GDC 2008

Today is the last day of GDC. In the past two days food quality has slightly improved. Though after the 1st day, the less expensive pass holders started coming: a lot more people !
There are very long lines to get the lunch boxes, but luckily they go pretty smooth.

A combination of jet-lag and night coding sessions brought me to a completely screwed schedule, with the advantage of not having problems waking up in the morning.. because by 4 am I'm already up (whether I slept 10 or 3 hours 8).

Some lectures were pretty interesting. I've been going to multi-core programming lectures (lots of them, sponsored by Intel) rather than more traditional lectures.. and completely avoided most non-technical lectures.

I bought a RenderMan book and I started writing a simple RenderMan interface !
There is a lot of talk about off-line rendering going real-time, but I don't think that OpenGL and Direct3D 10, 11, 12 are the right way to go about it. There are a lot of things that we 3D programmers on the real-time side have to learn from the pre-rendered world if we don't want to be always lagging behind the pre-rendered movies.

Of course pre-rendered will always win in terms of quality, but it's important to embrace the off-line rendering systems build pipeline and then go on about tricks to scale quality down without having to rebuild models, textures and shaders from scratch.

I see RenderMan the way I saw OpenGL 10 years ago. OpenGL was considered overkill for games, until Carmack started using it with the support of 3Dfx.
If Carmack today said we should be using RenderMan, I bet everyone would rush to it.. but it's me the one that is saying it.. 8)

GDC 2008

Same crappy sandwiches as last year.

I just coughed and felt like the shit was coming up out of my mouth...

Yesterday for lunch I went to this "Lori's Diner" in downtown. Supposed to be famous, pretty crappy indeed.
The floor was filthy, the service non-existent: the waitress didn't acknowledge us as we got in. Didn't bother to give extra silverware as the table had only 2 sets and we were a party of 3.
She gave us the burgers in a hurry and disappeared, other people went to pick up their orders from the cook 8)

The all-Mexican staff off duty kept playing around. One guy was counting money on a table and some other coworker jumping around, actually standing on the sofa with his shoes on at once.

Also, funny how the waitress on the check wrote "service not included" below the amount.. as to demand for a tip.
It was $29, we gave her $32. A 10% tip ought to be enough for a service that actually deserved a -10% tip !

The burgers were average to insipid. Do not go to "Lori's Diner", it stinks big time !!

In the evening however, we had crab for dinner (company dinner). Pretty good, and so was the service ..though a cleaner managed to drop some crab on the boss of my boss 8)

ole'

I'm leaving today for a week in San Francisco where I'll attend the GDC (Game Developers Conference).
I'm not a big fan of the event, I'm more a Siggraph kind of guy. It's not that I'm one of those pricks that thinks that graphics in games is everything, it's that I just don't care so much about game business. When I play games (rarely nowadays) it's regardless of their graphics (Mario Kart on DS !!).

Anyhow, it will be an interesting experience, with business meetings and I'll get to meet some cool people !

Gettign into the subject... I like to take notes as the conference goes. This time around I wanted to go to the conference with a shiny new Apple laptop. I was ready to buy the MacBook Air even before it was announced (!). At the announcement I was pretty interested: "Wow... the thinnest notebook ever !! And it's pretty light too..." or is it ? As it turns out, my current Vaio SZ is not much heavier than the MBA !
Sure it's not as thin, but it's just as large.. and it doesn't cost anymore than I've already paid ;)
One problem that I have constantly is lack of battery life. I forgot how much is it in "stamina mode", but it's definitely not more than 4 hours. I'm always begging to plug my computer somewhere at those conferences.. it's a pain.

So, I decided against the MacBook Air and I instead bought an extra battery for my current Vaio. Swapping battery (easily, unlike for the MBA which requires a screwdriver) is hopefully going to be good enough.
Sadly the battery was incredibly expensive.. about 21,000 yen, or $194 !! The long-life one was even twice as expensive !!!!
For a little more I could have bought an Eee PC instead.. which I really wanted to buy, but unfrotunately it's all sold out in Japan 8( (also the battery life is only 3.5 hours..).

In conclusion, I think that Apple missed big time by not releasing a cheap and small sub-notebook.
Recently I gave to my mother my old Vaio C1/VN which she loved. In fact, she insisted to get it once she realized that I wasn't using it anymore. I've never seen her so interested in getting a computer ! And I realize now that she was right.. size is (almost) everything ! That thing with more RAM and with a larger battery, kicks the MacBook Air's ass !
Fack those large items, fack being thin (or being fat 8).. that's a joke, fack that 13 inches screen !!
Maybe it's that most Americans are 2 meters tall and weight between 100 an 200 Kilos.. so for them a MacBook Air is indeed a sub-notebook 8P

Anyhow, time to start finish packing !!

Phack packing !
P.S. I'm also packing a company-provided DELL monolith 8( ...but hopefully I'll soon get a decent personal Vaio 8)

Just as I was going to move back to Gallery2, PicasaWeb extended the free space to 1GB (and counting). So, i could upload more pictures from GDC and San Francisco downtown around the GDC.

The second day was again about lectures. I started off with the Physics for Games Programmers tutorial, but quickly realized that it was going to be pretty basic, so I switched to Large-scale Engineering for Online and Offline Games. It was an interesting lecture, on how to distribute and organize workforces, in the same office or spread around branches.
What I didn't like much was some guy from Unreal, talking about pair programming as a way to get programmers to work with much less distractions. Nice.. for you !!!  read more »

2007/03/04-10 - San Francisco, GDC

..I dunno.. lots of lectures, technical lectures are boring. Agile Development was funny.. It's morning and I've been up all day mostly trying to sort out picture dates. Of course I forgot to change the camera clock as I arrived. Then I found some software that supposedly was going to help me shift time in the EXIF data, but it more or less fucked up things. Nice going.. it seems like most of the software out there sucks and one just needs to write his own to get things right ! For note taking I've been using TiddlyWiki ..it's very simple, just great, using a decent theme and plugins (even supports math notation through MathML) ...forget MediaWiki, Apache, MySQL.. fack those, I spent countless hours trying to run them on my PC.. die complex crap !! we try to zzzzzzzz ! poof

Italiano in fondo. Italian version comes later.

English

I arrived today at 7:48... so said the airplane pilot.

Totally ignoring the suggestion from my company (I didn't remember that at all.. possibly because all the notes where in Japanese), instead of going to register for the GDC, I went to sleep. I went to sleep at around 12, after some internetting from the hotel and woke up at 5pm when a coworker called me.

The very first thing I noticed about San Francisco is the homeless people. There is a lot of them and they are all black.

This is not a discriminatory remark, it's only a remark. I remember Michael Moore claiming that you can't find blacks in California... sure you can !!

At 7pm I had a company dinner in Chinatown at the Chinatown Restaurant, nonetheless. The restaurant was the more or less opposite of Japan. The waiters didn't look like waiters but rather a couple of Chinese guys (possibly closer to the owners) dressing with a shirt with their sleeves rolled up. One of them actually managed to throw the "wet towels" to a couple of my coworkers, because of the distance.  read more »