Halo 2 for Vista Delayed!!!

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 gamestop last night and H2 Vista is on scheduled for June 1st.

Lambert's Law

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 the direction the point is facing (the vertex normal). A dot product can be calculated between the 2 vectors (light vector and surface normal) to calculate the cosine of the angle between the two. We can then scale the light intensity by this value. Of course our material of our surface (reflective properties) will determine what the final result will be.

Halo 3 Beta has arrived!!

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/Profile.aspx?player=Windozer

Chatting about Game Cinematics with THQ's Coray Seifert

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, and discussing likes/dislikes and reasons. my thoughts below

H3 Intro Trailer - great trailer, showing scale of game, sounds builds (kinda slow but worth the payoff), in game technical innovations shown (real-time reflections on Master Chiefs visor and sky)

Gears of War In-Game Cinema - great in game cinema, actual cut from the game, "cnn-style" camera view shown, again technical innovations showcased well, audio a bit weak at parts (drowned out)

Gears of War TV Trailer - personally thought this was the least exciting, slow music ("Tears for Fears"Mad World), uses in game engine (real-time rendered), technically very good

Halo Wars Trailer - outsourced to production house so no in game engine used, great for users of Halo to see the spartans and elites in a more "real-life" scenario, audio weak at end


Overall good to hear Coray's comments as well as he was able to point out things like how to keep the viewer's interest, how to transfer from in-game cinematics to real game play, and the use of audio to pull off the theme and excitement.

Color macro in DirectX

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:

#define D3DCOLOR_COLORVALUE(r, g, b, a)
D3DCOLOR_RGBA((DWORD)((r)*255.f), (DWORD)((g)*255.f), (DWORD)((b)*255.f), (DWORD)((a)*255.f))

DirectX Fixed Function Lighting - Part 1

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.

1. Emissive - The object "emits" its own light (ie. neon sign)
2. 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 subsequently be reflected by other objects, until eventually all objects are lit.
3. Direct Lighting - This is further broken into two subcategories (positional and directional). Positional is where the light is coming from one defined point in space. Directional is where the light comes from a source that is infinately far away (ie. sun).

We can set emissive at the object level, on frame advance, and we can also set the ambient level at the device level. So we are really focusing on direct lighting. With direct lighting two other illumination types are introduced, diffuse light and specular light.

1. Diffuse Light - the full intensity of the light, scaled by the cosine of the angle between the normals of the light source and the object face. Lambert's Law dictates this.
2. Specular Light - used to highlight an object to give the illusion of shiny and smooth surface.

This leads to the basic lighting equation used by DirectX.

I = A + D + S + E

A = Ambient Light
D = Diffuse Light
S = Specular Light
E = Emissive Light

Great article on importance of not building garbage!

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.