bought yet since I wanted to save them for when I finished Expert. Although… the head-to-head multiplayer in Guitar Hero II and multiple guitar and bass parts are very appealing, not to mention the practice mode that this installment desperately needed for those crazy solos. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Vista, Elements, and Telecom Greed Posted on 6/9/2006 3:29:25 AM UPDATE: Looks like House voted against the bill for preservation of Net Neutrality, but a new vote moves to the Senate now where there is stronger bipartisan support for a bill that will keep the internet free. Microsoft is opening up the Windows Vista beta to the public, head on over to the site and give Beta 2 a spin. Be sure to try out the advisor program first to see if your computer can handle it, remember to check the box for Aero which is the pretty window manager you’ve seen in screenshots. This option usually requires a relatively new graphics adapter, more technically one that can do hardware shaders, and has a decent amount of video memory and memory bandwidth. I’ll be happy to forward any bugs you may find, given that they’re not already known or fixed since its obviously still a work in progress with new builds released daily. Also if you have it installed and dabble in DirectX be sure to give DX10 a spin as well since it’s Vista-only. Gamedev.net is holding their annual Four Elements contest and I found out about it early enough this year that I might actually enter. I happen to be working on my engine already so why the hell not. This year the elements (Emotion, Economics, Emblem, Europe) are a little funky and a game is not as obvious as the previous years (a good one being Ninjas, Pirates, Zombies, Robots) but it should make for some interesting submissions. If you’ve been keeping up with current events in technology surely the words Net Neutrality have popped into attention in the past month. Basically, what will be up for debate in Congress in the very near future is whether or not we can disturb the principle named above, where content providers (websites, for example Google, Amazon, eBay) get equal treatment in terms of quality of service. What the bigwigs in the telecom companies would like to see (ISPs, for example AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Bellsouth) is a system where content providers would have to PAY for preferential performance, or else risk losing their customers because their pages take longer to load compared to those they successfully ripped off. So if eBay doesn’t cough up the dough, good luck sniping auctions at the last minute or posting a lot of pics for something you’re selling, you get the point. Luckily, there’s a big uproar and companies like eBay and Google are attempting to take action, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt writing an open letter to the user community to join the fight. So, if you have 2 minutes please save the internet by writing your congressman. The petition there is real simple to fill out and automatically gets sent to your state’s representatives. Hopefully the big public outcry will influence the decision in Washington and we can keep the internet free of carpool lanes. Latest Comment Left by Rach on 6/9/2006 10:05:17 AM Interesting....a whole other language to me. View All Comments(1)

	What's Crankin' Posted on 6/6/2006 4:22:49 AM With as much music as I have in my collection, I always seem to hover over the same dozen albums for a given period of time. Here's a few of the records that I've been listening to a lot lately, some new and some old. Massive Attack - Mezzanine I'm usually not into much in the electronic genre but this is one of those CDs you can just leave on and not be bothered or bored to tears by it. It's not a bad kind of neutrality, there's definitely some excellent composition which in my opinion is not too common with their peers. Also, if you watch House you might recognize Teardrop as the opening theme sans voice track. Common - Be Always of fan of hip hop that doesn't involve bragging about how much money you have and that keeps from recycling the same beats you hear in every other song on the radio. While I'm on the subject, it's always confused me on how you can rap about your bling and bank account on your FIRST ALBUM, supposedly you just got your record deal or cut the album long before you saw any cash. Anyway, great songwriting did it for me here, and it's overall very chill. Definitely falls into the "If you like Kanye" category, given that they worked together for so long. Tool - 10,000 Days This one's a no-brainer for anyone that knows me. Their latest entry is definitely different from the usual, they seem to ignore the "if it aint broke don't fix it" with each album but it's always a good thing in their case. A lot less heavy in this Tool offering, more melody on Maynard's part, and as always badass lyrics: Angels on the sideline, Baffled and confused. Father blessed them all with reason. And this is what they choose. Monkey killing monkey killing monkey Over pieces of the ground. Silly monkeys give them thumbs, They forge a blade, And where