I booted into Vista yesterday to test something. It offered a bunch of updates to install. After they were installed, I got this:

I am not sure what shutdown buttons do when they look like this. I guess they are invincible, or something. Ha, I’m your log off button! You can’t kill me!

Yes, one of the updates installed was the ATI driver update, so I guess there’s some glitch somewhere in the driver update that makes some buttons be displayed like this… But hey, this is not some random driver that I found on the net, it’s the one that is officially suggested by Vista’s update!

Jeff Atwood notes the lack of polish in Windows Vista UI. Long Zheng has started Windows UI Taskforce. I agree - Vista’s UI has tons of polish problems.

You know, little things that would seem unimportant, but screams something like “I was made in a hurry by people who don’t really love me”. Aliased shield icon overlays? Check. Horrible screen flickering when logging in or UAC prompt pops up? Check. The infamous Shut Down menu? Check. Awful file copy progress dialogs? Check. Explorer window title bar sometimes displaying green progress bar inside of it for some reason I can never understand? Check. General lack of unified style for UI? Check. The list goes on.

But still, I wonder whether lack of polish is the real problem with Vista. From my point of view, lack of direction or lack of vision seems to be a problem of similar size, if not larger. What is the vision for Vista?

“Security!” is not a vision. However hard it is to make something secure, “more security” is an improvement in one area, and not a vision on what a product should be. And second, “security” does not explain everything else about Vista. At start, it looked like some architecture astronauts had some fancy visions, like “all your filesystem is a database now!”… Well, that did not end up in Vista, and it is something that users genuinely don’t care about.

I might sound like an Apple fanboy (and indeed, OS X grows on you after a while), but when upgrading from OS X 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.5 (Leopard) I had a pretty clear list of what will be more useful to me:

• New version feels faster (on the same machine). I am not sure if it is actually faster; or it’s only a perceived improvement. Maybe they optimized something, maybe they multithreaded something, I don’t really care. It feels faster and smoother. That’s good.
• Quick Look is amazing. A seemingly simple feature - press Space over a file to preview it. With added polish, like when pressing space over multiple images selected, you can go into slideshow mode. Simple, yet highly effective.
• Spotlight (desktop search) that is fast.
• …and so on.

Those are things I, as a user, care about. I want computer to feel faster. I want to instantly preview files. I want to search for something fast.

A filesystem that is a database? I can almost see the regular user salivating over that… Yeah right. Users don’t want a platform, users want useful features.

And this is where Vista fails - it does not have obvious new useful features or improvements. Aside from Direct3D 10 - which I am not using yet - all so called “improvements” just feel like gimmicks.

• It feels slower (I don’t care whether it actually is faster but just feels sluggish). And yes, it feels slower on a quad-core CPU with 4 gigs of RAM and a fast graphics card, so no “Vista runs circles around XP on a new box” please.
• The reorganized menus, title bars and layout of Explorer just scream “I totally don’t understand what users need” at you. Previews are too small to be useable, organization of menus and buttons is horrible, and the constantly fading-in-and-fading-out user interface elements (folders tree view) are just distracting. I dig the new Office 2007 UI and I can see some understanding of users and vision behind it (see Jensen Harris), but Vista’s UI feels like it was designed by a bunch of people who never talked to each other. And it’s not just lack of polish, the “design” of it is wrong.
• The Sidebar? Again, an attempt at doing something that seemed good, but without any understanding. Yes, I know that Apple might have taken the idea and implemented it right, but that does not leave Sidebar as being useful.
• The new skin? Oh come on. How many users did upgrade because window close buttons now glow in red when you hover over them?
• Was there anything else new in Vista? I didn’t notice anything.

So this pretty much sums up my view on Vista. Zero new useful things, many annoyances. Microsoft, here’s you chance to execute it better next time around.

When introductory documentation for something has this, you know it won’t be pretty:

CAsyncMonikerFile is derived from CMonikerFile, which in turn is derived from COleStreamFile. A COleStreamFile object represents a stream of data; a CMonikerFile object uses an IMoniker to obtain the data, and a CAsyncMonikerFile object does so asynchronously.

So yeah, I am dealing with downloading something from the internet inside an ActiveX control that is written in MFC. A seemingly simple task - I give you an URL, you give me back the bytes. But no! That would not be a proper architecture, so instead it has asynchronous monikers which are based on monikers which are based on stream files which use some interfaces and whatnot. And for ActiveX controls the docs suggest using CDataPathProperty or CCachedDataPathProperty, which are abstractions build on top of the above crap. And I don’t even know what “a moniker” is!

Of course all this complexity fails spectacularly in some quite common situations. For example, try downloading something when the web server serves gzip compressed html output. Good luck trying to figure out why everything seemingly works, you are notified of downloading progress, but never get the actual downloaded bytes.

Turns out the solution is to change downloading behaviour of the above pile of abstractions to use “pull data” model, instead of default “push data” model. The default behaviour just seems to be broken (though it is not broken in that pile of abstractions, instead it is broken somewhere deeper in Windows code). Is this mentioned anywhere in the docs? Of course not!

This is pretty much how a code comment looks like for this:

We don’t use CCachedDataPathProperty because it’s awfully slow, doing data reallocations for each 1KB received. For 8MB file it’s 8000 reallocations and 32 GB (!) of data copied for no good reason!

While we’re at it, we don’t use CDataPathProperty either, because it’s a useless wrapper over CAsyncMonikerFile.

Oh, and we don’t use CAsyncMonikerFile either, because it has bugs in VS2003′ MFC where it never notifies the container that it is done with download, making IE still display “X items remaining” indefinitely. Some smart coder was converting information message and returning “out of memory” error if result was NULL, even if input message was NULL (which it often was). So we use our own “fixed” version of CAsyncMonikerFile instead.

Oh MFC, how we love thee.

I just changed my job title to say “Code Chef“. I like it, and it represents my current understanding of programming pretty well. I cook code. That’s my job.

Some N years ago I would have liked a title with “Architect” or “Analyst” or something like that. I would have called myself “developer” instead of “programmer” because hey, a developer thinks up things, whereas a programmer is a mere “code monkey”. More on code monkeys below.

But wait! Back then I also believed that knowing and using Design Patterns is essential for a programmer! In one place when I was interviewing new hires, design pattern knowledge was something I would look for… how stupid! Nowadays my view of patterns is more along the lines of “yeah, whatever”. I don’t exactly think of them as things from hell, but they could have caused more harm than good already.

Back to job titles. Code monkey is actually the key employee. A software product is largely defined by the code, heck, it is code. Sure, it also has the user interface, the fancy icons, the documentation, the website, the support, the roadmap and whatnot, but the code is the product, whereas everything else is more or less addons (possibly excluding UI… UI also defines the product).

Code design? Design patterns? Who cares about that.

It’s the final result that matters. Futurist programming for the win.

On the other hand, Memento Observer is probably very cool.

So I decided to check out Crysis myself. A demo for a non-gamer like me would be perfect, I thought.

It’s probably three frames per second. In the menu!

I did not see the game itself yet, got bored while waiting for the after-menu-but-before-game intro movie to end (it’s not skippable, and it also ran at about three FPS). This is after watching half a dozen obligatory before-menu intro movies at 3 FPS with stuttering sound (”nvidia,vidia,vidia,vidia… the way it’s meant,meant,meant,meant…” - TWIMTBP).

All of this on a half-decent PC, I think - Intel Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM, Radeon 3850, Windows XP, latest drivers, none of extra stuff running; the PC is able to run other 3D stuff just fine. I’m sure the developers and EA’s testing labs have tested everything extensively, but sometimes something completely random apparently can make things be oh so slow. Oh well. Get back to work.

(cross-posted from blogs.unity3d.com)

One of our customers found an interesting bug the other day: embedding Unity Web Player into a web page makes some javascript animation libraries not work correctly. For example, script.aculo.us or Dojo Toolkit would stop doing some of their tasks. But only on Windows, and only on some browsers (Firefox and Safari).

Wait a moment… Unity plugin makes nice wobbling web page elements not wobble anymore!? Sounds like an interesting issue…

So I prepared for a debug session and tried the usual “divide by two until you locate the problem” approach.

• Unity Web Player is composed of two parts: a small browser plugin, and the actual “engine” (let’s call it “runtime”). First I change the plugin so that it only loads the data, but never loads or starts the runtime. Everything works. So the problem is not in the plugin. Good.
• Load the runtime and do basic initialization (create child window, load Mono, …), but never actually start playing the content - everything works.
• Load the runtime and fully initialize everything, but never actually start playing the content - the bug appears! By now I know that the problem is somewhere in the initialization.

Initialization reads some settings from the data file, creates some “manager objects” for the runtime, initializes graphics device, loads first game “level” and then the game can play.

What of the above could cause something inside browser’s JavaScript engine stop working? And do that only on Windows, and only on some browsers? My first guess was the most platform-specific part: intialization of the graphics device, which on Windows usually happens to be Direct3D.

So I continued:

• Try using OpenGL instead of Direct3D - everything works. By now it’s confirmed that initializing Direct3D causes something else in the browser not work.
• “A-ha!” moment: tell Direct3D to not change floating point precision (via a create flag). Voilà, everything works!

I don’t know how I actually came up with the idea of testing floating point precision flag. Maybe I remembered some related problems we had a while ago, where Direct3D would cause timing calculations be “off”, if the user’s machine was not rebooted for a couple of weeks or more. That time around we properly changed our timing code to use 64 bit integers, but left Direct3D precision setting intact.

Side note: Intel x86 floating point unit (FPU) can operate in various precision modes, usually 32, 64 or 80 bit. By default Direct3D 9 sets FPU precision to 32 bit (i.e. single precision). Telling D3D to not change FPU settings could lower performance somewhat, but in my tests it did not have any noticeable impact.

So there it was. A debugging session, one line of change in the code, and fancy javascript webpage animations work on Windows in Firefox and Safari. This is coming out in Unity 2.0.2 update soon.

The moral? Something in one place can affect seemingly completely unrelated things in another place!

Most of the time, yes, you can just set the needed states! You can set alpha blending on and turn light #0 off, and often nothing bad will happen. Blending will be on, and light #0 will be off. Fine.

Until you hit a graphics card (quite new - from 2006, it can even do pixel shader 2.0) that completely hangs up the machine in one of your unit tests. In fact, in the first unit test, that does almost nothing. Debugging that thing is total awesomeness - try something out, and the machine either hangs up or it does not. Reboot, repeat.

After something like 30 hang-ups I found the cause: you are damned if you set GL_SEPARATE_SPECULAR_COLOR and GL_COLOR_SUM to different values (i.e. use separate specular but don’t turn on color sum). Because, you know, some code was there that did not see a point in changing light mode color control when no lighting was on. So yeah, always set those two in sync. Just to please this card’s drivers.

It’s hard for me to have any faith in driver developers. I know that their job is hard, walking the fine line between correctness and getting decent benchmark scores… But still - hanging up the machine when two OpenGL 1.2 states are set to different values? Would you trust those people to write full fledged compilers?

Aaargh! Well, the blog title is about as much as I wanted to say on this topic.

…this is just me venting out, during the process of chasing a video memory leak for 4 days already. It involves p-buffers, depth textures, shared OpenGL contexts and other delicious things. Still didn’t find the cause, but I’m getting close.

Pbuffer my a**.

I’m always puzzled why people think that some interesting effect is “shaders”. The most recent example I saw is this message on Dir3d mailing list - it’s about NVIDIA’s skin rendering demo (*).

The most interesting effects are in fact not achieved by the use of shaders - rather it’s the complex interplay of render-to-textures, postprocessing them, using them somewhere else, postprocessing that, using them somewhere else again, combine the intermediate results in various interesting ways, and finally get something that represents the colors on the screen.

