Developmentally Challenged

I just started week 2 of my first extended vacation. I think I am starting to get the hang of it, but it’s taking some effort. I haven’t taken any vacation longer than a week since, well, I’m not really sure when; school, summer jobs, internships, then I came to Eugene, where I’ve been […]

I’ve switched to using spherical co-ordinates to encode world-space G-buffer normals. This has a lot of advantages to it, especially for 8:8:8:8 G-buffers. You can now store [Theta, Phi, DepthHi, DepthLo] in the 8:8:8:8 target. Bumping the format to 16:16:16:16 not only gives greater precision, but (depending on the depth resolution you need) you […]

Here I thought I was special. Turns out people like Greg Ward have been looking at the LUV color format for HDR rendering for some time now. I’ve been perusing a paper from 1998 by Ward describing the LogLUV format. On one hand I’m delighted that someone else came to the same conclusions as […]

I just attempted one of the dumbest optimizations I’ve tried in a while…
The idea was to remove reliance on the back-buffer depth target so that I wouldn’t have to do a StretchRect on MSAA surfaces for a render target. The plan was to render convex shapes to the stencil buffer, using a stencil z-fail […]

There was a little SNAFU with the site, apparently, but my host rules, and the problem is no-more. It motivated me to blog more.
Lets get right down to it:
Guitar Hero II Sucks To Play

The game looks great, but it doesn’t play right. I just returned my copy for a refund because the guitar just […]

I saw the comments and I haven’t looked at the Xbox Live boards in months, but I guess the hiding is over.
Guys it really sucks just as much for us as it does for you, but currently we are unable to come to an agreement with our publisher for the Marble Blast Ultra update. […]

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I would like to take this opportunity to paraphrase one of our founding fathers…
Hot girls in slave-Leia outfits doing bellydancing is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy
-Benjamin Franklin

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
2006 Results
“I know what you’re thinking, punk,” hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, “you’re thinking, ‘Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?’ - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose […]

The Latest Insanity, courtesy of Sony

Every Sony press event brings new humor and horror to the console world, like this recent gem:
All of this talk of upgrading and expanding truly strengthens Sony’s claim that the PS3 is a computer. While some users fear the idea of having to continually upgrade their console time and […]

Quality video on YouTube that Ethan sent me.
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