there's one they're bound to divide it, Right in two. Arcade Fire - Funeral I had heard a couple tracks off this album but it wasn't until Andy played it over and over that I fell into the same habit. There's not one bad song on this CD, I freakin' love it. VERY well written songs in a unique style, clearly a lot of heart and fine musicianship went into the composition here. My impression is that the band took an overall approach to each song and maybe the album itself rather than what most bands traditionally do, which is come with a riff or melody first and add to that in bits and pieces. Insert bassline, verse-chorus-verse, you get the picture. No, there's definitely some grand scheme here. Latest Comment Left by Rach on 6/6/2006 11:22:20 AM Ok ok ok, i'm going to pick up these cd's for sure this weekend. I'm such a slacker. P.S. I love the new pics.....how awesome!! View All Comments(2)

	For You RSS Fans Posted on 6/4/2006 11:28:41 PM You can now subscribe to my feed by clicking on the icon up top or adding the address manually in your favorite aggregator. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Some More Updates Posted on 6/4/2006 1:52:15 AM No more under construction pictures around here. The archive and links pages are up now, the last of the long postponed sections of this site as simple as they are. Also made some updates on the administrative end for myself. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	FF7 Burger Joint Posted on 6/2/2006 3:25:34 PM This is freaking hilarious, I love Robot Chicken. Obviously a lot funnier if you've played Final Fantasy 7. Latest Comment Left by Mike on 6/2/2006 6:24:34 PM Hahaha, that is sooo funny. View All Comments(1)

	.NET 1.1 vs. Visual Studio 2005 Posted on 5/31/2006 5:51:25 PM This last change to the site could have been done in a day, until I realized Visual Studio 2005 does not let you target .NET 1.1 out of the box. This proved troublesome since my host only supports ASP.NET 1.1 so I had to get it working without installing the older version of the IDE or at the minimum getting it to work with the older compiler. Luckily some service updates were released for VS 2005 along with MSBee, a tool which is now part of Microsoft’s Powertoys collection, that lets you target the previous incarnation of .NET. I figured this is something that’s pretty common especially with web applications where your platform is limited to what your host has installed, so here’s a quick run-through I wrote of what you have to do to get your ASP.NET 1.1 projects working with Visual Studio 2005. IMPORTANT: Do not convert your old 2003 project files until instructed to, if you already did then try to find a backup or previous version in your repository (if you have CVS or the like installed). Download and install the following updates for Visual Studio 2005. These are necessary since VS 2005 does not use project files for web applications and they are now built in a completely different way. This will allow you to build the projects as a single assembly as it did previously. Make sure to restart your computer after the updates. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 - Update to Support Web Application Projects Visual Studio 2005 Web Application Projects Download and install MSBee which is the toolkit for MSBuild that will let you target .NET 1.1 in C# or VB.NET. Attempt to load your VS 2003 project with VS 2005 which should bring up the conversion wizard. It’s a good idea to back up your old files as the wizard suggests in case something goes wrong and you might need the old code in a future step. Address any errors or warnings in the conversion. At this point you need to import the .target file for your language into your project, the documentation for MSBee goes into this in section 4.2 so I won’t go into detail here. Build your project from the command line as follows. Note that this step will be different if your project uses multiple languages, in which case refer to the MSBee documentation. msbuild [project file] /t:Rebuild /p:TargetFX1_1=true You might have some errors with missing definitions which is common if you have forms and you’re using codebehind in your app. This is where you need your old code. The wizard will turn your codebehind classes into a partial class and change the Codebehind directive in your aspx file to CodeFile. Undo those changes. Most likely the definitions for your controls are missing from your codebehind class and need to be inserted in there again. Also check InitializeComponent() since the line to add your PageLoad event handler (or others) was most likely removed as well. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Feature Update Posted on 5/31/2006 3:15:01 AM To the few people that actually read this: You can now add comments to the posts I make by clicking the link at the end of the one you wanna talk about. I also completed the Projects page over the weekend, check it out. Latest Comment Left by Rach on 5/31/2006 10:32:15 AM I was about to say....we read and we can't copy....hrm View All Comments(1)

