As always, here’s a thought that’s more about demo-engines than about game-engines; and mostly dealing with graphics stuff.

Some folks add whatever gfx effects/techniques they use to “the engine”. Quote from Plastic:

We’ve also added a couple of new features like <…> wireframe/particle shader.

Now, I don’t have a problem with that, but what strikes me is that for whatever reason our engine doesn’t have any effect/technique in it. Zero shaders, no shadowmaps/PRT/refractions/whatever.

The obvious disadvantage of our approach is that for each demo I basically write the shaders and “effects” from scratch (ok, copying them is also fine). There’s no central place where, for example, a Gaussian blur postprocessing filter or shadowmaps rendering code is stored.

On the other hand, that means (nearly) complete freedom for each demo. In each prod I can tweak whatever I want and implement completely different rendering techniques. For example, in.out.side demo is quite different from Visual Gaming viewer or Xplodar FEM demo, yet they all share the same underlying “engine” (read: bunch of code).

Still, what I’d like to do is have “somewhat stable” stuff gathered in one place. I don’t tweak my basic lighting functions, standard postprocessing effects or shadowmap sampling patterns that often :)

Left to right, top to bottom: The fractal house on our way from Narita Airport to Yokohama. Visual Gaming competition in action - hey, it’s the 3D viewer I wrote! Paulius in the ferri wheel - demo or die. Me showing our demo before the dinner. The wistful photo - me looking at the horizon. Yokohama - we were here.

I’m back from Turkey. That’s me somewhere in the Mediterranean sea, practically showing that refraction really works - note the double hand and the mermaid-like legs :)

Right now - finishing my ShaderX4 article and preparing for Japan.

One totally insane 64 kilobyte intro: 195/95/256 by rgba. Of course, first you have to see the original 195/95 demo by Plastic. The 64k intro copies the (party version) of the demo almost perfectly, while squeezing everything in less than 64 kilobytes. Ok, the music sucks, the loading time is nearly infinite and it has lots of bugs/glitches, but I must say that rgba guys are insane anyway.

I’m going off to Turkey for a week (vacation). Then, I’ll go to Japan for a week (ImagineCup finals). Will see how it goes; should be pretty cool I guess (well, the air will most likely be hot, not cool).

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)!