So the effect is much more than the shaders; it’s more like “an orchestration of different stuff”. It’s the shaders, textures, models (often with custom data that is required for the effect to work), specially precomputed textures (more custom data for the effect), multiple render textures to store intermediate results, and finally some sort of “script” that controls the whole process.

Shaders are (relatively) small, isolated thingies that operate on small, isolated pieces of data. So they are only a small part of the whole picture, and in fact often they are the easiest part. Both to the effect author, and even for the “engine” to support.

Adding “shader support” to the engine/toolset is a piece of cake. The hard parts are:

• How shaders integrate with the lighting? Once you start doing shaders, you lose all lighting that used to be computed for you.
• How shaders integrate with various data the mesh may have or it might not? For example, to support per-vertex colors you either have to write a single (sub-optimal) shader that always assumes vertex colors are present, or write multiple shaders: when vertex colors are present, and when they are not.
• How shaders integrate with … lots of other things that were taken for granted in fixed function world. Scaled meshes. Various fog types. Texture transforms. The list goes on.
• How do you expose the rest of the “stuff” that makes interesting effects possible? Shaders alone are nothing. You need render-to-texture with various interesting formats. You need to store custom data in the meshes. You need to store custom data in the textures, in various interesting formats. You need custom cameras to render intermediate results into render textures. You need a way to replace object shaders with some other shaders so that these objects can render these intermediate results. The list goes on.
• Hardware support. Once you enter shader world, you get a totally new set of inconsistencies between operating systems, graphics APIs, hardware vendors, graphics card models and driver versions. And a new bag of driver bugs of course.

So shaders do present three big challenges.

1) Shader explosion. How do you do lighting? Do you say “there shall only ever be a single directional light” (that is what most tech-demos do)? Do you try to support the general case and write some dozen shader combinations? How do you handle all other cases that were “just handled” by fixed function pipeline? Vertex formats, fog, texture transforms, etc. Congratulations, multiply your shader count by 10 or so. Or don’t multiply the shader count, but use static/dynamic branching if you have hardware support for it.

2) Platform differences. How you write shaders in the general case, when some things don’t work on AMD cards, some other things don’t work on NVIDIA cards, yet some other things don’t work in OpenGL, some other things don’t work in Direct3D, and something entirely else does not work on Mac OS X (with different things not working on PPC vs Intel, yay)? Congratulations again, multiply your already large shader count by 10 or so.

3) Shaders are just a small part of the equation. You need the whole infrastructure around them to actually enable those interesting effects.

To return to the original message about the skin rendering demo: no, “just shaders” won’t enable that. You need render textures in several formats (color & depth) at least. And some dozen shaders to do the effect for a single light type, for a single mesh configuration, and for a single hardware platform. Multiply the shader count by, hmm…, hundred or so to cover the general case.

Real life is harder than a tech demo. Real life is more than just the shaders.

(*) I’m taking the message out of the context on purpose. Nothing is wrong with noisecrime’s message, I just want to point out that just exposing shaders does not get you very far.

Ok, I got an USB memory stick (PQI something). Now it has two partitions on it by default, one of them to store some sort of “USB Notebook” data. I am pretty sure I really don’t need that, so I was looking around for a way to merge those partitions. I ran this “USB Notebook” application in a hope that setup wizard will let me choose “no thanks, I don’t need this stuff”. Of course, it does not have such an option.

Pressing Cancel somewhere in there results in this dialog:

Pretty cool, I must say. Some advice I’d like to give for the application developers, if I may:

• Instead of trying to copy Aqua’s GUI, make the application actually do useful things. “I don’t need your stuff, please give me a single partition” is a pretty common use case. And please don’t make error messages like that be the topmost windows (now it stays on top even when I switch to another app).
• Either get someone to write English messages, or leave the message as is and change the caption to “All your base are belong to us”. For such an exciting error message I’d also change the button text to “YES!!!”. Let the user enjoy your software!

From the software manual: “Thanks a lot to you that are use our company’s product”. Gee, thank you that you are use your software on me!