	Games and Making Games Posted on 5/25/2006 3:21:25 PM I don't know if it’s all the brain food leading up to SIGGRAPH or getting a new laptop but I’m feeling the urge to write some games again. It’s been a while since I actually did heavy work in that area with the amount of work (and WoW) during the Masters semesters and starting my job up here. I just kind of fell out of it. I have a couple good ideas for games and I definitely want to start another engine from scratch, one less tied to D3D9 and more portable in terms of graphics APIs, a burn I felt when I tried to reuse a lot of Scout (my old engine) code in my brief run-in with Smartphone gamedev. Most likely I’ll write extensions for both DX9 and DX10 right away so I can jump right in there when we finally get some hardware (Vista-ready baby!). There’s a lot of code I can most likely reuse from Scout (namely all the BSP loading and traversing classes) since outside of graphics there’s not a whole lot I know I can improve performance on. The last thing people want is another gaming geek talking about E3 so I’ll get to the points: What was Sony thinking? I’m glad we finally told the world about Live Anywhere, it was starting to get tough keeping my mouth shut. Especially when people questioned why gamers would upgrade to Vista. Solid first party games for the Wii and DS. Nintendo wins. Gears of War! What was Sony thinking? Latest Comment Left by Mike on 5/31/2006 3:02:36 PM Let's make a game! View All Comments(1)

	Go away Spring Posted on 3/23/2006 3:17:30 PM I saw the saddest thing when I went to Crystal Mountain this weekend. Holes in the snow with the ground beneath exposed. A sign of the end of the season, granted it’s a little warmer at Crystal but all the resorts close April 16th anyway. I took advantage of the end of season sales and bought a Burton Custom with Mission bindings. Saved a ton and got to try it out last time I went up. It’s amazing what you can do with good equipment. Pictures up soon. I’m not sure if it was the wax job or how well the board’s edges traversed threw the snow but I was hauling on that thing. It just tore up the powder too. I made it a point to get a 50/50 board since I love carving down the slopes but I also want to do some freestyle, it kind of sucked that Crystal didn’t have a park so the most I could do regarding jumps was catch some air on the moguls left behind by the skiers. I’m going back to Snoqualmie this weekend for a second impression, I didn’t enjoy it much the one time I went since it was my first time dabbling in snowsports and I was skiing, so I spent most of my time on the ground in the green run. My prime motivation was looking at the trail map and seeing all the terrain park areas, and that they’re the only place open at night at this point in the season. Riding at night just rocks, I also feel less rushed during lunch fearing the 4 o’clock shutdown of the lifts. Getting into snowboarding also made me want to skateboard, last time I did was when I was in elementary school and owned a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles deck. I got a board about a month ago, put it together, and I’ve been riding to/from work whenever the weather is actually nice. I think it will help pass the 7 or 8 months I’ll have to wait for the next season. It’s crazy how well muscle memory works, I retained all the balance and feel for skating and never fell. I’m trying to learn some tricks (just ollieing for now) but it’s hard finding the right time of day to not bother the downstairs neighbor with the sound of a board slamming into the ground. I drove by the skatepark in my neighborhood yesterday and no one was there so I grabbed my board from the trunk. I just went up and down ramps and along the slopes of the pipes, there’s no chance in hell I’ll try verts or dropping in anything right now. It was still a lot of fun and probably increased my confidence for the terrain park up in the mountain this weekend. There’s a chance I might to up to Whistler in Canada for the weekend in April, I’m praying it doesn’t fall through. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	wtf... Posted on 3/1/2006 3:30:00 AM Looks like some wacky application state caused by me reposting and deleting my Snowboarding post due to server issues got reset when the web server was rebooted. I guess the post was in the app state this whole time but not in my database, oh well. The intarnets will survive. In any case, I went to Stevens Pass again this weekend and got a lot better snowboarding. I'm fairly comfortable overall now going down the slopes, turning, and stopping although my toe-side turns still need some work, I get weirded out having my blind side downhill. I really want to go again this weekend but I need to let my toenail injury heal since the snowboard boots put so much pressure on it, also there are other injuries in our usual party. Going up and down the green run I kept running into the same drunk white guy singing Gin and Juice the whole afternoon. Snoop Dogg needs to come up here and bust a cap. King Kong is easily the shortest game I've played in long time, it didn't help that it was ridiculously easy and I finished it in three