tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36346384952720567102012-02-19T03:35:45.948-05:00Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.comBlogger601100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-37173587249939223202010-05-13T00:04:00.001-04:002010-05-13T00:04:45.064-04:00

Recently, I have been reviewing some of the content from MIX10, specifically pertaining to the talks on the new Windows Phone.  I came upon the talk from Seema Ramchandani (http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL60).  This was full of good tips on performance tools and tuning for Silverlight on the phone.  I wanted to share the items that stood out to me. First, the idea of having a UI thread

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-90685570060374019072010-01-21T23:52:00.001-05:002010-01-21T23:53:09.846-05:00

Had a friend mention the Global Game Jam to me today.  I was still able to register for the New York City location.  The event takes place between January 29th and 31st.  The NYC location currently has 66 jammers registered.  I will post updates as this takes place. Global Game Jam Site

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-22545522710062211782009-05-09T14:36:00.001-04:002009-05-09T14:36:47.439-04:00

Recently, my otherwise perfect XPS laptop experienced a GPU failure.  It was time for me to upgrade my laptop anyway, so I went ahead a got a 1730 to replace this 1710.  I then contacted a Dell reseller in CA for a replacement GPU (these things are $680 from Dell) and was able to secure a new one for $400.  This is Nvidia 7950 GTX, the largest GPU available for the XPS M1710.  I received the new

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-43471444664902712622009-03-26T23:49:00.001-04:002009-03-26T23:49:13.397-04:00

C++ Destructor Definition One Special Deterministic –> called at well defined times Automatic –> object out of scope or delete Symmetric –> constructor fits Member –> part of a class Function With A special name (~) No parameters No return type Designed to Give last rites Before object death C#

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-11769321880916532922009-03-26T23:42:00.001-04:002009-03-26T23:42:50.184-04:00

How we made Killzone 2 run @ 30FPS Deferred shading Diet for render targets Dirty lighting tricks Rendering, memory and SPUs Deferred shading not forward rendering Geometry pass – fill the GBuffer (all material info for lighting) loading depth map, normal / bump map, albedo (diffuse color and texture), shininess (reflective materials) Lighting pass – accumulate

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-69375918351399138882009-03-26T03:03:00.001-04:002009-03-26T03:03:22.918-04:00

High fidelity characters seem a bit out of reach of real-time apps (games). 10 to 30K chars not out of reach for 360/PS3 Striving for Cinematic Quality Characters think in terms of triangles currently   Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces Industry standard subdivision surface scheme Modern implementations don’t require too smooth   Direct3D11 Realtime rendering of Catmull-Clark

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-6297634551800021612009-03-26T03:02:00.001-04:002009-03-26T03:02:58.230-04:00

VMX on the 360 for optimization of vector math Slower than C counterpart, and out of order (so broken) Missing out of order logic no instruction reordering no store forward hardware smaller caches, slower memory no l3 cache   LHS L2 Miss Expensive, non pipelined instructions Branch mispredict penalty Load Hit Store Store to memory location, then load,

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-13090295614510495292009-03-26T03:01:00.001-04:002009-03-26T03:01:42.151-04:00

Things they did on the SPU’s (post mordum) What worked and didn’t work Practical advice Food for thought 3 Years ~120 team size with 27 programmers Cinematic Dense Realistic Intense   6 x 3.2 Ghz processor Local mem per SPU Very fast DMA   Core Requirements Animation AI Skinning Physics Compression/

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-56668127380711973322009-03-26T03:00:00.001-04:002009-03-26T03:00:04.217-04:00

Current Hardware 360 – 6 hardware threads PS3 – 9 hardware threads Windows – Quad cores not uncommon Point being multi-core is here to stay Multithreading is mandatory if you want to harness the available power.  If not you are really wasting the advanced features of the hardware. Multithreaded programming is easy if you don’t share data.  :)  Of course this is not usually an

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-11708278563173330522009-03-26T02:35:00.001-04:002009-03-26T02:35:37.375-04:00

