I’m not one to rant and rave about books (that’s a blatant lie), but it rare that I find a textbook so intriguing and useful that I find myself wanting to sing its praises.  When you start researching topics like game rendering, there’s quite a few specialy words that often get thrown around like anisotropic filtering, or parallax texture mapping which all sound like complete bollocks when taken out of context.  However many books like the OpenGL SuperBible or similar, will teach you how to do effects like this, but they don’t cover the theory behind them, and the implementation of the effect is invariable tied to the hardware or API that the book was written for.  This book is a theory book, and the concepts are explained at detail, but it’s up to you to implement them, no copypasta from the examples in the book.

I picked up this book for some insight into some advanced rendering techniques, and so far it has delivered, the book is written in a very readable manner, and is much easier to read and understand than many books I have read thus far.  Also, the book has sackpersons(sackpeople?) on it, which make everything better.

Real-Time Rendering, Third Edition

Programming | No Comments »

Back before I got  my PS3 i was all excited that Xeongears was getting re-released as a digital download on the PS3 online store.  It was my dissapointment that when I finally got my PS3, there was no Xeongears to be found, that it was a Japanese-only deal.  Bhu-what?  i have absolutley no idea why a digital distribution system would ever need to be limited by region.  It’s really quite bizarre, and I can’t come up with a reason for it not to be on the American store as well, it was a PSOne greatest hit here too.  In fact, why isn’t the whole catalog of greatest hits games not up on there for me to download?  How about the greatest hit PS2 games as well, like Maximo or Contra, both of which are CD based games, so it could easily be downloadable.  Compared to the Xbox Live Arcade, PS3 Store needs to really beef up its content, in my opinion.

As for the newly launched PS Home, it is an interesting concept, but there are two glaring issues that make it a non starter currently:  One, its reliability thus far has been spotty at best, with quite a few times I’ve been unable to get past the sign in screen.  And second, they have applied physical scarcity to a digital item, which is a very wordy way of saying that you have to wait in line to play pool or the arcade games in Home, something that needs to be addressed and quickly, because such a stupid limitation like that is quite frankly, bullshit.

Games | No Comments »

Our team has put up a website to hold infromation about our upcoming game, Task Manager.  Nothing is there yet, but as preproduction assets come in it will start to flesh out.

Full Sail, Games | No Comments »

This month marks the first month (of five) of my final game project at Full Sail.  Groups have been asigned, and I was very lucky in who I was grouped with.  The end of this week is when we pitch our groups game idea for approval, and after that, I will start a page for that under projects, and start chronicling the things that happen.

This is going to be interesting.

Full Sail | No Comments »