Another day I stumbled upon this: how to be creative. Overall it’s good; although a bit too long and most of the content is quite common-sense. A good read anyway.

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?

On the other hand – maybe it’s the way to go. You’re designing the engine around some specific technologies and approaches, to be used in some 2-3 years.

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.

I’m reading API docs of one “really advanced” modern 3D engine (found them publicly available on their site, don’t know if that’s an error or not :)) and… it’s a strange feeling. Basically, everything’s hardcoded!

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?

Yesterday Paulius put screenshots from UE3 and our demo next to each other, wrote “right!” and “wrong!” over the corresponding shots and we realized that we’re basically screwed.

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 :)

(me back at work after three days of 12+ hour work on the demo)

Nearly finished the demo, gave testing builds to several people. I’m already sick with it and can’t judge it objectively. My wife says that demo lacks colours (true), lacks action (partially true) and other things – but probably she’s already sick with me doing the demo.

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!

Demo demo demo! Beware!

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.

It’s my 24th birthday today, yay!

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…

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! :)