The day starts out with a packed room, all waiting to hear the keynote to be delivered by Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo.  With the unquestionable success of the Nintendo products worldwide this talk is to pull back the curtain a bit on some the ideas and methods that have lead to this success. Iwata started off by presenting the obligatory numbers slides showing how much success both the

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-61966418796389302902009-01-08T16:45:00.002-05:002009-01-08T16:49:56.221-05:00

using System;namespace Indexer{class Program{static void Main(string[] args){TestObject obj1 = new TestObject();TestObject obj2 = new TestObject();obj1.AddData(new[] { "this", "is", "test", "one", "!?" });obj2.AddData(new[] { "this", "is", "another", "test", "!" });// output to check objectOutputObject(obj1, "OBJ1");OutputObject(obj2, "OBJ2");obj1[1] = "was";obj2[1] = "used to be";// output to

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-45203776063849212842009-01-06T03:45:00.003-05:002009-01-06T03:53:45.720-05:00

I have heard the discussion of memory alignment, or rather the question about is it really necessary. I can say from a standpoint of any system where you would like to carefully manage memory (for speed or scalability), yes, it matters.Memory bandwidth can quickly become the bottleneck to a system. If we take, for instance, this case. We have a processor that has a memory width of 32 bits. If

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-81848932874909529032008-11-16T12:28:00.003-05:002008-11-16T12:33:21.283-05:00

Just another update on the upcoming NXE for Xbox live. This pertains to the ability to rip the games to the HDD, in hopes of faster load times/better in game performance. I have said before that I reserve judgement on whether this is a good thing or not, and I think further revisions may help sway me this way. My argument is, when I have time and want to play some games, I don't want to wait

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-61383374058669164302008-11-01T12:25:00.003-04:002008-11-01T12:46:19.582-04:00

The upcoming NXE (xbox live dashboard update) will bring with it a feature to rip the game to your hard drive and run off that. This is has been a topic of discussion with a few of my friends because there are some conflicting views. The PS3 camp is saying its great, but they are forced to "install" their games. While this makes the game run faster (eliminates some loading issues that have to

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-11166938411787581862008-08-15T02:49:00.001-04:002008-08-15T02:49:02.108-04:00

Global Illumination The discussion about global illumination was headed by Hao Chen, lead graphics software architect at Bungie. The idea of using global illumination in real-time applications has become a very important concept in new games.  If the surface does not emit any light (emissive) the formula used to calculate global illumination is listed. This formula assumes a BRDF (f) has

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-68759757466931339082008-06-17T21:21:00.001-04:002008-06-17T21:21:35.823-04:00

Just dropping a line on a book that I am reading.  It is focused on advanced .net debugging techniques and tools.

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-75846700451391704552008-05-23T23:50:00.001-04:002008-05-23T23:50:56.677-04:00

I have recently been spending some time learning LUA language.  I am looking into this mainly as this is a standard language used by game developers for in game scripting.  I picked up this book to aid in my studies.  More to follow on this.

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-73425229046125781032008-04-23T00:30:00.001-04:002008-04-23T00:30:06.505-04:00

In working on a recent project, involving some callback data in a animation with DirectX and interesting solution to a common problem was presented.  In order to describe the solution correctly, I must setup the scenario. We have an animation that is loaded from say an X file with the DirectX API.  When using the convenient function to load the X file (D3DXLoadMeshHierarchyFromX) the obvious

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-11273447052600179592008-02-28T01:19:00.001-05:002008-02-28T01:19:33.180-05:00

This presentation was given by Damian Isla from Bungie Studios.  It presents the basic architecture and tools used to build the AI system in Halo 3.  This lecture specifically detailed the encounter logic. Encounters are the "dance".  Basically how the system reacts and collapses in interesting ways.  The "dance" is the illusion of strategic intelligence.  Designers choreograph the "dance" to be

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-81547384244482739992008-02-21T22:45:00.004-05:002008-02-22T01:59:28.204-05:00

This lecture was given by Luis Villegas and Sean Shypula. This was primarily about the server farm and distributed computed system created by Bungie for automated builds of code and content.Advantages:Faster iterations -> more polished gamesKeeps complexity under controlBinary Builds (game and tools)Automated tests are run on tool builds onlyLightmap RenderingPre-Compute Lighting in scenes (

