Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Been playing the PS3 beta because it is an awfully addictively fun game. Don't think I will ever want to go back to a game with a trivially static play area again, no matter how pretty the developer makes it. Baked global illumination, forget it, just not good enough any more. Nothing compares to the fun factor of being able to leave your mark, to be able to interact with your surroundings, and to do that in a tank!



The point of excellence in game design is when a game provides more than just the sum of canned content generated in production. Otherwise a game is simply an interactive movie: you play to see the next scene, and when the end is found, there is not anything more to it. Sure there is the market for the interactive novel, but games since the dawn of humans have been about enjoying the interaction between people in a system engineered to produce fun in the process. By this definition, BBC2 multi-player beta definitely captures the essence of what it is to be a game.



Other devs out there should be taking notes.

You've got greater than 1 Tflop to play with on high end GPUs in the PC space, over 100,000 times more processing power than many of us started programming with, and more to come in future years.

What are you going to do with that?

Many of you are simply going to increase your resolution, provide a more pretty interactive novel. Others are going to push forward with something new, provide gamers with an interactive experience which brings renewed energy into the industry, and learn to wield the scaling of the parallel machine for something beyond just graphics!

Real Time Global Illumination Using Temporal Coherence

Martin Knecht has posted a video and his thesis on Real Time Global Illumination Using Temporal Coherence.

Time Flys and the Blog is Lonely

Too busy to write but links of interesting stuff,

Johan Andersson's Parallel Futures of a Game Engine
Direct To Video on Deferred Rendering in Frameranger
Sander van Rossen's Progress on Virtual Texturing
Aras's Post on Deferred Shadow Maps
Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping by T. Hachisuka and H. W. Jensen
Fermi spotted on Twitter
SC09 Papers
State-Based Scripting in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Quilez's Mandelblub

Demo Tube

Link Soup

meshula.net : Stone Soup - Thanks Nick for this post reminiscing of the exotic time before the common C compiler!

Real-time Parallel Hashing on the GPU - Neat paper, and poster at GTC. Builds upon Cuckoo hashing (using N>=2 hash functions instead of one, lookup requires at most a check of N places, insertion requires recursive eviction and insertion of the filled bin using the other hash functions), cuckoo hashing for N=3 hash functions can almost achieve 90% hash table occupancy. Paper presents parallel cuckoo hashing. First step is to use a high level hash function to divide the input into bins sized to fit into the local store, followed by parallel version of cuckoo hashing for the bin. Read the paper for more details.

Stochastic Progressive Photon Mapping - PPM extended to compute the average radiance over a region instead of a point.

Amortized Supersampling - Interesting, still problems with rapidly changing shading such as specular highlights, but great progress towards a complete solution.


Rudebox by Alcatrax




Jellyfish

Visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium the week before Halloween,