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!

]]> http://aras-p.info/blog/2006/07/27/painting-and-wallpapering/feed/ 0 http://aras-p.info/blog/2006/06/01/windows-on-a-mac-experience/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2006/06/01/windows-on-a-mac-experience/#comments Thu, 01 Jun 2006 18:47:00 +0000 Aras Pranckevičius http://aras-p.info/blog/?p=92 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.)

• Add eye candy, whatever that may be. They say we can ditch some old harware (DX6 level), but methinks we can’t go really wild (“minimum ps2.0″ would be cool, but not in this real world). We’ve got to add some particles, transparent blood cells, lighting fx etc. Anyone has some ideas what could be easy to implement and look extremely cool? :)
• I can’t say much, but it’s about network, client-server etc. Time to learn some network programming for me!
• The guys behind whole this thing have some really insane plans that would rock the christ child if they would really happen. Not a high probability of them happening though…

Ok, back to thinking about possible eye candy and the network protocol.

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.

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)! ]]> http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/07/08/press-releases-and-other-noise/feed/ 0 http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/06/29/japan-here-we-come/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/06/29/japan-here-we-come/#comments Wed, 29 Jun 2005 07:08:00 +0000 Aras Pranckevičius http://aras-p.info/blog/?p=49 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… ]]> http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/06/29/japan-here-we-come/feed/ 0 http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/06/27/while-waiting-for-imaginecup-results/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/06/27/while-waiting-for-imaginecup-results/#comments Mon, 27 Jun 2005 13:09:00 +0000 Aras Pranckevičius http://aras-p.info/blog/?p=48 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! ]]> http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/06/27/while-waiting-for-imaginecup-results/feed/ 2 http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/06/25/various/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/06/25/various/#comments Sat, 25 Jun 2005 07:39:00 +0000 Aras Pranckevičius http://aras-p.info/blog/?p=47 I’ve got my Master’s diploma. I feel like nothing has changed, probably so it is.

We have a pretty unreal orchid in our house. I bought it 8 months ago, and it’s been blooming all the time. It’s even getting bigger and bigger!

Casey Muratori:

God, no wonder games are so hard to make. The tools are such complete crap. Some day there’s going to be a tools revolution and one guy will be able to make the equivalent of today’s $10 million games. There’s no doubt in my mind.

That reminds me: the other day I was thinking about a strange feeling in the town where I live (Kaunas, Lithuania). Basically, whenever I see a group (three or more) of young guys (20-25), most of the time they seem to be aggressive and angry. I don’t get this feeling in the other towns/cities; I don’t really know what’s causing it. Maybe it’s several bad experiences I had. Some of my friends have this feeling also, so it can’t be just my problem.

I wonder why people are agressive at all. I mean, what’s the point in insulting/pushing/beating a random walker-by? Is that the only way they can express or “feel” themselves – through invoking fear or pain on the others? Maybe; another day I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Childhood of the Leader” (L’enfance d’un chef) and maybe that’s the case – when a person can’t find “himself” he starts doing weird things.

Still, why there seems to be so many of them?

That way, when fancy water reflections go out of fashion and are replaced by fancy waxed floor reflections, you’d throw everything out and restart from scratch. Predicting that this moment will occur only in the next console transition (hey, cur-gen can’t handle fancy waxed floors!).

Pretty reasonable I think, in 2-3 years it’s likely that the things will be changed in non-trivial way, so you’d need to rething and possibly remake some parts of the technology anyway.

By ‘everything’ I mean that, for example, possible shadow algorithms are hardcoded in the very base classes of the engine. Same for physics, lights, scene management, culling etc. Similar like you’d have a class VeryBaseEngineObject and that would have information “what shadows are on me?”, “am I physics body”, “cull me against the camera” and “render me for the water reflection”.

Huh? Is that how all engines are designed? You have functionality like “shadow map”, “a physics crate”, “a fancy reflective water” and “a fullscreen glow with light streaks Masaki Kawase style” in the core of the engine? I’d understand if that would be as helpers or some “premade” stuff on top of the core engine… but having that in the core? Why?

Is that what constitutes a “flexible” engine?

I’ve been watching it too long to have any objective opinion. Some outsider comments are here. Enjoy!

In the evening, I tweaked lighting and contrast, made some lightmaps and hand-drawn the other lightmaps.

In the morning, Paulius took new screenshots and put UE3 screenshots next to them. Then he wrote “WTF?” over UE3 ones and “world domination!” over ours. Suddenly we realized that maybe it ain’t that bad afterall.

Conclusion: it all depends on what’s written over the screenshots :)

The other people say various things. Well, too late to change everything; I feel a bit bad – we’ve invested so much time into this and it looks pretty bland (i.e. when you compare screenshots of our demo and UnrealEngine3, one of them looks clearly better :)). Now it all depends on what demos will the other teams make.

On the efficiency side, it’s doing pretty well. I didn’t bother writing fallback effects for anything lower than ps2.0 hardware (that was great!). Our low-end-target (something like 1.5GHz CPU and Radeon 9500 64MB) the demo runs ok at lower resolutions (800×600). On our ‘recommended’ hardware that ranges from Radeon 9800s to GeForce 6800s the demo runs well; FPS counts are 60-120. Haven’t tried on any of the ‘top’ video cards. Two people said it doesn’t run on GeForceFX; one effect does not get validated – that’s bad, looking at the effect I can’t tell what’s the problem and don’t have anything from FX series at hand.

Funny enough, the demo manages to run reasonably well even when it’s severely unoptimized!

We still have a chance to finish it on time. I’ve taked a day off the work tomorrow and want it to be really finished by tomorrow evening (or night). The real deadline is after 4 days, but I’ve got to test it on various hardware…

It’s going pretty well, I think. It works, other team members say it looks pretty good (myself – I’m not sure, I think I’ve been watching it for too long). Does 100-150FPS on my GeForce 6800GT at 1024×768 with some FSAA. Again, we’re under-utilizing the available hardware :)

Back to work.

On the other hand, I won’t “celebrate” (whatver that means) it now, maybe after a week. The deadline for ImagineCup demo is just around the corner, and my todo list still contains lots of stuff… ]]> http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/05/20/24-deadlines-near/feed/ 0 http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/05/18/dilemmas/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/05/18/dilemmas/#comments Wed, 18 May 2005 06:10:00 +0000 Aras Pranckevičius http://aras-p.info/blog/?p=35 Sometimes you must make decisions that clearly affect your whole foreseeable future in a significant way. Here comes the really unexpected though: making such decisions is hard! :) ]]> http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/05/18/dilemmas/feed/ 2 http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/05/16/improving-uv-mapping-skills/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/05/16/improving-uv-mapping-skills/#comments Mon, 16 May 2005 15:09:00 +0000 Aras Pranckevičius http://aras-p.info/blog/?p=34 Hey, UV mapping the second human-like figure took me much less time than the first one! This one took about 1 hour, again in Blender (and again, marking seam edges, LSCM that and just arranging resulting pieces rocks).

That said, making the low-poly mesh from the high-poly one took much longer than UV mapping; something like 4 hrs. A good artist would probably make a new mesh from scratch in shorter time, but hey, I’m not an artist :)

Now I’m using ATI’s NormalMapper to compute normal/AO maps (Previously was using nVidia’s Melody, but switched for no obvious reason). The good thing with NormalMapper is that it comes with sourcecode; I’ve already sped up AO computation about 20% by capping octree traversal distances (that took less than an hour). I suspect with some thought it could be optimized even more.

Previously I was using a hacked solution – compute normal map with either tool (that doesn’t take long), then use my custom small tool that does low-order GPU PRT simulation on low-poly normalmapped model with D3DX. Get the first term of results, scale it and there you have ambient occlusion. I was thinking it produces good results, but in the truth is that ‘real’ AO maps look somewhat better, especially for small ornaments that aren’t captured in low-poly geometry.

The good thing about this hacked approach is that it takes ~10 seconds for a model (compare to 3hrs). Using it as a quick preview is great, and the differences between hacked-AO and real-AO aren’t that much visible once you add textures and conventional lighting.

I’m thinking about doing GPU-based AO simulation on the high poly model, with quick-n-dirty UV parametrization; then just fetching the resulting texture in normal map computation tool (afaik, Melody can do that natively; for NormalMapper it would be easy to add I think). With recent DX9 SDK such tool should not take more than 200-300 lines of code (D3DX has both UVAtlas and GPU PRT simulation now). On the other hand, I know that nVidia guys are preparing something similar :)

Update: added image – on the left is hacked-n-fast AO, on the right is real-AO. Ornaments inside aren’t present in low-poly model (only in normal map). Differences are less visible when the model is textured and other stuff is added.

Things that help me (examples from IC05 demo): write down a detailed, roughly prioretized task list. If I don’t write it down and keep tasks in my head, I often spend too much time polishing not-so-important features. With task list, I update it constantly; at the same time I get sort of ‘summary’ of remaining work.

Another one: really concentrate. Turn off music (for some reason I can’t work while music is playing… especially if the music is good, I start listening to it), close the doors, tell the child ‘go play with mom instead’ :), etc.

More: disconnect from the net while working :)

Both thanslate into weird stuff!

I have a temptation to put a small picture of some dragon or a naked chick :) somewhere inside just to test if anyone really reads that crap.