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-10016755807858398492008-02-21T22:44:00.007-05:002008-02-22T01:41:09.521-05:00

This lecture was given by Dave Aronson from Nvidia and Karen Stevens from Microsoft (graphics tools division).Main toolsetsWindows - PIXNvidia - FXToolsUse GPU & driver counters for basic performance related issues.Shader Perf 2.0Test opt opportunityIntegrated to FX ComposerRegression analysisIts in Beta 2.0!SDK AvailableFX Composer for authoring and debugging shaders.Use PIX for:Game Assets (

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-43922499542754399492008-02-21T22:44:00.003-05:002008-02-22T01:30:14.978-05:00

Lecture given by Jeffrey Kiel from Nvidia with an instructor from Full Sail giving a demo.Optimization TechniquesSystem -> CPU to GPU and multithreadingApplication -> game codeMicrocode -> lowest level (tied very closely to hardware)Optimizations should start at the higher level and work way down. Microcode optimizations can be benefital but will only work with certain configurations (good for

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-87680987750320049362008-02-21T22:40:00.001-05:002008-02-22T01:14:16.036-05:00

Lecture was given by Mike Zak from Bungie.Typically there are artists, who manage geometry, and designers, who manage gameplay. Bungie has titled an architect as the "glue" between these two. This is the role Mike fills at Bungie (as well as a finishing artist).Pre-production modelBroad Timeline of level and gameNapkin sketchConcept ArtWhiteboardAspect 1 : The HookPromenant features in the

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-20656562711246222772008-02-21T01:14:00.004-05:002008-02-21T01:30:41.102-05:00

This lecture was given by pretty much the core audio team at Bungie (Marty O'Donnell, Jay Weinland, C Paul Johnson, and Mike Salvatori.First off let me just say that in my opinion, Marty O'Donnell is one of the best composer/audio directors I have ever seen. He, and his team are very passionate about audio. It really inspires others to push as hard as they do for audio perfection.Jay Weinland

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-71233697351386419712008-02-21T01:03:00.002-05:002008-02-21T01:13:27.353-05:00

Chris Butcher from Bungie gave this presentation. This was talking about how matchmaking works in H2/H3 and differences (goods and bads) of both.This was a pretty technical talk about the internals of the matchmaking process. Chris started by talking about why this is needed. The idea of user being matched in games that will be fun (not too easy or hard) with some way to hold the user and keep

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-3849845261739973202008-02-21T00:54:00.002-05:002008-02-21T01:03:43.066-05:00

This was hosted by Anibal Sousa, a Microsoft XNA manager (and Lead). He is responsible for testing XBox Live and components contained therein. I am trying to get an electronic copy of the presentation he showed. Anibal has a very good type of analysis used to determine if a person fits as a good software tester. The attachment I will post will show this better. I will post an update when I

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-75111571649652574562008-02-21T00:29:00.003-05:002008-02-21T00:52:16.794-05:00

John Walker hosted this session.Topics:Using reflection to help build GUI for tools3rd Party tools / components used to build toolsC# and managed code for tool buildingReflection with C++ and C is a bit harder to pull off (use header files) than something like C# or Java. This limits this approach for dynamic generation of gui based tools and plugins for IDEs.Some of the studios still using C++

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-70838083382812568352008-02-21T00:28:00.001-05:002008-02-21T00:29:19.963-05:00

The speaker was a no show, so nothing here. :(

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-72104129439265146422008-02-20T14:34:00.003-05:002008-02-20T21:42:33.682-05:00

Current Next Gen Games are IO bound.DVD drive supports about 12MB/s transfer rateThe key item impressed by Matt was to minimize seeks. When using hdd, the problem is much less pronounced, but with systems that might not have hdd, the system must work with at least just DVD drive.Break the levels down to required and optional resources.Required resources -> blocking to load/synchronousOptional

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-1146354813458660032008-02-18T16:06:00.001-05:002008-02-18T16:06:57.961-05:00

I have attached a map of the locales I will be at so far. http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=37.79639~-122.415891&style=r&lvl=15&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=13246441&cid=3FAC30C6B49E9A66!637&encType=1

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-71118273543808999052008-02-12T00:47:00.001-05:002008-02-12T00:51:30.247-05:00

February 18-22San FranciscoMoscone Center Wed9:00 AM PSTNew Dog, Old Tricks: Running Halo 3 Without a Hard Drive Wed10:30 AM PSTTechnical Consulting Engineer, Intel C++ Compilers Sponsored by IntelWed12:00 PM PSTTechnical Issues in Tools Development (Day 1)Wed 1:00 PM PSTThe Profile of a Great Software TesterWed2:30 PM PSTE Pluribus Unum: Matchmaking in HALO 3Wed4:00 PM PSTAudio Post-Mortem: HALO

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-84680067387909030712008-01-03T02:15:00.001-05:002008-01-03T02:15:12.736-05:00

There are a bevy of new functionality added with SP1 for .NET Framework 2.0, but one of particular interest to me was the changed to the garbage collector.  There are 2 major changes that I will discuss. GC Collection Modes There now exists a new overload to the GC.Collect method.  The new method signature is void System.GC.Collect(int generation, System.GCCollectionMode mode).  The generation

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-70694259334073463932007-12-28T00:09:00.001-05:002007-12-28T00:09:49.081-05:00

Recently I have been studying the ideas of Frame Hierarchies used in graphics programming.  Specifically, with DirectX and the X file graphics format.  Listed are some of my findings: Frame of References Frame of References are all around us.  A typical example is someone giving directions to someone else.  These are typically given "within a frame of reference".  Meaning, if directions are

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-91455060017677740722007-11-20T00:11:00.001-05:002007-11-20T00:11:25.840-05:00

The second release of XNA Game Studio has been released today.  I am in currently in process of installation of this.  I will be posting my experiences with this.  Link to download.

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-33013922161501567042007-11-14T22:03:00.001-05:002007-11-14T22:08:14.689-05:00

I have recently had the opportunity to experience the newest version of firmware and software available for the Zune.  I am the proud owner of a Halo 3: 30GB Zune.  As I have been using what is now termed the Zune 30 I have had experience with the device for about 6 months.  Device update New firmware is included with the release of the new Zune devices, so the users of the 30GB model are not

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-27640485131024341672007-11-11T19:23:00.001-05:002007-11-11T19:23:43.363-05:00

This is a post generated by using a new tool recently released by Microsoft (Windows Live Writer).  I have never used a offline blog editing software, so I am looking forward to this.  Might help me stay up on my blog posts.

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-17575542218375584332007-08-28T00:28:00.000-04:002007-08-28T00:47:23.140-04:00

Been a while since I posted, but I am knee deep in assembly at the moment, reviewing for game programming class. Binary divison was a recent topic for reducing instructions by using bit shifts. The interesting part is how to find the remainder on number other than factor of 2. NOTE: This works with divisors that are a factor of 2 (typical for mov(b/w/l) instructions).These operations are used

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-82225595668677744372007-07-15T23:38:00.000-04:002007-07-15T23:48:04.321-04:00

Bungie celebrated Bungie Day last week (07/07/2007 - 777), weird but it may well be the day when most get married (http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1630320,00.html). They released a new theme and gamerpics on that day, and that day only. Listed below are the blades.

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-72815617170269544592007-07-09T01:15:00.000-04:002007-07-09T01:24:30.119-04:00

When moving a integer, from say a smaller size field (word) to say a doubleword, you should not just movw to the new register.movw %ax, %bxThis should not be done because you can not be certain that the upper part of the EBX register is zeroed out ahead of time. To do this you should first zero out the EBX (destination) and then move your intended value there.movl $0, %ebxmovw %ax, %bxIntel

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-88875546384243137032007-07-07T21:59:00.000-04:002007-07-07T22:38:41.289-04:00

In my continuing studies of C++ I have been studing assembly language. Not from a standpoint that I will be authoring large programs written totally in assembly, but when you are down to your last options and trying to squeeze performance from a piece of code, taking a look at the assembly generated by the HLL (high level language) you can find things otherwise unseen.Studies on Assembly: (get

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-88245335958057723542007-07-04T22:54:00.000-04:002007-07-04T22:58:50.700-04:00

Check out one of the coolest benefits of becoming a XNA Creator Club member (http://creators.xna.com/subscribers/torquex.aspx). This is makes the $100 entry to creators club easier to swallow for some. Content is being added to the site daily (new tutorials and info). Hats off to the XNA Dev Team at Microsoft!

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-39826115364796245722007-06-29T21:51:00.000-04:002007-06-29T21:57:36.507-04:00

Screenshot posted from inside Bungie's realm. Apparantly this is the backend storage that will support the video/screenshot capabilities of the upcoming Halo 3. You can store as many as you like, on your local storage, but there limits, yet to be announced for public viewable ones. That's a lot of bytes though!

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-27505879100463463612007-06-21T02:04:00.000-04:002007-06-24T16:47:11.336-04:00

Compression of textures is something that DirectX can take care of for us, but it makes sense to understand how it does this.Consider the following gradient:If you were required to store this in a texture, you would end up having to store hunderds of RGB values to represent it If you instead stored say 2 colors (the ends) you perform linear interpolation to get the remaining colors and you have

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-27744575966257161762007-06-17T18:49:00.000-04:002007-06-17T18:56:04.179-04:00

Persisting objects to other medium for future use is one advantage of the serialization mechanisms built into the .NET Framework. Listed below is are 2 code sections showing serialization and deserialization to disk.SERIALIZE:FileStream fStream = new FileStream(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[1].ToString(), FileMode.Open);BinaryFormatter bin = new BinaryFormatter();htObject = bin.Deserialize(

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-25701760810084576132007-06-17T00:10:00.000-04:002007-06-17T00:36:12.616-04:00

So in .NET, there is a virtual function defined for all object types (everything) named GetHashCode(). This function can be used to generated a hash value for an object, but the main caveat is this hash will not be guaranteed unique. The implementation can be used for very small amounts of data. The hash calculation returns a 32-bit integer. This means that at most there 4,294,967,295 different

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-19702235185104052432007-06-15T00:07:00.000-04:002007-06-15T00:11:16.513-04:00

So I have finished Normal level campaign of Halo 2 Vista. This game is definately worth the buy, even for gamers who have played H2 on XBox/360. The graphics are that good! I will continue the fight for Heroic and Legendary acheivements. Btw, I will be getting back to more DirectX centric blogging now. ;)

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-18589744137611634792007-06-06T01:34:00.001-04:002007-06-06T01:37:33.964-04:00

Got back a bit ago from the Pac Man World Championships. Had a great time hanging out with the Microsoft crew and the fellow gamers. We went to the Marriott in Times Square after the gaming for a community get together. Interesting pics can be found on http://picasaweb.google.com/caleteeter/PacManWorldChampionships , these were courtesy of John Porcaro from the Gamerscore Blog.

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-68204091908267206312007-05-23T16:44:00.000-04:002007-05-31T14:12:34.037-04:00

Halo 2 for Vista supporters will need to wait just a bit longer to "continue" the fight. Apparently, there were some problems with the DVD discs (physical problems). The new release date is May 31, 2007.UPDATE: There were rumors circulating the internet that H2 Vista would be delayed till July 4th, but these are bogus per Microsoft spokesperson. May 31 is the date.UPDATE: I swung by the local

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-50010270522456653702007-05-23T02:27:00.000-04:002007-05-23T10:07:29.588-04:00

More on my continuing study of lighting effects on objects in three dimensional space. Lambert's Law states that intensity of incoming light (a ray of light) is directly proportional to the orientation of the light to the point on a surface. Basically this means that we can scale reflected light (an hence color perceived by the user) by the cosine of the angle between the incoming light ray and

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-77252712609248961082007-05-20T22:33:00.000-04:002007-05-20T22:48:38.612-04:00

Hal0 3 Beta arrived, slightly delayed, but here none the less. Anything of this size is bound to have problems with production deployment, so its understood Bungie! I have been playing since launch, May 16th and this is the best Halo yet in my opinion. Of course we only get a small taste of multiplayer (no campaign) but it looks really impressive.My stats on H3 Beta:http://www.bungie.net/Account/

