I just noticed Tom Forsyth, aka tomf, is speaking at the Stanford EE CS Colloquium on January 6, 2010. The video will hopefully be posted on the web afterwards.
The topic is “To be announced”, but is very likely to be Larrabee related.
I’m writing a skinning sample for a future Android SDK. This has prompted me to construct a toolchain to get skinned animated models into Android applications.
I’m really only just getting started, but so far I’m thinking along these lines:
Wings 3D -> Blender 2.5 -> FBX ASCII -> ad-hoc tool -> ad-hoc binary file -> ad-hoc loader.
For what it’s worth, right now Blender 2.5 doesn’t support FBX export, so I have to do Collada -> FBX Converter -> FBX. But Blender 2.5 support should be ready fairly soon.
You may wonder why I’m considering using the proprietary and undocumented FBX standard rather than the open source Collada standard. I’m doing it for the same reason so many other tool chains (e.g. Unity, XNA) do, namely that FBX is a simpler format that just seems to work more reliably when exchanging data between DCC applications.
The open-source Blender 3D DCC tool has long suffered from an ugly, non-standard, hard-to-learn UI. I’m very happy to see that the latest release, which just entered alpha status, has a much improved UI. It’s not quite Modo quality, but it’s starting to get into the same league as commercial DCC tools.
Yahoo continues to be a source of excellent information on recent and future versions of JavaScript / ECMAScript. Here are two very good talks from November 2009 about the evolution of JavaScript from 2000 until now:
In the late 1980’s Jordan Mechner single-handedly designed and programmed the original Apple II version of Prince of Persia and several other groundbreaking games. He published his development journals and technical design documents on his web site.
The journals touch on:
Although many games are now written by large teams of people, in the end, a lot of the business, artistic, and technical issues Jordan writes about remain relevant. I highly recommend these journals for anyone interested in an inside view of game development. (Or anyone interested in trying to break into Hollywood. :-) )
Above is the output of the raytracer. Below is a diagnostic mode showing which goroutines raytraced which section of the screen. Each goroutine has its own color to outline the pixels it traces:
I wrote a simple multi-threaded ray tracer in Google’s new “go” language. It’s an adaptation of Flying Frog Consultancy’s Raytracer.
It runs single-threaded about 1/2 the speed of a comparable C++ version. I guess the C++ version benefits from a more optimizing compiler and the ability to inline small functions.
Compared to ordinary C/C++, the Go version was easier to multithread.
On my dual-core Macbook Pro I get an 1.80x speedup when running with GOMAXPROCS > 1:
$ GOMAXPROCS=1 time ./gotrace
**1.52** real 1.50 user 0.01 sys
$ GOMAXPROCS=2 time ./gotrace
**0.82** real 1.50 user 0.01 sys
$ GOMAXPROCS=3 time ./gotrace
**0.81** real 1.50 user 0.01 sys
On an eight-core, 16 Hyperthread HP Z600 running Ubuntu 9.10, (with the source code changed to use 16 goroutines instead of the default 8 goroutines) I get a 5.8x speedup:
$ GOMAXPROCS=1 time ./gotrace
1.05user 0.01system 0:01.06elapsed 99%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+1544outputs (0major+2128minor)pagefaults 0swaps
$ GOMAXPROCS=16 time ./gotrace
1.32user 0.00system 0:00.18elapsed 702%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+1544outputs (0major+2190minor)pagefaults 0swaps
Source code gotracer.zip
I’ve been working part time on the “Droid” project for the last year, and it finally shipped today. I wrote some of the graphics libraries.
At first I was skeptical of the industrial design. The early prototypes looked very much like a 1970’s American car dashboard. But Motorola really improved the industrial design in subsequent versions. I like the high-grip rubber on the battery cover. It makes the phone very comfortable to hold.
The phone hardware is very fast, and the high resolution screen is beautiful. I think people will enjoy owning and using this phone.
My favorite feature is the turn-by-turn navigation software. My second favorite feature is the “Droooid” default notification sound. Oh, and the camera flashlight is very nice too!
Man, the web really does change everything!
The company “Demand Media” has developed a Google-like business model for creating how-to videos:
They say that the algorithm produces lifetime values about 5 times higher than human editors do.
These guys have basically automated the “How to” video market. Amazing! I wonder if they will move up the video food chain into music videos, TV shows or movies? It might work for low budget children’s programming.
Or even for casual games. Hmm.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that the latest version of Ubuntu, 9.10 b1, comes with a nice selection of desktop backgrounds. This makes a huge difference in how beginners perceive the product, at very little cost to Ubuntu. The new dark-brown default color scheme is also an improvement over the older schemes.
Now that the Android Native Development Kit has been released, I was finally able to publish the sources and binary to my Android Terminal Emulator. It’s a fairly plain Digital Equipment Corporation VT-100 terminal emulator, with some features from newer terminals (like colors.)
This is my first application in the Android Market. There are at least 10 other terminal emulators in the market; we’ll see how this one is received.
A bit of history: This was my first Android application. I wrote it for the original “Sooner” Android devices, and have kept it updated for the successive generations of devices. It requires native code because there’s no public Android Java APIs for dealing with PTYs.
A bit of ancient history: I wrote two terminal emulators for the Atari 800 back in the day: Chameleon, in 6502 assembly, and a version of Kermit in the excellent “Action!” programming language. Kermit was one of my first “open source” programs. If you poke around on the web you can still find it here and there.