Author Archives: admin

Game engine project

2007/12/24 – 23:40

I’m looking for investors and customers for my new game engine project, Unsweetened Engine. The first customer to use this engine will have the power to redefine the FPCE genre.

Partial feature list:

  • Written in clear yet highly optimized C++ (full source included with license)
  • Runtimes available for Windows (DirectX and OpenGL), Linux, PS3, Wii
  • Per-pixel shading features that are indispensable for realistic candy rendering, including subsurface scattering and refraction
  • Easy-to-use particle system. Use it at any scale to simulate overturned display carts, context-aware vomiting, dropped change, etc.
  • Royalty-free access to over 300 licensed candy models from major manufacturers
  • Embeddable ribbon-candy editor allows for seamless user-generated content
  • Advanced physics library with unprecedented gummi physics
  • Complete implementation of the FADTSS digestive system model (developed by a nutritionist!): 37 tunable parameters allow for groundbreaking precision in real time
  • A* pathfinding, IK and natural-language parsing combine to enable a new level of performance in customer counter interactivity
  • 3D, low-latency, high-resolution sampling sound system (physical modeling available as an option)

Serious inquiries only, sucka.

Permalink | Comment (1)

Two things you didn’t care to know

2007/12/21 – 00:36

I like to breathe fog.

I like to have ribs at 1am sometimes.

Permalink | Comments (2)

Backups are good

2007/10/23 – 04:48

If you’re a go-go guy like me, you don’t want to have to spend a quarter-second between keystrokes to realize that you’ve accidentally selected five hundred files instead of just two before you hit that delete key. Backups to the rescue. That and ntfsundelete, which helps you get the handful of files that were modified since the backup yesterday. Because you deleted these files 2 minutes, literally, before the next backup VSS snapshot was to be created.

Tags , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)

Neurons abuzz

2007/10/16 – 23:19

Hmmm, it’s pretty interesting to me how my brain works sometimes.

Tonight as I was walking home from the grocery store, not particularly thinking about work, it popped into my mind: infinite loop! If a certain event happens tonight, there’ll be an infinite loop that will fill up the disk, which sucks a bunch on a remote machine because you might not be able to log in at that point to clean it up, and I’d have to have tech support clean it up and reboot it, and the pilot starts tomorrow.

Fixed that before the event happened, but only thanks to the fact that somewhere in my brain, there was a simulation running of two servlets on two machines reacting to a nightly automatic event…

Tags , , | Permalink | Comment (0)

Temporological

2007/10/15 – 08:31

Not many hits come up in search engines for the word ‘temporological’. Nothing like ‘psychophysiological’, for example.

But I did think of a reason to make such a compound today. I was thinking about how in software code*, for a given ‘location’ in the code (line number, basic block, etc.), there are a set of temporal and logical conditions that hold there. For example, “after this line in this block, the Person object has been created and all its fields are null”.

I’m kinda fascinated by that aspect of programming, but I can’t explain precisely why yet…

* I normally wouldn’t use a weird phrase like “software code”, but I didn’t want to say just “code”, and I didn’t want to say just “software”. Huh.

Tags , | Permalink | Comment (0)

The Annoying Valley

2007/09/24 – 17:47

OK, you probably know about ‘the uncanny valley’ (maybe start at the Wikipedia article if you don’t), but do you know about ‘the annoying valley’? If you’ve played a video game in the last bunch of years, I’m sure you do.

In an effort to make their AI players more human-like, a lot of game developers add little human touches, like a character saying something to you in a specific situation. But what’s a pain is that they often say the _exact_ same thing in the _exact_ same way (basically, the same sampled audio) in the same situations. Such that you hear it possibly dozens or hundreds of times in the course of normal gameplay. This is annoying, this is the annoying valley.

Some sounds in a game you expect to repeat exactly or nearly exactly, because they would in real life. But humans are so rarely that boring, so the fact that it’s supposed to be a human reaction just makes the annoyance level skyrocket. I suppose you could call that a personal problem, and I certainly understand the relative difficulty of making human speech/animation that sounds/looks good _and_ has lots of natural-seeming variability, but still…

Tags , , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)

TV firmware

2007/09/23 – 15:17

I wonder when the day will come when the firmware in more consumer-electronics devices, like TVs, will go open-source. I would love to be able to modify the firmware in my TV. For one thing, there’s a very annoying video bug that I’m 98% sure is a firmware bug, but Sharp (ooops, I didn’t mean to say the name of the company, but it’s too late to backspace now) refuses to acknowledge that it’s a bug or fix it. I bet if I had a source tree/build tools/loader I could fix it in about a day, regardless of the fact that I don’t know anything about TV firmware.

But the real reason is this: some PS3 games do 720p and some do 1080p. When the mode switches, my TV has an indicator that comes on briefly that says “Video: 720p” or “Video: 1080p”. I want to change the former indicator to “Video: 720p (teh suck)” und express the anger than I am feeling about games that don’t do 1080p.

Tags , , , , , | Permalink | Comments (2)

Muffled

2007/09/12 – 12:14

Hmmm, interesting psycho-physiological phenomenon… If I have a song running in my head, and it has lyrics, I hear it being sung in the voice of the original singer (Jim Morrison singing “Maggie M’Gill” is the particular example today). If I then take a drink of water or something, the voice is muffled a little. I wouldn’t predict that if I hadn’t experienced it…

Tags , | Permalink | Comment (1)

Nature software

2007/08/19 – 05:16

Hmmm, looking at the credits on an episode of planet earth, I don’t see any credits for software/IT support staff. I’m sure there _is_ some, but the fact that it’s uncredited probably indicates that there isn’t as much computing going on in the production of such a series as there ought to be. I can think of lots of ways that software and computing infrastructure could support efficient production, insightful exploration of A/V materials and data, exceptional editing, etc., and I’m sure that current off-the-shelf software can’t be doing everything that can be done there.

So, if anyone reading this is a nature documentary producer, I’ve got two requests of you: produce lots and lots more content on the level of quality of planet earth (even a level or two lower quality would still be great), and talk to me about how to make more and better stuff through software magic.

Tags , , , , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)

Domain name speculation goldmine

2007/08/12 – 01:03

Hmmm, I wonder if The Simpsons is a goldmine for domain-name speculators. In a 1999 episode, Homer is picking through the Sunday newspaper looking for something he cares about, and reading the names of the sections aloud:
“Now to trim away the fat: Outlook [tosses in trash], Vista [tosses in trash], Spotlight [tosses in trash], Mosaic [tosses in trash]”

Though I’m sure the writers only intended it to be (partly prescient) commentary on bloated software, a smart speculator could have looked at that list and predicted the name of two future popular packages and grabbed up all the good domains, ya know, *.com, *-help.com, *-for-dummies.com, *-sucks.com, a-*-ate-my-baby.com, *-forums.com, viagra-and-*-for-fathers-day.com, learn-*.com, learn-*-underwater.com, that kind of stuff…

Tags , , , | Permalink | Comment (0)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »