Google's Lively

Google has launched Lively, a virtual space for chatting... and... hanging out.

Several blogs mention that Lively uses Gamebryo: e.g. Gamasutra & Virtual Worlds News

I've put up a room here, and embeded it here:

Johan Andersson's keynote at Graphics Hardware

Johan Andersson's slides were recently posted for his keynote The Intersection of Game Engines and GPUs - Current & Future at Graphics Hardware (other presentations there too...). I've looked over several of Johan's presentations in recent years, and am a big fan. This presentation covers many interesting topics, though is light on details:

• Most screen shots and examples are from Bad Company
  
• Shader node editor
• Rendering jobs, task decomposition for concurrency
• Command buffers used on 360, PS3, but DX10 is a problem
• - He also mentions an approach I'll be presenting on ind detail at Gamefest 2008 - software command buffers - with the con of "Difficult to update dynamic resources efficiently in parallel due to API", quite true
• Software rasterization for occlusion testing
• - low rez floating point buffer, renders 100 meters of low-poly occluder meshes, limited to a max of 10,000 verts. Use on all platforms
• Prefer bumpmaps to normal maps - better compression - sample to normals in shader
• Virtual textures
• Raytracing - cites Mirrors Edge - urban environments with reflections
• DOF implemented in CUDA

Virtual Training, games aren't just for fun

The ESA is reporting that 70% of major businesses are using game technology. Their survey (150 major companies polled) doesn't convince me that gaming tech is used in the working masses yet, but clearly it has it's place in large corporations such as Hilton, IBM, Canon, &c...

“Businesses across the spectrum, from automobile manufacturers to financial service providers, are utilizing entertainment software to help educate their employees to better serve their customers and improve their bottom lines,” said Michael D. Gallagher, CEO of the ESA, the U.S. association representing computer and video game publishers. “Interactive technology is a valuable tool in workforce development and this study underscores the fact that video games have become a mass medium helping Americans live, work and of course play.”

The survey indicated benefits of:

• a reduction in costs;
• more efficient and faster training;
• the ability to apply consistent training across all parts of an organization;
• the ease of measuring employee participation; and,
• better information retention.

Well, Gamebryo is game tech, how widely is it being used? Vis/Sim customers include:

• BAE Systems
• Breakaway Games
• Chi Systems
• Cubic Defense Systems
• Electronic Warfare Associates
• Engineering & Computer Simulation
• General Dynamics
• Honeywell
• Muzzylane
• Navteq / Mobility
• RTI International
• STS International
• Syandus
• Techrizon
• Total Immersion
• USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)
• Washington Hospital Center

So... how long until McDonalds employees learn their job tasks by training in Virtual McDonalds Camp?

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P.S. Thanks Phaedra for pointing this out.
P.S.S. baxissimo, nice to see you're finally reading RSS... now... of the countless people I've given that advice... who lives in Tokyo... hmm....

Links, New blogs, Random stuff

Time for a few links.

First, a few colleagues started blogging:

• Dan Amerson - http://whatmakesyouthinkimnot.wordpress.com - Engineer at Emergent
• Shaun Kime - http://shaunkime.wordpress.com/ - Engineer at Emergent
  
• John Goodale - http://egtasia.blogspot.com/ - Sales type guy, making Asia happen

Game wise, I'd been searching for some numbers recently...

• VGChartz - http://www.vgchartz.com/ - game numbers for the people

And finally, check out this real world media animation!


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Er, Careful with the NERF Guns: LCD Casualty (updated 1)

For the Gamebryo 2.5 release, we bought NERF guns for the entire office.

There's been an LCD casualty.

;) Tricky to shoot around the office and avoid hitting any monitors.

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Update: baxissimo wanted to know what type of gun. It was a Nerf Reactor. Those green balls have a decent amount of mass to them.... and a particularly strong shot at ~8 feet did the trick.

Gamebryo 2.5 Ships!

Gamebryo 2.5 has shipped! This is the largest release of Gamebryo I've worked on, so huge we went right from 2.3 to 2.5. ;) We knocked out a whole ton of work on this one, getting our hands extremely dirty rearchitecting large portions of the engine.

If you want the details and marketing blitz, check the website.

I'm posting now cuz It feels good to ship.

(photo credit flicker user Leo Reynolds)

Improving Bug Triage with User Pain, Comment

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.

(image by flicker user Marvin (PA))