(the lack of updates recently is because I have lots of stuff here going on)

I few weeks ago I was visiting OTEE and over the weekend we were jamming on a small game called Pakimono! The idea of the game was pretty cool - you’re the naked guy and have to ruin tourists’ photos :)

The whole experience was great. It was my first time using a Mac, first time working with Unity (their game development tool) etc. I coded&tuned most of the bullet-time character controller, where you drag your limbs with a mouse, trying to cover as much of the sight as possible.

The coding was a bit unusual - most of my coding life I was doing pretty low-level C++ programming. This time it was completely different - I’d setup “the game” directly in the editor, write some short C# scripts and boom! - everything works, without me having to worry about any of the low-level stuff. No recompiling or any of that stuff. Cool.

Ironically, I did not see the final Pakimono build yet. I left earlier than the others and do not have a Mac anywhere nearby. But the guys promised me a windows build!

Lost Garden is good - about game design and related things from (ex) Anark guy (hi Chris!). E.g. this one (a practical definition of innovation in game design):

And if you ever hear an indie game developer talking about level design, either shoot them in the head now to help them avoid their future misery, or direct them towards this essay.

I was planning to do a demo this year; all by myself (except music). However, after playing with Blender a bit it became clear that I am really not a 3D artist (not Blender’s fault, of course) - what a surprise :)

Now a crazy thought: do a 64 kilobyte intro instead?

Yeah, I know, one pretty unsuccessful try already was there 3+ years ago… But still: I need a musician that could use Farbrausch’s V2 synth, some clever ideas/design/code and there it is. There’s a hope that I have actually learned something in these 3 years, you know :)

By the way, this bzhykt intro produces really abstract visuals on my computer right now. Something was messed up in there…

Released this HDR with MSAA demo I was talking about earlier. Here it is: aras-p.info/projHDR.html. I can also add that this St. Anne’s Church is a pretty complex beast :)

I’m still spending an occasional minute on my HDR demo. Now, everything is fine so far, except one thing: I can’t get MSAA working on some Radeons (and I don’t have a Radeon right now, which makes debugging a lot harder). The main point of my demo is to have MSAA on ordinary hw, so this is bad.

The reason seems to be that on older Radeons MSAA does not resolve alpha channel, which obsiously messes things up in my case. I’m using RGBE8 encoding for the main rendertarget, and it RGB gets MSAA’d and exponent not - then oh well, no good anti aliasing most of the time.

Of course I could always manually supersample everything, but this would defeat the whole point of the demo. Or I could render everything in two passes, one for RGB and one for exponent - but this also is not very nice…

Probably I’ll just release the demo as it is now and wait for possible feedback. Or dig up an old Radeon somewhere and debug more - but replacing the video card in my Shuttle XPC is not an easy task :)