Letter to my love

Dear love,

Things have not been easy this past year and some, but in that time I have grown exponentially as a person and for the first time in a long time, I am happy with who I am and how I have been acting. I still have a long ways to go in proving to you how much I have changed and how much I really do care about you, but that is coming. One day, when I say I’ll do something, you won’t roll your eyes, you’ll know that I’ll do it. So do not be surprised when I start doing things that are out of the ordinary. I am changing to be a better person. I have been inspired by my love for you. You make me so happy and I want to show you how much you mean to me.

Love,

Me.

Snowfall Memories

I miss snow and the deep cold. There is something so magical about waking up to the intense brightness of the sun shining off the fresh powder, stepping outside in only your pajamas and feeling that cold air brace against your skin, lighting up your senses and nerves, jolting you from your half-slumber state.

That is a time I will never forget, that snowfall in Seattle. Walking through the snow, arm in arm with my lovely wife, taking in the silence from the streets and the beauty of the falling flakes. Driving to downtown Seattle in an attempt to get some late night dim sum, weaving through stuck vehicles and abandoned cars, only to find the dim sum joint closed and instead having a very romantic dinner at the Palace Kitchen.

Those memories draw me back to Seattle and the north in general. It may be best to just vacation there in the winter rather than move back entirely. Either way, we’ll be following the snow fall, if only to create more everlasting memories.

It’s been awhile

Things have been pretty crazy these past few months, so I haven’t been able to really do to much with this whole Tumblr thing.

But since I’m here, I guess I can say something.

We finished up our game, Project Echo. It wasn’t what we wanted but it was something I am proud of. The people I worked with are amazing and I am very excited to keep working with a couple of them. I have learned more in this year from working on this game than I have at any other time in my life and I am very grateful for it.

Here’s the gameplay video of our Gold release. Hopefully you can view this.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/video/video.php?v=383216484138&ref=mf

Now I am interning at Titan Studios, doing some scripting work to test their Atlas Technology that they have been developing, while I also begin work on a new engine with a semi new team. We are called Retronauts and we are making an XNA title. I am in charge of the graphics engine and a lot other technical aspects at this moment. Hopefully, I’ll get to do some gameplay stuff and end up with a pretty fun game.

I am excited for the future. I have one year left of school. I’m looking forward to where the future will take me.

Progress

I seem to have dove deeper into a world that I am completely unfamiliar with, and so far, haven’t found anyone that is familiar with it to talk to.

I handed over fifteen dollars for a paper on Efficient Depth Peeling Via Bucket Sort. I really hope I can pull some stuff out of it that will help me gain the ability to have transparent objects and deferred lighting without being a big hit performance-wise.

This is exciting to me though, because it is something that is not easy and is one of the biggest drawbacks when talking about deferred lighting and if I can pull it off, I will be very proud of myself.

Here’s to experimenting!

Our game, codename ECHO, at first playable. Copyright Digipen 2010.

ayla-alexandra:

These days, I am one who dislikes more often than likes… BUT I don’t think that should make me be perceived as a negative person. I hate the notion that one must love and enjoy everything and constantly see a silver lining, to be positive. In fact, that should be seen as delusional (and commonly religiously affiliated). These people seem to have the most extreme midlife crisis.

Instead I think that I, and the people that feel the way I do, be seen as realistic. I see that the world is a mess and the number of academic intellectuals is far out numbered by stupid ignorant people (in offsprings especially). All one can really do is look at our disease ridden, war torn, undereducated, underpaid, lackluster society and not so much in vision a light at the end of it all, but claw through the filth to the surface. Perhaps it’s in vain, but right now I don’t see a valuable lesson or growth occurring. It’s true that it’s always been like this in the world to a varying degree, and perhaps it’s simply that I’m young, but things seems sickly and stagnant. There is hope somewhere, but not in this moment, somewhere far away in the future. I guess we’ll just have to wait… 

One thing at a time

One word at a time. Things are changing.

Moving Forward

Hey,

I believe I have jumped a fairly large hurdle thanks to a function I didn’t realize existed.

clip()

Call this little HLSL intrinsic function and if the value you pass into it is less than 0, guess what? No pixel is drawn. So that means, for my rendering setup anyways, that where there was no alpha blending before, there is a halfway there version of it there now.

This newly discovered idea, thanks to a fellow classmate, allows my artists to use alpha values on their textures to fake geometry on foliage, which if were done with actual geometry, would be very expensive.

I wish I could have used the Efficient Depth Peeling algorithm that I found, but it seemed like a lost cause. This new method is good enough right now and makes my artists happy, so I’m happy.

Push on towards alpha!

Epiphanies

Don’t you love taking a shower while thinking about a problem you have, say it involves your deferred lighting setup, and then all of a sudden, it hits you on how to actually improve your performance significantly while also discovering a way to do order-independent transparency?

I know I do.

It finally clicked in my head what people were talking about when suggesting, for an optimization for deferred lighting, to draw spheres instead of a screen sized quad. Now it seems almost trivial to implement. I look forward to this.

Not to mention stumbling across this interesting thing on Wolfgang Engel’s blog about order-independent transparency via a technique described as Depth Peeling. It didn’t sound too hard to implement and it would give our artists the ability to use alpha values on their textures so we can get some beautiful looking foliage going on.

A productive night and new ideas is a good way to set up for a completely productive week.

Beginnings of Deferred Lighting, shown with animated static creatures. Copyright Digipen 2010