Portland_2008_01 (public)

I arrived in Portland (OR) a couple of days ago and I'm going back to Tokyo tomorrow !
It was my first time here, though I've been in Oregon before.
Compared to San Francisco, Portland looks a lot more safe. But also deadly cold. It seems that most people wear hats, and I can see why. One day I had my ears freezing from the cold wind.. so hats after all aren't just a fashion thing !!

I'm here for business, but I can't really talk about it. Exciting things, but I still think I'd be more excited if I got a substantial pay raise ;) ..cough cough !
I'll be back on Sunday and Monday already to work. I want to get busy with code, but instead there will be some management/business/financial things to talk about.

Talking about code. Just before leaving, I made some sensible changes to the engine I'm currently working on.
There really isn't a proper way to do anything. One can throw random polygons at a rasterizer and get terrible performance or group geometry (and textures) in a certain hardware-friendly fashion.
Depending on the file format and on the average organization of mesh data, one has to come up with the best compromise. So, for example, in most cases having every polygon listing a different material is a bad idea.
Then one can group polygon lists using the same material, but do those polygon lists all share a common vertex pool or should every polygon list have a separate vertex pool ?
If lists are few and made of many polygons, then it may be wiser to have separate vertex pools, this is also because if every list has a different material, different materials could imply different vertex attributes (if there is no texture, then there is no need for texture coordinates, etc).
This also reminds me of the pain of using uber-shaders (long shaders) with DX10. Sometimes long shaders will ignore some input vertex data, but feeding null buffers gets DX10 debug mode to spit out thousands of warning messages in the output console.
I dunno.. DX10 doesn't really seem like the ultimate solution. It shifts the weight of state changes towards the application program, which is nice and not so nice at the same time.

And finally, some great news ! I'm leaving in 5 hours and I still haven't lost my digital camera 8)

woooooo  read more »