Levelhead

Interesting art/game project: Levelhead. By combining filming and motion tracking of a little white cube, you can manipulate the projected game world inside by twisting and turning.

That is no moon ...

I'm an evening/night runner. Sunset in Heverlee near Leuven.

And have this one, too.

The age of beauty

Some final results of my computer graphics project. I implemented a graphics rasterizer, which is the implementation one would follow if you wanted hardware-accelerated graphics on today's GPU's, which have pipelines dedicated to vertex transformations. The other option was a raytracer, which is not (yet) suitable for real-time applications due to calculation complexity.

2 light sources, diffuse (gouraud) shading, phong (interpolated), 5000ish polygons. First without, then with bump mapping. Thanks a lot to this Nvidia Developer's Zone paper about Perlin Noise.

Implemented in Java from scratch, I'll drop the source code online soon.

Fax

Credit

Greetings from the low-end side of town

If there's one thing I've always envied console users for, it's the universal system compatibility. You buy a disc, pop it in, and performance (I'm ignoring TV quality here) will be the same for you and other players you encounter.

Not quite so for a PC gamer. I'm sure everybody is familiar with the so-called minimum requirements for a game. This brings me to the first problem. There's a huge ambiguity over what is acceptable as game performance. In game A, meeting the minimum requirements might be good enough to actually load the game into memory and gaze at a slideshow of half-baked pictures, while for game B, meeting them might result in a fluid - although low-end - gaming experience.

So here's my proposal for what a true minimum requirement would have to look like. A configuration which:

Taken an average over the full game (main quest / campaign if we're talking non-linear gameplay)

• renders at an acceptable framerate, say 25 or 30
• at a fixed resolution (1024px)
• benchmarked on a fresh system with the given hardware.

Options should - of course - be set to low quality for this benchmark, but players should not have to deal with serious gameplay disadvantages. All vital objects should be rendered, and 'pop-in' (the sudden appearance of game objects at the horizon, to preserve GPU memory) should be non-obtrusive to gameplay. I'm running out of fingers counting the occurences of a low-settings-configured game pointing to things in the horizon which haven't been rendered yet.

I am aware that game demos are the proverbial hook to draw new buyers in, but it is very important that they represent the state of the actual game, performance-wise. A lot of games are pirated to check out overall performance, because the demo lacks in benchmarking possibilities. And once you've got a pirated copy of a game which performs so-so, who's going to run to the retailer?

Now, I am aware that unlike consoles, not every PC system is the same, even if the hardware matches. I too shrug every time I get my hands on a box which is loaded with bloatware, degrading overall system performance. All I'm asking is for these requirements to be realistic. If an internet connection is required to activate the game, it has to be on the box. If there's an install limit, same story.

Another thing: it is not that hard to come up with new and shiny graphical improvements for games. The algorithms are there, and hardware evolution is catching up. The bottom line is: do we really need them? In the middle of a trans-galaxial firefight, who's going to wonder whether or not the smoke on the battlefield is volumetric, has soft edges and correct physical reaction? As a game developer, you've got to draw the line somewhere, because nowadays, it's a thin line between a fantastic tech demo and a very crappy game experience.

Sure, if your game is all about smoke, you better make sure it's the best damn smoke I've ever seen. If the game is about much more, careful planning of the performance budget is required. Example in case: Call Of Duty 4. Praised as one of the best games of 2007, it effectively balances showdown and performance. Sure, it's all scripted sequences and sprite-based-explosions, but did anyone really bother?

As a conclusion, some games which I've been playing in this busy release season:

• Left4Dead demo: I don't know how they pull it off every time, but Valve surprised me once again with the performance of their latest build of the Source engine. I barely meet the system requirements, but medium settings is all the rage.
• Fallout 3: It looks fugly on my rig. But it's Fallout.
• World Of Goo: I yet have to find the first person who doesn't play this game straight on for the first hour. The music, the animations, the puzzles ... it's actually really good.

Busy

So, the new academic year has started. I'm following a Master in Computer Sciences now, option Human-Machine interaction. I've got a bunch of interesting new courses (Computer Graphics, Distributed Systems, Compiler Construction, ...), but the workload is getting pretty heavy. I'm also organising events for the improvisational theater group I'm active in, Preparee.

So I'm going to do the very thing I think is a landmark in laziness: instead of writing out paragraphs and paragraphs about the tidbits of interesting things I've found in the last few weeks, I'm going to sum them up. That's right. Yes, Dave, I'm afraid I can do that.

• I've been using Drupal a lot for the Preparee website. It's quite complicated to get started with at first, although the module system is a bless. It was hard to get things running, since we opted for drupal 6.X, and a lot of modules still don't have release candidates for the 6 series. Especially the Date module had some problems, but with my little project living against the dev-release line, I helped to debug it.
• The Telectroscope is an awesome art project.
• World of Goo is the best indie game I've played in a long time. It's a physics-based puzzle game with a unique art style and tremendous music. It's quite hard to believe this is a two-man project. I try to avoid using the phrase Bedroom Programmers here, since it tends to sound quite homoerotic.
• Automated P2P enforcement gone wrong: printer sued for downloading Indiana Jones 4. Of all movies, the poor printer.
• Promising one-man MMO: Love. Procedural animation and rendering.
• Video series I've laughed at lately: twisted cubicle workers in ManInTheBox and the ever sarcastic Zero Punctuation.
  

Fog of War

Once again from the lovely Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Rorsach

Thanks to the excellent Rock Paper Shotgun (best website title ever) I keep discovering cute little indie games. Rorsach is a short adventure game, which is interesting on two points:

• Art style: everything is drawn in chinese ink. Although the locations are limited (it's a one man game after all), this works pretty well with the theme, which is an asylum.
• Conversations: instead the of regular "IF you talked to X you can suddenly talk to Y about subject P", the game features an original system: every subject is an actual object. You can add objects (for example The Murder Weapon) to your inventory, and take them to other characters to get them talky about it. Although the inventory is quite small and you still find yourself running back and forth to get all the subjects, this is an interesting take on the genre.

It's free, so I highly recommend you check it out.

Evolution

credit

The Sandvich

He was a good lunch who played by the rules, until the rules robbed him of everything he ever loved. Now he's lettuce, tomato, cheese, bread, and a mysterious slice of meat, marching down your throat and straight to hell. He'll satisfy your hunger. FOR REVENGE!

Noclip

Men write code from Mars ...

and Women Write More Helpful Code from Venus, quoting the Wall Street Journal.

Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.

So it is true. Javadoc was invented by a woman, because all Sun (planetary pun intended) guys were too stubborn to ask eachother for directions. If it wasn't for women, we'd all be writing unindented lines of assembly. Bless them and their coding skills !

Voxel Trouble

Some interesting bits up at Google Code : it's my second Radiohead-related post this week, I know. For the recording of the House of Cards video clip they did not use any camera's. Yes, that's right. Instead, they used specialised hardware that can register 3D geometry at a very fast rate, and manipulated the information - not only in post-capture processing, though. You can see in the making-of video how they distort the 3D measurements by using reflective surfaces or water.

From a free-software point of view, this project is pretty interesting too: by using the Processing programming language and the data sets (a singing Thom Yorke and a lot of captured architecture) people can remix the video. It's no straightforward task, but if only I had the time, I'd give it a try ...

Big ideas

The song nude by Radiohead performed on old hardware. Several doses of awesome.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Put mum on the phone !

Keep an eye on the jars. Brilliant.

Foxhunt !

Today marks the release of Mozilla Firefox 3.0. To celebrate this, the Mozilla Foundation is trying to set the Guinness World Record for most downloaded software. So if you've never tried out Firefox before or were bound to update anyway, go ahead. World-wide release times can be viewed here.

Version 3 adds faster rendering (through Gecko 1.9), intelligent bookmarks and smaller memory footprint. Pages load noticeably faster. Firefox is available for all Windows, Linux and Mac flavours.

Firefox is a web browser. I know there are tons of people out there still thinking Internet Explorer is The Internet. I have to cry myself to sleep every night over it.

P.S: Congratulations to the Mozilla Art team for having that giant retro robot in the beta.

FT(cat) = Meow(f)

How can a man every concentrate on studying filters and digital signal processing when every Google search on the matter eventually leads him to a vortex of inproductivity ?

The Biggest Narcist in the World

Today I read about Erik Nordenankar, who did a pretty cool thing: he developed a GPS transmitter with elongated battery life, put it in a shock-proof closed case, printed out very detailed instructions (places and coordinates) and handed the lot to the world-wide delivery company DHL.

By using the acquired data from the transmitter he could set out a trace of the case's journey afterwards. To say it in his own words, he used the briefcase as a pen, and our planet as a canvas. The result is amazingly detailed, although it's a bit pretentious to throw bags of (sponsored) dollars around to paint the biggest self-portrait ever made.

All info and some nice videos can be found on the website: Biggestdrawingintheworld.com

I would have gone for a crudely drawn fallus (testicles left and right of the african continent, shaft crossing the meditteranean sea, ending in the Scandinavian area). Just to see the looks on the sponsor's faces.

Towel Day

Thanks to fellow blogger Pelle at Blikkendoos.be, I will never forget that the 25th of may is from now on Towel Day. In order to celebrate the festivities, I went for a Vogon-green one.

Don't hesitate to post your pictures of Towel Day madness, but make sure to cut off the parts future employers could use to identify you. Much like I did.

So long, and thanks for all the fish

And then, on one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.

This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
(...)
This is her story.

One of the best prologues of a book ever, and it's from So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish, the fourth book in Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker trilogy.

If you haven't heard about these books before, you should go out and recklessly buy them. If you have seen the movie, forget it - reckless buying is the way to go here, too. If you have heard about it and already own a copy ... well, backup is nice.

Mind you, don't buy any translation. Some of the jokes depend heavily on the English language and Adams' clever way of twisting it. Honestly, it's the best birthday gift I ever got :)

• Wikipedia on The Hitchhiker's Guide
• Wikiquotes (lots of good ones there, but some of them might spoil parts of the books - read them first.)