Yesterday night I went to ageHa club in Tokyo to listen to Ferry Corsten.
I'm a big fan of Trance music.. it was great.. if only I weren't thinking all the time that I wanted to go back home and code !!

As I pretty much still develop on Windows, I've been using my Vaio laptop at home (not laptop from the company, they promised it once, but then took it back 8( ).
At home I only have a small desk and that's for the iMac. So when I use the Vaio it's on the kotatsu, with it's limited monitor and keyboard... not the best environment for developing (it's important to have a full size keyboard to write code !).

So, yesterday I decided to try installing Visual Studio on the iMac under VMWare Fusion. It works surprisingly well (I have 3GB of RAM). DX9 support doesn't seem to be there, but it's probably a setting or an upgrade. In any case recently for me it's either DirectX 10 (ewww) or software rendering (slooww).

Speaking of software rendering, I started with the idea of implementing a RenderMan state machine and borrow from RenderMan Shading Language. But the tendency is more towards Mental Ray.. which interestingly implements shaders as DLLs compiled in C/C++ (I've heard that Pixar itself does use all sort of languages to write shaders).

Writing shaders in C++ is one of my goals. HLSL/Cg kind of shaders are rather limiting, but for a good reason, those limits make it easier to write compilers that can parallelize operations. Still those limits are becoming unbearable and if shaders are written in C++, they can potentially run at the same level of a 3D engine on the same platform without having to create all those silly contractual interfaces like it happens with HLSL for example.
There will always be a problem with optimizing the interface between engine and modular shaders or any kind of module, but still, not having to worry about heavy state changes, buffering hardware display lists, etc etc, is going to make it easier to solve certain problems in different ways.

I see HLSL/Cg shaders like the (Macromedia) Flash of real-time 3D graphics: an excellent platform that can bring to great results with minimal effort, but a very limiting platform, eventually forcing a whole mindset to down the throat of an entire generation of graphics programmers.

It's important to be nonconformist sometimes !

woooooooo

今日は夏休みを開始した。一日中家に居た(^。^;)

Today was the beginning fo my summer vacation. I was all day home 8P

新しいカメラを買うに行くと思ったけど、結局よるだけで出かけた…日用品を買うため。

I thought about going to buy a new digital camera, but in the end I only went out to buy groceries.

しかし、何となくコードした。昨日の夜自分のプライベートアルバムのため、今日はTokyoClubbersのため。

However, I somehow did some coding. Yesterday night I worked on the private photo album thing, and today I worked on TokyoClubbers.

明日はちゃんと出かけたほうがいいと思う。ジムに行ったら…ehhh！！

Tomorrow I should really try to go out, perhaps even go to the Gym.. ehhh !!!

今日の作業に関して満足できない。

I'm not happy with my work today..

明日の方が頑張る！

Let's get busy tomorrow !

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz