dAb 3D Painting Research Licensed

[Edit 2010-03-15: A new project at Microsoft has been announced that looks a lot like dAb, Gustav]

In 2000 I collaborated with Bill Baxter on a 3D paint brush system that was presented at Siggraph 2001. Less talk, more video:


dAb: Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes (Siggraph01)

Bill continued the line of research for his PhD, and you can see some great improvements to the paint model and brush simulation:


IMPaSTo: A Realistic Model for Paint (NPAR04)


A Versatile Interactive 3D Brush Model (PG2004)

Over the years, we've had a few large companies inquire about licensing the research. I'm excited to say that we've closed a package deal for several systems! Perhaps you'll see this technology in consumer applications in a few years.

For more details, visit the dAb webpage.

Building a Game Engine Product vs Internal Tech

Yesterday I was reminded again of the difference between developing Gamebryo as a product and typical studio internal tech.

Joel, over at Insomniac, mentioned how much he enjoyed only working on one platform, and only supporting one version of Maya. While Gamebryo supports several versions each of Maya, Max, and XSI. We cover Win32 with 2 compilers / 2 versions of DirectX / static & DLL configs, Xbox360, PlayStation 3, and Wii. And, for good measure, we keep some of the code running on Linux.

David Boss also happened to have just given an update on our build system. He's running continuous integration on all platforms with unit tests; a full build; extensive regression tests; and packaging into DVD images. This turns over every night. That's impressive for an engine, tool set, and art library this size!

Global Game Jam: Robot Love

The Global Game Jam weekend is over, and I'm excited to say I got to help out on Robot Love:

High Resolution Version available on youtube website.

The theme was, "As Long as We Have Each Other we'll never run out of Problems..."

Gameplay: A 2 player co-op game with a simple gimmick, you need to stand next to the other player to reload! Two robots are escaping their factory, chased by mobs of other zombie robots.

Credits:

• Demond Rogers (Epic) did an awesome job at the character animations.
• Jason Connell (Red Storm) built the 2.5D environment.
• Adrienne Walker (Emergent) was ninja lead programmer.
• Harrison Moore did sound and UI.
• Will McGuire coded and placed enemies and props in the level.
• Mike Daly (Emergent) chipped in on level file format and robot AI.
• Vincent Scheib (Emergent) helped with collision, a bit of gameplay, and gamestate/screens.

Download it!

Global Game Jam: Kicking off the Triangle

The first global game jam has been kicked off! Although I can't participate all weekend, I did help get things started at the local triangle game jam. You can check in on them with this ustream:



Icarus studios is being an excellent host, setting us up in their motion capture room and having wired up a LAN for us. We've got just under 20 participants, with 4 games in development (brainstorm names: Breeder, Tethered, Robot Swarm, Buttons and Mindy).

Submitting Our Fails (or, how I love the Error Shader)

I pestered Michael Noland to submit a few images 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.

Vista Send To Clipboard As Name

Vista 64bit has been a fairly smooth move for me, but one feature of Windows XP I missed dearly was Send To Clipboard As Name (from the Power Toys).

I frequently have one or several files I'd like to get as fully qualified text strings to dump into a shell command, another application, or just a text file when keeping notes.

Well, I found it, Vista supports Copy as Path on a file explorer context menue if you hold SHIFT when opening the context menu.

The image shows the context menu with the SHIFT exposed items:

• Pin to Start Menu
• Add to Quick Launch
• Copy as Path

msinfo32 - big brother of dxdiag

Developers likely already know about dxdiag, a good tool to get information related to graphics. However, did you know about msinfo32?

Msinfo32 and it's predecessors (msd, winmsd) have shipped with DOS and Windows for quite some time. These tools are a great one-stop-shop to get information about a machine: device memory mappings, drivers, environment variables, startup programs, history of program crashes, etc...

Msinfo32 is easy to launch and save a computer's data to a single binary or export to a text file, which you can examine on other computers. Handy to know about when you're debugging across several machines.