The ‘engine’, called dingus (don’t ask me why :)), is the one that was born for LTGameJam2003, based on some previous experience and insights from people more clever than me. Variations of it were used in all ‘serious’ nesnausk! demos so far, and in my personal projects as well. The sourcetree at BerliOS has no exporters/tools commited in yet, that will be at some later time. Of course, no real documentation is written for the engine.

Besides the engine, there’s ic2005 project that’s, well, the sourcecode for our WIP demo for ImagineCup2005. No art assets in any form are committed in, sorry :)

At some later time I’ll put the sourcecode for our other demos/projects as well. Maybe.

Update: mesh and animation exporters for 3dsMax added to svn. Other tools pending. ]]> http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/22/enginedemo-sourcecode-released/feed/ 5 http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/21/content-shoveling/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/21/content-shoveling/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2005 06:34:00 +0000 Aras Pranckevičius http://aras-p.info/blog/?p=28 We’re going into heavy crunch mode to finish our ImagineCup demo on time. The demo alone would be nothing, but when you add up TheRealWork, master’s thesis, the demo and some sleep, you quickly run out of hours available during the day. Take one out of that, and it’s manageable :)

Anyway. I feel kinda strange about the direction our demos are taking. Much like the game industry, we’re going the ‘content shoveling’ way. Paulius’ first ‘serious’ demo, Demo 612, was low in content amount on purpose. Our other demo, The Fly, already had some content; programming part was already the minor one.

In this demo, I project that we’re putting 5x more effort than into ‘The Fly’, and something like 90% of the total effort goes into art content (models, textures, animations etc.). It would better look good in the end! I once thought that for some reason we ‘raised the bar’ so much that it’s hard for ourselves to jump over it.

This kind of scares me. The overall trend is that with each demo we’re doing much more content, while the ‘code’ part remains pretty constant in size/complexity. What’s coming next? Will we need 5 artists working for 5 months just to make a demo?

After this demo, I want to take the usual 2-3 month break; and then try something different. Something more abstract, with more intelligent code and less massive art content. I admire kewlers very much – somehow they are able to make great demos ‘out of nothing’ :) ]]> http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/21/content-shoveling/feed/ 5 http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/20/a-demo-that-still-fascinates-me/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/20/a-demo-that-still-fascinates-me/#comments Wed, 20 Apr 2005 08:04:00 +0000 Aras Pranckevičius http://aras-p.info/blog/?p=27 Been thinking about how we should synchronize the visuals and the music in our demo… So I went and watched some of the classic demos, paying some extra attention at how they do it.

Synchronization aside, the demo that still touches me very deeply is Gerbera by Moppi. It’s old (2001) and already starting to show it’s age visually, but the whole mood, ‘storyline’ (whatever that is), the tiny writings and the music is fascinating.

Directions makes us unable to choose our paths. Wonderful. ]]> http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/20/a-demo-that-still-fascinates-me/feed/ 2 http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/09/animation-blending-for-walkrun/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/09/animation-blending-for-walkrun/#comments Sat, 09 Apr 2005 17:48:00 +0000 Aras Pranckevičius http://aras-p.info/blog/?p=26 I’ve done some very basic walk/run animation blending. The results are pretty neat!

We have several walk animation cycles, each for different walk/run speed. Now I can smoothly move the character at any speed, and the right animations are selected, synchronized, mixed; and the walk is mixed in/out of another animations.

As a basis I’ve taken Tom Forsyth’s talk from GameTech2004 and Charles Bloom’s rambles (dated 3-13-03). Of course, our case is somewhat simpler (e.g. we don’t have manpower to author all turn left/right, accelerate/decelerate, etc. anims).

Try it yourself – it’s good! :)

BTW, I was thinking about putting our full engine/tools/whatever somewhere, in case anyone is interested or maybe would find it useful. Well, I know, the naked sourcecode is not useful at all in the real world, but still :) ]]> http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/09/animation-blending-for-walkrun/feed/ 0 http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/05/geoff-zatkins-essay/ http://aras-p.info/blog/2005/04/05/geoff-zatkins-essay/#comments Tue, 05 Apr 2005 08:19:00 +0000 Aras Pranckevičius http://aras-p.info/blog/?p=25 A must read article for any game developer wannabe here:

Your industry heroes work like dogs too. Ask a Blizzard employee what their “core” hours were for the last year+ before WoW launched. Or a Bungie employee leading up to Halo shipping. And those are the lucky ones. For every studio that turned out a brilliant game, multiple other teams of equally cool people ended up wasting years of their lives working on games that never saw the light of day, came out stillborn or got pushed out early and died an ignominious screaming bug-filled death.

Don’t even get me started on the core work hours for Japanese studios.

How sad, and how true…