Scattered Pixels

End of Scattered Pixels: Moved to Buzz

2010-05-02T18:54:00.003-04:00

Buzz is easier to post and comment with - so I'll no longer be using this blog.

(Beautiful Pixels will stick around on Blogger and be rarely updated. It has an RSS feed and will also appear in my Buzz.)

If you use GMail you can get "Scattered Pixels" style frequent updates by Following me in Buzz:

If you prefer RSS feeds:

http://buzz.googleapis.com/feeds/117022097663427079142/public/posted

Call Larry Page, get me.

2010-04-27T15:28:00.000-04:00

Random people call Google, use the name directory and enter PAGE... who do you get? The lucky employees with dialpad hash collisions with PAGE, e.g. SCHE-ib.

Hesitate a moment, then guess you should enter a first name? L in Larry will select the 5th in the list and ring them up! That's me!

"No, sorry, I'm not Larry Page...
No, I can't connect you with Larry Page...
No, I don't know his secretary's number...
Yes, I'm happy that Google is great too..."

Lost my Pictures

2010-04-15T10:37:00.002-04:00

Lost my pictures when copying them off camera. ;P Got them back with this! http://www.z-a-recovery.com/ It was free, and I feel compelled to at least link them. ;)

Mark DeLoura joins Google

2010-04-12T14:26:00.001-04:00

http://www.casualgaming.biz/news/30023/Mark-DeLoura-named-Googles-Developer-Advocate

GPU accelerated browsers

2010-04-12T14:25:00.000-04:00

NVIDIA is excited that browsers are starting to be GPU accelerated:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOee9u7kHs

Pixels

2010-04-08T13:13:00.000-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcXtT3rZcqg

Quake in a browser

2010-04-01T19:40:00.001-04:00

http://ajaxian.com/archives/gwt-quake

Quake in a browser, not using a plug-in!

(Also, NOT an April Fools joke, it's real)

Call For Submissions: Game Development Tools Book

2010-03-27T17:48:00.001-04:00

Marwan is a friend of mine, and is editing a book "Game Development Tools". Thanks to the Toolsmiths blog for writing this up nicely, I'll just Ditto it. ;)

Sent to you by Vincent via Google Reader:

Call For Submissions: Game Development Tools Book

via The Toolsmiths by Jeff Ward on 3/23/10

I thought I would bring to the community's attention this new book on Game Development Tools that's looking for submissions. Here's the call:

We invite you to submit a proposal for an innovative article to be included in a forthcoming book, Game Development Tools, which will be edited by Marwan Y. Ansari and published by A. K. Peters. We expect to publish the volume in time for GDC 2011.

We are open to any tools articles that you feel would make a valuable contribution to this book.

Some topics that would be of interest include:

Content Pipeline tools (creation, streamlining, management)

Graphics/Rendering tools

Profiling tools

Collada import/export/inspection

Sound tools

In-Game debugging tools

Memory management & analysis

Console tools (single and cross platform)

This list is not meant to be exclusive and other topics are welcome.

The schedule for the book is as follows:

June 30th – All proposals in.
July 15th – Final list of accepted authors are informed and begin articles.
August 15th – First draft in to editor
September 15th – Drafts sent to other book authors for peer review
October 15th – Final articles in to editor
November 30th – Final articles to publisher (A K Peters)
GDC 2011 – Book is released.

Please send proposals to marwan at www.gamedevelopmenttools.com.

Regardless of whether Toolsmiths readers get into the book, it sounds like it could be great.

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to The Toolsmiths using Google Reader
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Google Thank You Voice Mail

2010-03-25T23:20:00.001-04:00

This morning I had a voice mail waiting for me at work (Google). It was from an unnamed woman who didn't know who's inbox she had found, other than that it was at Google. She spent 2 minutes heartily thanking Google, and wishing us well, and praising us for doing the right thing.

She did not mention it explicitly, but it was in response to Google no longer censoring China.

Captain Forever

2010-03-24T16:03:00.001-04:00

Nice small flash game. :)
http://www.captainforever.com/
go farbs go.

Native Client and Web Portability

2010-03-22T18:00:00.001-04:00

Native client is a way to run compute intensive applications in web browsers. This blog post announces compile once - run anywhere support. Even on ARM machines... pretty cool.

Sent to you by Vincent via Google Reader:

Native Client and Web Portability

via Chromium Blog by Ian Fette on 3/17/10

One of the most important principles of the web is portability: a web page renders and behaves the same way, regardless of the browser's operating system or the type of hardware it's running on. When we first released Native Client a year ago, we supported all popular operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) but only on machines with x86 processors. Today, we're happy to say that you can build and run Native Client binaries for all of the most popular processor architectures: x86-32, x86-64, and ARM. Even better, our initial benchmarks indicate that Native Client executables perform at 97% of the speed of an unmodified executable on both ARM and x86-64 processors. These results indicate that a browser running on virtually any modern computer or cell phone could run a fast, performance-sensitive Native Client application.

However, we recognize that just running on today's most popular architectures isn't enough; if a new processor architecture emerges, it should be able to run all Native Client modules already released without requiring developers to recompile their code. That's why we're also developing technology that will enable developers to distribute a portable representation of Native Client programs using LLVM bitcode. Using this technology, a browser running on any type of processor could translate the portable representation into a native binary without access to the source code of the program.

If you'd like to review our instruction-set support or give us feedback about the technology, please visit our project on Google Code and join our Google Group.

Posted by Brad Chen, Native Client Team

Things you can do from here:

Subscribe to Chromium Blog using Google Reader
Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites

dAb Painting Mystery Licensor Revealed! Microsoft!

