The Cansin

Meh, I've seen better

It’s been a while since I last posted a tutorial on anything so I hacked together this little sample on Reflective Shadow Mapping with Virtual Point Lights.

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Right here, chillin’.

Just today I got a good look at the projects I would be allowed to choose for my final year design subject, with lo and behold something to do with the Kinect! Even though I never really paid much attention to the device I would definitely be down for some Kinect programming(though that picture a few posts down might suggest otherwise), mesh creation based on input image data though? Seems fairly boring/a lil bit impossible. We’ll see how that goes if I do choose it, my other main preference being animal herd behavior simulation, basically just more advanced boids, interesting but not challenging enough…

Got back recently, though still on Ankara time, there’s some good stuff coming soon enough hopefully, everything has been unexpectedly busy this year hence the slowness of the responses and tutorials.

As far as what I’ve been playing recently, NOTHING! I heard FEAR3/F3AR came out, but I became disinterested in that franchise after FEAR2, it seemed like they went from trying to make something on a AAA scale to a kind of budget scale because the first game in the franchise felt very polished and fresh whereas the FEAR2 really felt cheap and this latest one feels the most generic and bland of all in the short amount of time I played it.

In other news, I had accidentally changed the matrix multiplication order in just one of the sums out of some 60,000 lines of code in one of my projects which lead to a days worth of debugging before I found the tiny problem with such dramatic consequences(I think the entire project ended up broken because of it), I have no idea why I did something so stupid in the first place but it just goes to further remind you, matrix multiplication really isn’t something you should get cute with

I believe that horrible Octupus/Slime-Monster thing accurately represents what I think about Microsofts Press Conference. I love Microsoft but damn it was horrible to watch! Also is it just me or does Don Mattrick remind you of Tom Cruise? There’s just something about that look on his face…

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Crysis 2 sucks.

Yeah that’s pretty much the extent of the post. For real though, it’s really strikingly bad is my impressions from the first two hours. It’s like Crysis 1 was a novel and Crysis 2 is just a fucking marketing catchphrase scribbled onto a napkin.

I can think of no way in which it’s better than it’s predecessor. I mean dx9 only? No more open world? Fucking annoying tutorial section? Also there is SO much fucking bloom too! What the hell is with that? AND What the fuck is with the FOV?? Someone needs to teach these people about perspective projection matrices methinks =P

I don’t really care about the graphical side of things from a gamer perspective, from a programmer perspective I was looking forward to seeing the diffuse propagation volumes and all that but from a gamer perspective I was just looking forward to more open world Crysis fun; of which there was none to be found.

It just feels less polished too and really consolized. Even the little things like the picking up of ammo or the way that now everything feels much more static, the first game had this feel to it where everything felt really dynamic whereas this kinda puts that UE3 feel where the universe is just rigid to a ridiculous point.

Maybe I’m just sleep deprived but I really really dislike Crysis 2, hopefully it gets better later in the game, right now it feels like Halo without having the depth to the mechanics and has the story of COD without the excitement or shock that COD4/MW2 provided, it just really feels lacking in all departments as though they try to hard to please everyone and end up without really provoking any strong emotions either way. Cause I dislike it but I don’t hate it the way I hate shit games, I hate that they squandered what could have been much better. If you were to ask me what score I would give it, I would prolly say 6/10 but then I have to really look into it further…

The standard form in C++ is to have the class declared and all that in a .h file and then have its functions fleshed out in .cpp’s, I personally prefer the C# way of doing things ie. A complete class in one file. It just makes it easier to read the code and even write cause you can easily see inside the class, whereas with the other style you would have to switch to the .h while writing. Hence why I never bother with that standard. There are definitely downsides to my way but I don’t care, it reads better and I have yet to encounter any problems.

What have I been playing recently? Crysis 2 demo on pc, it’s too bad it’s mp and D3D9 only, it doesn’t look bad but it doesn’t look too amazing either. Though tech wise it looks solid, I didn’t think artists who are used to making jungles and swamps would be too good at making urban shit but it looks surprisingly good, still not really anything eye popping though, mp isn’t really built to look good anyway so I’ll reserve judgement for sp.

Is it just me or has news on the whole game programming scene been slow? I used to think that tutorial writing was easy, quickly learned why people are so slow uploading tutes, it’s so incredibly BORING to do. I can see why the news is getting slow considering almost everything has been covered in XNA around the net, I mean it’s just D3D9 and SM3 at best so 6+ years of work by this point there’s not much left in it therefore it makes sense the news is kinda dying down.

Speaking of which, what is Microsofts plan with D3D? If they are planning to update it every year or so, I think I would lose interest, I just upgraded my main pc again and it is *such* a chore, it really made me remember why I switched to consoles. I really can’t be fucked with constant upgrading, hence why I’m not an Apple consumer. I think they should let D3D11 get established like D3D9, considering it’s feature set and api, it’s almost the perfect successor, once they get DirectWrite and Direct2D to work with it, then it’ll be perfect.

OH! And I upgraded my PC. Changed out the NVidia 9800GTX(which was fucken awesome for the 2+ years I had it) for my new ATI 6970. The thing is a fucken beast! Also finally took my main PC off XP and put in Win7, previously I could only program D3D11 on my laptop(mostly emulating the features), now I can really test it’s features.

Finally, on the topic of the post title, I really think FF is dead or at least nigh on death. What happens then? A repeat of history maybe? Square says “This really is the last FF so we gonna make it amazing” it turns out to be amazing then they reboot it like that? That would be fucking hilarious.

Yes, yes I’m back again…

Well my hand is pretty much healed so I decided to cart my ass back to work here.

Okay last time I left you it was on Text Rendering in D3D11? What a boring tutorial, I may actually end up doing something completely different but that’s what I’ll stick with for now.

As for the GUI thing I was working on, I must have iterated on it a million times at this point, if you think you’re a good programmer and you wanna test yourself, program a good GUI system, it’ll REALLY test your skills. I’ve almost finished it and when I have, I’ll convert it to a 3rd party style library for all to use, don’t hold your breath  though cause it ain’t gonna be anytime soon =P

I see you

Where is this strange elusive bastard? Why has he been gone a while?

…

I fractured my right hand! I’m typing this on my left hand at the moment and it’s extremely annoying, will be nigh on dead for a week or so at the least. Can’t program for even longer as my right hand is the one responsible for all the semi-colons and my pinky in particular got the worst of the injuries.

Oh that also means whatever tutorials I had planned is postponed as well. What! My right hand is killing me mang! It’s no fake neither, check it:

My hand really fucking hurts.

That’s enough of the pictures damnit, imagine that on the side of a milk carton though O_o The milk industry would go bankrupt!

I been looking into SVG or generally Vector Graphics, for the past day or so, from what I have seen there is almost no D3D/XNA implementations of it, I found one implementation of it in OpenGL and I know there is OpenVG from Khronos but still almost nothing on the topic!

Upon further inspection of the theory, I can see why that is. There’s only a few articles out there on it, one of them in GPU Gems 3 which you can read online for free over at NVidia’s dev site, but that whole article presents it in a way that just seems far too complicated to implement.

I also noticed that Opera uses some library “Vega” or something, but from what I can see that’s not for any kind of public use. I bet someone could make a fuckton of money if they made a Vector Graphics library for D3D, the closest equivalent is probably WPF which I’m looking into but it doesn’t seem to work with D3D very nicely so we’ll see…

I have seen that Valve paper on approximating Vector Graphics through clever filtering, it looks fairly good but it seems to have some drawbacks, any of you ever had experience in Vector Graphics?