short sittings. No complaints here, it was basically 1000 free gamerscore. On the other side of the difficulty spectrum I also managed to finish Call of Duty 2 on Veteran this weekend. Awesome game, good to hear Infinity Ward is going to patch the horrible Live interface and lag issues soon. Also got Empire at War which I was looking forward to for quite some time. I wish the RTS element was a bit more deep, it sucks not being able to do base construction and unit production during battle but the other elements kind of make up for it. The galactic tactical view and planetary conquest system are excellent and theres nothing like leaving some Y-Wings in orbit and using them for bombing runs when you're fighting on the planet surface. Poker and Marvel this Friday, hopefully I'll win some money again. Full Tilt Poker really messed up my game, playing for real money forces you to play smart. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Snoqualmie Pass Posted on 2/15/2006 7:32:45 PM So I finally went skiing this past Sunday after so many weekends this winter spent in Miami. This being my first time and all I had to get some gear to stay warm and dry up on the slopes. Luckily, REI happen to be having a big post-season sale so I took advantage of that and got myself a snow jacket, pants, gloves and goggles. It was about two months or so since I had seen snow, we didn't get anything in Redmond since those two or three days in December. The roads on the way over were fine, apparently little snow fell that week and all of it was maintained on the outside of the highway barriers. It was a beautiful sight once we got there of course, the mountain covered in snow and people having a blast. It was a bit warmer than I expected however, the day was clear and the sun was out full blast like the few days before. This warm weather made the snow a bit more icey overnight, more on that later. I ended up getting a sweet deal with the beginner package which included rentals, lift pass, and lessons for only $63. So I grab my gear and head over to the lessons. I couldn't have asked for a better instructor, although these were group lessons he was very patient with me screwing up and helped me with what I was doing wrong. By the time the lessons were over I had a pretty good idea of what to practice and decent control over the skis... on the bunny slopes. So Andy comes along and tries to teach me how to stop by doing a fast turn, which after a million tries I feel I have it down... on the bunny slopes. Off we go to the green run. I knew it was a bad sign when I fell about two times just trying to get to the lift. We get on the lift and at least theres one thing I was able to take home as a proud achievement, I didn't wipe out getting off the lift. Getting down the hill is another story. Any ego boosts achieved on the practice slopes were quickly cancelled out by falling about 9 out of the 13 times I tried to S-turn or stop down the hill. Andy was very patient with me and pointed out what I had to do and stop doing, but my lack of coordination at such high speeds didn't allow me. I was ok in the beginning of the turns but once I was facing down the slope I accelerated well beyond what I felt comfortable with, not being able to get a grip on the snow because of the icey conditions didn't help either. I finally managed to get to the base of the run and head inside for a breather. I really meant to go back to the practice slopes to improve my technique but once I sat down the pain and fatigue really hit. All I wanted was to sit and drink my coffee til the others were done in about 45 minutes. Regardless of my performance on the green run I still had a great time. Next time we head up I definitely want to try snowboarding and see which one I like better before sticking with one. Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	The Next-Gen Cometh Posted on 1/26/2006 4:31:03 AM So I FINALLY got my hands on an Xbox 360 today. "But Chris", you say, "don't you get first dibs at Microsoft?". Oddly enough, whenever I have made any kind of line for the 360 those who have shared the experience have always been my fellow employees (including today). The deal is that Microsoft, along with any other console-maker, loses money on each unit it sells and relies on attach rate of the games as a measure of success for the system. Therefore, no employee discount or even availablity of the system, heck we still dont get the Xbox 1 at the company store. Accessories and first-party games are another story. Oh yes. Anyway, I happen to download and install unt1tled's notification tool this afternoon and the thing went off at about 3:15 or so saying Bellevue Best Buy got some in stock. I jump up off my seat and ask my coworker Andy "Hey, wanna buy a 360?" and we head off. Of course, given where I live and work, a lot of people had the same idea but I was the 3rd or so in line and got my grubby hands on the premium shiznit. After leaving work that day I head to the company store to grab some goodies of course then head home. My impression thus far: So the only reason I'm typing this up now is because I'm waiting