We repainted our living room and did one wall in wallpaper (real actual ones, not for the desktop). This is fun but takes a couple of days to get done, half of that time spent moving stuff outside the room and moving it back afterwards.

One thing I learned is that painting with semi-glossy paint is very different from painting with matte one. Semi-glossy is very sensitive to paint strokes, pressure and a lot of other things, and if you’re not extremely careful you’ll get a wall that looks like with a varying gloss or specular power. Of course, varying specular exponent would be cool in a shader demo of 2001, but it’s not a cool thing to have on your room wall. And it’s not 2001 anymore either!

After that we just went for a week to Crete. Here’s an assortment of small random pictures. Now back to work!

A post on GrammerJack blog made me post similar impressions about Mac vs Windows etc. So:

I was the evil guy to install Windows on my MacBookPro (via BootCamp) as well. That was like a month ago. The thing is, I think I haven’t booted into windows for like 20 days on this machine. At first I though gee, I’ll use VisualStudio on this machine, will watch demos and have a proper Subversion client! But I use VisualStudio, watch demos and have a proper Subversion client on my work PC, so there are not that many reasons to boot windows on the laptop…

Plus BootCamp has small annoyances that GrammerJack mentions: no two finger scrolling (it’s the best thing in laptops I’ve ever seen), no backspace key, function key not supported, the machine never seems to come to proper sleep (i.e. it’s always hot to touch), trackpad sensitivity and precision much worse than on OSX etc.

And in general, I must admit that I kinda like OSX. “It feels nice” would be my best attempt at explanation, for I can’t think of any serious reasons why I like it. Well, yeah, the UI is nice etc. Mind you, I like Windows as well, but at least on this laptop, OSX “feels much nicer”.

Now if only Apple could throw the bunch of crap called XCode away and make something like VisualStudio+VisualAssist; and if only OpenGL would be so sweet to use as D3D! I’d jump on OSX bandwagon immediately and be a happy man. Alas, XCode is just lighyears behind (*).

(*) Though Apple has some really cool development tools as well (Shark etc.)

The Escapist is a good read from time to time. This time, it’s Greg Costikyan:

And actually, EA tried to kill The Sims many times before it was finally released. From what I’ve heard (and this is definitely hearsay), Bing Gordon’s comment at the meeting where publishing was approved was: “Well, it’ll only sell a hundred thousand copies, but it’ll get Will off our backs.”

We’re only talking about the best-selling PC title of all fucking time.

Gee, I’d want all magazines to be like this. Focused, to the point and without trivial crap that most of them are 99% full of.

Ok, seems like Microsoft Lithuania issues some PR about ImagineCup and our demo in there, and now every news portal in Lithuania catched it.

Now, its pretty standard in a sense that from the PR itself noone could understand what it’s about. The “rendering competition” is translated into something that means “the competition of presenting ideas”; and the demo is described as a “CG short film”. And, of course, the usual press-like exaggerations: “competed with 17000 students and took 1/2 place” – which is obviously wrong as 17k is the total number of students; in the rendering compo there was probably something like 100.

I don’t like it (the press); it’s just a noise that distracts you. Meh.

One funny thing: yesterday I received a call into work phone from one local PR agency. How the hell do they get this information? They know my name and university (it’s in the press release) – how do they find out where I work and more, how do they get my phone number? I mean, even I don’t know my work phone number (ok, I could find it out if I needed)!

The results of ImagineCup05 rendering compo were finally announced!

The best thing of course is that our demo in.out.side: the shell took the 1st/2nd place (a tie). That means that both winning teams will go to the finals in Japan at the start of August. The final winner will be somehow decided there.

That’s going to be pretty interesting, methinks. We’ve got the 2nd place last year; the other winning team got the 1st place last year. This year, the same teams meet again, but it’s still not clear which one will win. Cool.

I wonder how the winner will be decided. Will we need to to some “presentation” (techniques/algorithms/workflow/hacks used)? Maybe there will be an additional “fast demo” competition (e.g. make a new demo in 1 day)? Interesting. Waiting…

Aargh, the ImagineCup crew postponed the results announcement again (that is, 3rd time already)! First it had to be on June 13th, now it’s scheduled for Real Soon Now, Really!

Meanwhile, I’m doing a game that surely will revolutionize the whole gaming industry, blah blah etc. That is, a letter learning game for my daughter; in Lithuanian. There are lots of these (example), but the problem is that they’re in all languages except the one you need.

Now, the most obvious implementation would be in Flash. Alas, I don’t have Flash authoring tools nor do I want to learn them and it’s ActionScript. I thought about going Lua+SDL all the way, without C++ at all. Guess what – SDL doesn’t have any high level audio playing stuff; I’m too lazy to bind it’s sdl_mixer to lua; there’s no nice IDE and there were lots of other obstacles. So I just went and am doing this in C++, abusing our demo engine. Oh well, I’m just lazy.

While implementing it I found out that I have no good tool to pack lots of arbitrary images into nice power-of-2 texture atlases. nVidia’s Texture Atlas Tools do almost that, but they rescale textures to be power-of-2 (which is usually ok, but not for my case). So I just had to fork the AtlasCreationTool (just SVN link for now) to do what I want. While at it, I removed it’s dependency on D3D sample framework (hey, removing code is always good!), forced it to support non-pow-2 textures and to pack them better. It’s probably not that good for the usual case (where you want to place textures at block boundaries in the atlas to minimize mipmap artifacts), but packs arbitrary sized images pretty nicely. Yay!

A Pilgrimage 2004 talk by Tom Forsyth. Good points captured.