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

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)