A Space Invaders mini game rendered with a post it note style. ;) Well worth seeing it in motion... download or youtube video (it lessens the effect since it's a downsampled resolution, at least watch in HQ).
Frameranger, the winning demo at Assembly 2009 by CNDC, orange, & Fairlight:
At 5 minutes in, there's a great shift to 8-bit music style and a block push pixelated render target. Check out the capped.tv video.
oh, demos... i love you, you make the most beautiful pixels.
On the left, a pile of links. On the right, some Gamebryo games I don't think I've mentioned yet.
Game Development:
Mark DeLoura is at it again with another Middleware Survey. (You saw his writup on his Game Engine Survey online or in Game Developer, right?)
Darrin West has been writing up detailed thoughts on Online Game Techniques, e.g. his recent post Online Hard Problems.
Sysinternals offers handy tools you likely already use, such as Process Explorer. But, have you noticed VMMap? It can show you a process's virtual memory access. This came up recently on the DXGAB email list as a hint to finding memory leaks of GPU resources (look for WriteCombine attrib)
Graphics:
Timothy Farrar is verbose and detailed in his many graphics posts this year, certainly you're following along? e.g. game deconstructions: Killzone (+more), Resistance 2
Accumulative SSAO, similar to what was done in Gears of War 2. A gamedev.net thread on Screen space ambient occlusion together with reprojection to smooth over time.
3D Glasses from NVIDIA. I recently tried these out in the office, with about 50% of people thinking they were cool, to 50% not being all that impressed. I'm concerned it's a bit of an expensive gimick that doesn't add much - gamers won't wear glasses for prolonged periods, and I doubt autostereoscopic displays will justify their cost.
Fun:
ThruYOU, sample based music, but together with video from the youtube sources of the samples.
I pestered Michael Noland to submit afewimages from Emergent to I Get Your Fail, which if you haven't subscribed to you should. ;)
This one is my fav. Several years ago Tim Preston wrote the "error shader", for any situation where a renderer can't bind a shader... and we haven't been able to wipe the smirk off his face yet.
This particular scene is amusing with some error shader, and some missing lighting.
This image is early in the evolution, the final image is a good approximation. ;)
Reset
A fun, short, game. Cool novelty: the gameplay is synchronized with the music. Friend Adrienne Walker pointed out that this could be a great game jam theme.
Google Native Client
A plugin recently revealed by Google.
Cross browser, runs sand boxed native code.
Could be a good alternative to ActiveX.
Gamebryo 101
A university created webpage packed full of training videos, tutorials, and resources related to the product I work on.
WinDirStat
I recently gave up on SpaceMonger -- it was having issues with lots of files. This survey convinced me to move over to WinDirStat, which works very well.
Mr EditGotoFindCombo
Nice tip for Visual Studio programmers:
Quickly open files with sub-string prefix matching:
CTRL-D, type:">of ", then start your file name.
More tips on the linked page.
Depth of field came up on the gdalgorithms list. Jeff Russell caught the thread and replied with some screen shots from his brute force O(n^2*m^2) blur, with nice circles of confusion. I'm posting it here to make a few comments:
Sure, there are the typical DOF artifacts (halos, alpha object discontinuities, ...), but:
Top Left: Check out the trees, they look "right". The small highlights on leaves, or of sky through leaves, has that distinctive look that Gaussian blurs don't capture.
Center Left: Most of the scene is mush, but the enemies show distinctive disk highlights on points and lines.
It's been a while since I've dumped some links. If you haven't already noticed these, take a look:
I love sketch Check the video, scroll to 5 minutes to see curve sketching in 3D, that just makes it look too easy. ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.
Rendering with Displacement Surfaces Iñigo Quilez is a great demo-maker. He's recently been making some interesting images in 4kb executables. Shown here is "organix".
At nVision this year he gave a nice presentation discussing graphics in tiny executables, and displacement surface raymarching.
Input Director: Software KVM This year I started regularly running multiple machines on my desktop, including my laptop. While doing some CUDA development I had was using another machine across the room, with an HDTV I could see it from 10 ft. I needed something to simplify input.
I used synergy for a while, but it was a bit buggy. Tim Preston suggested Input Director, a great solution if you're running only Windows. Some key features:
Works before you log in, so you can log into a machine from another.
Has an alias for CTRL-ALT-DEL, so you can lock other machines from your master.
Easier config than synergy
Less bugs with being in "stuck" keyboard modifier states
If you weren’t able to make it to a presentation, I highly recommend you check out Siggraph Encore, where you can purchase videos of the presentations.
Danc, over at Lost Garden, recently made an interesting post describing Improving Bug Triage with User Pain. It describes a bug triaging methodology, and has several good points. I disagree slightly with his release goal for bugs, however.
Here's my comment:
Setting a pain threshold for a release is a very easy policy, but I'm concerned about the build up of low pain bugs. 100 Low pain bugs... ok. Next release, 300 low pain bugs.. and they're starting to have in impact. 1000 low pain bugs, and in aggregate they represent larger pain to me.
An alternative I would suggest is to get the total pain below some value. E.g each bug's pain value is simply it's fractional user pain value. So two bugs at 90% user pain and 20% would total to 1.1 user pain. Set the bar for the release to be something like 50 user pain.
The result is that working on highest user pain bugs reduces the total pain rapidly. But, if there is a huge base of low user pain bugs, it's still recognized and addressed.
Your visualization of a red line at a certain user pain threshold becomes instead a line at the point where the sum of all bugs crosses the total pain threshold.
Cutting room floor, where does it all go, are some of the best ideas there?
Innovation in games, how important, and how much is there?
Games benefiting all of humanity, or are just filler for the gamer niche?
GTA using Natural Motion's Euphoria, will NM get the credit, or will GTA soak it all up. How does it feel to work on middle-ware when games take all the publicity?
Consequences in games, e.g. to your own character, the virtual world, the supporting characters, the story line, AI, etc.
Game Architect doesn't update often, but when Kyle posts it's worth the read.
Definitely read his GDC 2008 wrap up, and if you're into engines, read his thoughts on Day 1 Studio's Despair Engine.
I especially enjoyed the engine section on orthogonal hierarchies, a topic I've discussed with many before regarding scene graphs. He mentions that they've split what many have overloaded into a single scene graph into at least 5 hierarchies.
Perforce is the source control solution du jour. It's great, except for a few frustrating gaps in features.
One of those gaps is the ability to quickly and easily set aside the work you were doing. Here's a nice script that solves that, called p4shelf.
The author has several other good p4 tips as well, on his blog Aurora.
The next most frustrating aspect of p4 to me is the inconsistency of integrating file changes vs file creation/deletion. It is easy to integrate changes you've made to a series of files. However, when you've added or removed files between branches, suddenly your integrations are much more complex. You can not, for example, choose to ignorea file deletion.