2010-03-16T10:51:00.002-04:00

Remember the dAb Painting with 3D Brushes work I helped out with back when? I mentioned it was licensed but couldn't say by who.

Microsoft has some very similar looking stuff going on in research. It could be exciting to see a full product that expanded on what dab did. ;)

OK GO: This Too Shall Pass: Music Video Rube Goldberg Machine

2010-03-15T22:54:00.002-04:00

OK GO: This Too Shall Pass

A Music Video Rube Goldberg Machine

Golden ratio

2010-03-12T17:54:00.003-05:00

http://ffffound.com/image/014456154055ce5a43f3f6b0dcfafaecc59a56ad

GDC 2010 Wednesday and Thursday Notes

2010-03-12T00:23:00.001-05:00

GDC has been busy, and is packed with people. Part of that seems to be due to not enough conference space. Several sessions I went to just didn't have big enough rooms. :( Hopefully videos do show up on GDC Vault, but I'd rather have seen them in person.

David Perry convinced me that the critical feature from cloud streaming services such as Gaikai, OnLive, and O-Toy will be frictionless entry. How many clicks does it take to get someone a demo of your game? Gaikai will do it in 1. Just 1 click and you're in the demo.

Starcraft scalability and perf discussed how they felt custom built profiling tools were necessary. They did have nice features, historical frame perf data, single button press to sent data to engineers from QA, butterfly view for CPU time but Memory too, post game results with worst frames sorted out and worst seconds.

Animation in Just Cause 2 was interesting, they have highly coupled physics, character movement, post animation, and IK. the results looked good, but also very delicate to work with.

Mono will come out supporting C# 4 the same time MS releases. ;)

GDC 2010 Tuesday Notes

2010-03-10T00:28:00.002-05:00

These are rough notes and thoughts from GDC.

If you're at GDC, and in middleware or just want to drink with some middleware types, see: http://whatmakesyouthinkimnot.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/middleware-meetup-details/

A general thought: it's noticable that Moscone West isn't being used this year for GDC. This may be due to a reduction in size of the conference, or perhaps the floor area is similar and there are other reasons. It is nice not to have to walk across 4th st. but there is still a lot of time wasted going between North and South.

Also, Tuesday was notable for the insanely long line of attendees picking up their free Google android phone (offered to early registrations).

Some session notes:

Ron Carmel (2D Boy) had a short talk "Indies and Publishers: Fixing ..." which came down to 2 main points: The classic model of publishers doesn't seem relevant with digital distribution, and the remaining need is just fundings. Cue introducing the Indie Fund. There were any new details on that. There were some tidbits of World of Goo costing $120,000 and Braid $180,000.

My takeaway from "Case Studies: AI in Recent Games" was mainly that the future of AI is in handling specialized cases without explicit coding to set them up. That calls for generative AI instead of just expert systems. With online games pouring in huge amounts of human game play data, there's good opportunity for training AI.

The "The State of Social Gaming: Industry Overview and Update" was informative for me since I haven't been following the area much. A few interesting bits:
- Asia had $7 Billion in virtual goods business in 2009. In the West social games are growing fast, but still only $.5 Billion last year.
- Zynga is over 700 employees now, and is overtaking Facebook in headcount! (Oh, and $200 Million for them last year)
- Facebook will be introducing their own currency "Facebook Credits", but with a 30% cut!
- To me it seems Facebook's future success is secure so long as they maintain the best social graph platform inviting external app developers to use it.

Unreal on the iPhone was nice to hear. Nothing fancy, except not wanting to actually develop on a mac. So, they moved as much of the build to Windows as possible, running commands on the mac over PuTTY.

p.s. Attending and staying in a hotel near the convention center is way cooler than living in the bay area and having a 1.5 hour commute.

Nintendo DSI demo video using Facetracking to control Parallax

2010-02-26T23:33:00.002-05:00

MixApp for Music

2010-02-24T12:25:00.000-05:00

I've been using MixApp for music at work. It's social music, enter rooms and queue up music on a shared playlist. Don't like the music one a room, start your own. Queue music from your own library or that of your friends.

A Life Well Wasted

2010-02-16T12:29:00.001-05:00

This is a great games podcast:
http://alifewellwasted.com/

If you listen to podcasts, I definitely recommend you queue it up.

Google food

2010-02-15T22:26:00.000-05:00

The Google perks were not on my radar when I was interviewing. Just like the cars at Epic didn't impress me, nor the decorative wrought iron at Valve. But, after one week at Google I must say that the chefs and staff behind the cafes are awesome.

I recommend the blueberry ice cream. ;)

Google Fiber Internet at Home

2010-02-10T23:59:00.002-05:00

http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi

How about an internet connection faster than 1 gigabit at home...
(typical cable internet is 10-15 mega bit, 100x slower)

[edited typo, thanks anon comment]

Starting at Google

2010-02-09T22:10:00.000-05:00

Some updates for curious friends. I'm starting up at Google. It's mighty different from previous game jobs - decidedly a larger company. The pervasive engineering mindset is assuring, though. This first week feels like I'm a sponge in the middle of the ocean. soak soak. Also, while I had respect for the magnitude of google accomplishments to date, I wholly underestimated and still can't grasp just how much they've done.

Google 411

2010-02-06T11:39:00.001-05:00

Don't have your smart phone handy, still need help in a flash? Try 800-GOOG-411. A free service I just noticed from google that will hook you up fast to local info.

Android based or iPhone?

2010-01-17T21:57:00.001-05:00

3D Glasses Fail

2010-01-11T22:32:00.000-05:00

Most sane people working in graphics agree: 3D Glasses == FAIL. Dan tells it like it is, with my canonical argument - why would people wear dorky glasses?