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-18032737340145215342007-04-01T22:48:00.000-04:002007-04-01T23:20:50.373-04:00

I had the pleasure of attending a talk hosted by Game Institute with speaker Coray Seirfert from Kaos Studios, a THQ development house. The talk was about trailers and cinematics. It was basically a review of some top trailers and cinematics (H3, GOW, etc). Attendees were asked to view the content and comment to the group on their feel on items like the type of content, issues with the trailers,

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-9144261547834866732007-03-25T18:52:00.000-04:002007-03-25T19:06:28.881-04:00

Quick post but I ran into a macro that is defined in d3d9types.h that accepts 4 float values and returns and a single DWORD. This came up when I was working with the lighting pipeline in DirectX 9. Specifically, there is a fundamental difference in the way vertex diffuse/specular colors are stored (DWORDs) and the way DirectX materials are stored (D3DCOLORVALUEs aka. 4 floats).definition:#

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-50844736690052904632007-03-23T01:48:00.000-04:002007-03-23T09:31:37.900-04:00

So I have been studying the lighting module included with DirectX (fixed-function pipeline) and I created this as a summary of these effects.There are three main types of illumination models.Emissive - The object "emits" its own light (ie. neon sign)Ambient - A an object is lit by an outside source, based on the material properties of the object, it will reflect this light, which will

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-47743990356746245572007-03-16T22:12:00.000-04:002007-03-16T22:14:17.239-04:00

This shows the importance of being careful to not build up garbage that the GC has to collect, especially on XNA as the GC is not as efficient.

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-46376662921481820212007-03-16T00:19:00.000-04:002007-03-16T17:24:47.738-04:00

The following are the slides from GDC. I have been unable to find any audio or notes to accompany these, but I have touched based with Dave Weller via the xna forums and he did not have these available.UPDATE: The slide audio is availabe here for a fee!

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-67527589168283027262007-03-06T21:57:00.000-05:002007-03-06T23:33:43.933-05:00

Its finally here. We all got the opportunity to join the XNA creators club a while back, but now the creators club web site has been released (actually was released Monday, first day of GDC). Apparantly, the msdn forums for XNA and DirectX will be moving over here. The new forums are great, much more rich experience. Kudos to Microsoft and the XNA Team!!!UPDATE from GDC! From theZman

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-31070497966086903652007-03-05T00:11:00.000-05:002007-03-05T00:16:02.485-05:00

Another update to the disection of the stl vector continues!! This time we are looking closer at how much overhead is added for this "auto-grow" array. There is no free lunch and this proves this point. Link to vector size discussion.

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-69571478545228053472007-03-04T11:17:00.000-05:002007-03-05T00:16:47.344-05:00

I came upon this article on STL vectors and how the instantiation of new ones (of different types) can effect the output binary size. Check it out! Interesting reading.

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-40234523688647871222007-03-02T01:02:00.000-05:002007-03-02T01:09:21.553-05:00

A big issue that is getting some press has resulting from new products like XNA Game Studio and the questions are arising about how to make things like the garbage collector deterministic in managed code. If code in a critical game loop is stalled, for garbage collection, the results would seem to be very bad (stutter, dropped frames, oh my!). Luckily, the CF team that worked on the XNA Framework

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3634638495272056710.post-35895822639377404362007-02-20T13:15:00.000-05:002007-02-20T13:18:54.178-05:00

One of the best ray-triangle intersection routines, written by Tomas Akenine Moller./* Ray-Triangle Intersection Test Routines *//* Different optimizations of my and Ben Trumbore's *//* code from journals of graphics tools (JGT) *//* http://www.acm.org/jgt/ *//* by Tomas Moller, May 2000 */#include #define EPSILON 0.000001#define CROSS(dest,v1,v2) \dest[0]=v1[1]*v2[2]-v1[2]*v2[1]; \dest[1]=v1[2]*

Cale Teeterhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06873910030528245849noreply@blogger.com0