Scriptionary Blog

Even though I program for a living, my personal projects have been on hiatus for about two months now.

Naturally, the demise of one habit fuels another; in my case gaming. If I can’t work on computer graphics, might as well enjoy them.

So in the last 2 months I have been playing some games. Firstly, I finished Half-Life for the second time, finished Half-Life 2 for the second time, after which I wanted a bigger blast from the past and blew the dust of my Wing Commander collection.

After finishing Wing Commander III, IV, and Prophecy, I needed something new.

So I gave in.

I have been avoiding playing World of Warcraft for a while now because of the stereotyping, subscription based game-play and my disappointment in Warcraft III (big fan of I and II).

But last night I downloaded the 10 day free trial and gave it a shot. Why not, right? I have to say that I am very pleasantly surprised. This game had me hooked in 20 to 30 minutes (after figuring out the controls).

After my wife (who felt the same way as I did initially) saw the game and the game-play, she also downloaded the trial and started getting hooked.

I’m finishing the 10 days for free and after that, I’ll most probably purchase the game/subscription for my wife and myself.

Now, let’s hope those stereotypes don’t come true…

I had a chance to watch the new Star Trek movie last Sunday and being a Trekkie since childhood I have to say that this new movie is quite possibly my favorite so far.

This movie is absolutely nothing like anything in the Star Trek franchise which, in my humble opinion, is a good and refreshing idea. The story isn’t anything that will blow your mind but none of the Trek movies have had an original storyline, you have to admit that.

The only thing that irked me about the movie was that it didn’t quite feel like a Trek movie at first but that’s probably because I wasn’t familiar with these characters from any Star Trek series. It was a bit weird connecting the new characters’ faces to the old familiar names they have been given but after about 30 minutes into the film, everything seemed natural.

If you’re an old Trekkie and haven’t watched this movie because it’s not a TOS movie, just go see it already, you’ll be blown away by the guy who plays Bones. The franchise is being continued, thank God, just not in a very strict TOS/Roddenberry way.

OK I first thought that the concept of zombie fire ants was incredibly cool in a scifi way after a colleague sent me the below link but after thinking about it for a while, this sh*t is a bit creepy.

Go ahead and read the story or the section on Wikipedia about this.

Crazy sh*t, agreed? Now scientists are using these flies as a pest control agent in several southern states which is where the creepiness comes in. What if the fly population booms and runs out of fire ants? Here’s a hint:

[the fly] is omnivorous. It has been reared from decaying vegetation, shoe polish, paint emulsions, human cadavers pickled in formalin, and even lung tissue from living people.

Does that mean that there’s a chance that we’ll become zombies? Keep your fingers crossed for the next mutation of this species and we’ll meet eachother in Ravenholm.

I don’t know how many times I’ve ran into people that need help with a piece of C code that should run perfectly fine but for some reason it just doesn’t. Of course, after much going back and forward, you find out that the person you’re trying to help is using Borland’s Turbo C compiler version 2.01, released 20 years ago in 1989..

While the compiler is freely download-able from several websites labeled as an “Antique”, it’s really not a great tool to start programming with on modern systems. If you really (really) want to use Turbo C, buy an old 286 and go at it but don’t use your Intel Core i7. Here’s why. PS, this also applies to Turbo C++

1. The compiler is 20 years old, it won’t support the current C99 standard so many things you might have learned, you now have to unlearn in order to get the program working.

2. Turbo C is an MS-DOS compiler, chances are if you are learning C now, you have never used DOS in your life; there’s no reason to go back, nostalgia doesn’t apply to DOS. Furthermore, Windows does not support DOS programs from the 80’s, so you would have to emulate DOS in order to get your programs working properly.

3. There are many free compilers available that are 100% compatible with today’s hardware and not bound by any limitations. Even if your Turbo C compiler is 32 bit compatible, it’s not a great match for your 64 bit CPU and Operating System.

4. You’re stuck on the command line interface with no way out. Even if you make the best command line program for DOS, nobody besides yourself will ever want to use it. Converting your program to Win32 requires a new compiler that will yell at you for using coding practices from 1989 and break your program.

In other words, if the following code compiles without warning, you know you need another compiler.

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
    printf("Hello, World!");
}

Been gone for a couple of days but I’m back with some cool stuff from Intel. Intel has posted a whole bunch of stuff from GDC 2009 on their site, you can check it out right here.

Interestingly, my postscript got answered, Intel has posted (a preview) of Tom Forsyth’s talk on Larrabee’s SIMD extensions, the full version should come online in one month according to the site.

As always with Intel (and many others), you have to read through the marketing crud and filter out the core.

I don’t often recommend books, especially when it comes to DirectX/Direct3D. There are many monstrosities out there that should never have seen the light of day.

Once per week or so I browse a local Barnes and Noble hoping to catch a book I haven’t seen before. It rarely happens since their inventory is very stagnant, but still. A month or two ago I accidentally browsed the Graphics/Web section and found “Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10″ by Frank D. Luna.

The title, publisher (Wordware) and cover were kind of off-putting so I almost didn’t buy it. But I’m glad I did since, in my case, it has become my number one DX10 reference. It’s compact, concise, always around my desk and well written so give it a shot if you have 30 bucks or so to spare.

Today Intel released it’s new issue of “Intel Visual Adrenaline” featuring a three page interview with Tom Forsyth about Intel’s upcoming Larrabee GPU, which is x86 based and fully programmable.

Click here to read the PDF, scroll down to page eight (8)

Larrabee will support a rasterization pipeline as well as raytracing but Forsyth mentions raytracing to be more of a technical feature than a mainstream implementation. Regardless of this, for graphics programmers this should be good as there will finally be a piece of hardware that actually supports realtime raytracing.

Direct3D as well as OpenGL will be supported in addition to the much anticipated programmable route, either through C++ or pure assembly, which should open up the card for people interested in parallel computing.

Sadly there’s no definitive answer from Forsyth on how many cores Larrabee will actually contain. I guess we’ll have to wait for that a bit longer.

PS, if anyone is at GDC listening to Abrash and Forsyth tomorrow, let me know what you got from it.

I haven’t been active at all in the OpenGL circles recently but apparently OpenGL 3.1 was released yesterday. Check out the specs by clicking here at Khronos.ORG.

I have been extremely skeptical about OpenGL 3.0 since it was more like an OpenGL 2.2 and did not implement any of the promised object oriented features that competing APIs like Direct3D implement. Thankfully, this release of OpenGL 3.1 seems to be better at first glance as it not only deprecates but removes the old functionality which has been in the way for so long.

It looks like Khronos has heard and listened to its outraged end-users and finally created a better specification. At least, upon first glance, that’s what it looks like.

With the release of OpenGL 3.1 also comes a new version of GLSL, version 1.40. Most excitingly, NVIDIA has released OpenGL 3.1 drivers immediately after the release of GL, showing that they’re way ahead in the game already (as opposed to AMD or Intel).

It is amazing to me that no major outlets such as Slashdot have picked up this this story and one has to find out about 3.1 by accident or RSS feeds.