for the Fight Night demo to finish downloading (seems the EA file servers are bogged down). I'd say I've spent 80% of the time on Xbox Live Arcade/Marketplace and only 20% playing "real" games. Live went from simply an excellent matchmaking framework to the heart and soul of the sophomore Xbox offering. Wow. Just wow. Timesink staples like Bejeweled and Zuma are there but newer games like Wik, Geometry Wars, and Hexic offer whole new levels of time killing. Another thing that brought a smile to face (especially when playing Wik) is the potential for XBLA to bring indie games to the spotlight and make it feasible to work on creative low budget games. It also seems that the first games are setting the standard for providing a demo instead of making you blindly purchase the game (which are cheap anyway). Which leads me to MS Points. What a great and easy (too easy, you gotta have self control) way to do business, you buy a ton of points for a set dollar amount (in a matter of 2 button presses) and use those points throughout the marketplace for the stuff you want. I enjoyed Hardwood Spades. Choose Unlock full version. Spend 400 points (about 6 bucks). Now I'm on Live playing against people. Yes. Like so many I know have said, Achievements == crack. Now you have a reason to explore every nook and cranny or beat a game in super-hard mode. Bragging rights set in stone (ok, pixels) instead of potentially fictitious and far less accessible word of mouth. Some are easy to get just to get you started on the addiction, some make sense in terms of progression in the game, and some are just weird. I heard Condemned has an achievement for finding all the dead birds in the game. Sweet. Everything just fits together so well, leaderboards and achievement compare screens for friends, private chat from anywhere in a game or the dashboard, and the guide itself, like clockwork. I feel like I need a Media Center PC now, but Windows Media Connect will do for now. Nothing like jamming to The Police (streamed from my PC) during Hexic. I wish the current playlist wouldn't stop once you leave a game though. Of course, the graphics are incredible and are very hard to enjoy without an HDTV. When I set that Dashboard to 1080i it was like BLAM! I've only tried DOA4 so far and it just looks phenomenal. Never been a big DOA fan but this one is pretty good, the gameplay still isn't complex but it's far less shallow than before. So I see my buddy John from work signs on while I'm playing through a nifty popup that comes out through whatever you're doing. I send him a private chat invite. "Hey wanna play DOA4?" "Yea." He sends me a game invite. Next thing you know I'm handing his ass to him... ok so we're both DOA noobs but whatever. It's just that seamless. Anyway, Fight Night is done downloading and I wanna play FFXI Beta before I go to bed. Peace out! Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)

	Respawn! Posted on 1/24/2006 8:49:02 PM With this whole blogging epidemic going around I figured I'd resurrect this tiny corner of the web. It's finally acceptable and to e-rant endlessly (or has that always been the case) so where's the harm in it really? Anyway, I need to actually start programming recreationally again and put up a comments section for my posts since that's the cool thing to do. I know, I know, "just use some open-source whatever" but those of you that know me as a programmer know that I like doing things myself. So, other than my usual gaming I've been reading a lot more than usual. Michael Crichton never ceases to amaze me in turning an otherwise cheesy story into something very intriguing and informative. I have read nearly all his stuff and every time I learn something new, the guy really puts the "science" into science-fiction. I finished reading Prey last month, and I'm convinced if anyone else had written it the plot would've been utter BS. However careful placement of nanomechanical and artificial intelligence history make the story that much more believable with only a couple of leaps of faith required (namely the mass production of the nano-predators and the manufacturing process itself, along with something I won't spoil towards the end of the book). Don't know what State of Fear is about but it's sitting on my bookshelf awaiting my page-turning pleasure. Also, as the last literate person on Earth that hadn't read it, I finished The Da Vinci Code while I was in Miami. Nearly three years as a best-seller... why? I can only assume it's the subject matter itself, even though it's not the first time the story of Mary Magdelene was told. I liked the book and all, felt very Indiana Jones-ish but I'm not sure it would have done too well if were about something else. Dan Brown's style is very cinematic, almost crying out "MAKE A MOVIE OUT OF ME" (hey it worked), and there were a lot of very cliched parts (lots of guns and the kiss at the end). Come on now. And at what point did TV become so much better than the movies? (No House tonight, damn American Idol) Latest Comment There are no comments on this post yet, follow the link below to speak your mind... View All Comments(0)