07 Oct 2014
•
Games
After an incredibly long time of quiet development, our new game, I Am Dolphin, will be available this Thursday, October 9th, on the Apple/iOS App Store. This post will be discussing the background and the game itself; I’m planning to post more technical information about the game and development in the future. This depends somewhat on people reading and commenting - tell me what you want to know about the work and I’m happy to answer as much as I can.
For those of you who may not have followed my career path over time: A close friend and I have spent quite a few years doing R&D with purely physically driven animation. There's plenty of work out there on the subject; ours is not based on any of it and takes a completely different approach. About three years ago, we met a neurologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital who helped us set up a small research group at Hopkins to study biological motion and create a completely new simulation system from the ground up, based around neurological principles and hands-on study of dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Unlike many other physical animation systems, including our own previous work, the new work allows the physical simulation to be controlled as a player character. We also developed a new custom in-house framework, called the Kata Engine, to make the simulation work possible.
One of the goals in developing this controllable simulation was to learn more about human motor control, and specifically to investigate how to apply this technology to recovery from motor impairments such as stroke. National Geographic was kind enough to write some great articles on our motivations and approach:
Virtual Dolphin On A Mission
John Krakauer's Stroke of Genius
Although the primary application of our work is medical and scientific, we've also spent our spare time to create a game company, Max And Haley LLC, and a purely entertainment focused version of the game. This is the version that will be publicly available in a scant few days.
Here is a review of the game by AppUnwrapper.
More …
I’ve been in the process of building and testing a new machine using Intel’s new X99 platform. This platform, combined with the new Haswell-E series of CPUs, is the new high end of what Intel is offering in the consumer space. One of the pain points for developers is build time. For our part, we’re building in the general vicinity of 400K LOC of C++ code, some of which is fairly complex – it uses standard library and boost headers, as well as some custom template stuff that is not simple to compile. The worst case is my five year old home machine, an i5-750 compiling to a single magnetic drive, which turns in a six minute full rebuild time. Certainly not the biggest project ever, but a pretty good testbed and real production code.
More …
14 May 2013
•
3d
•
Direct3D
•
Non-technical
•
opengl
•
pixel
•
rendering
•
square
It’s good to review the fundamentals sometimes. Written in 1995 and often forgotten: A Pixel Is Not A Little Square.
I just wanted to share this. Popped up today while initializing an NSDateComponents object.
components:fromDate:toDate:options:]: fromDate cannot be nil
I mean really, what do you think that operation is supposed to mean with a nil fromDate?
An exception has been avoided for now.
A few of these errors are going to be reported with this complaint, then further violations will simply silently do whatever random thing results from the nil.
Here is the backtrace where this occurred this time (some frames may be missing due to compiler optimizations):
So that was unexpected.
There’s been a lot of chatter on the various blogs and news sites about the IGDA and Yetizen party incident. I’m not going to rehash that. See these articles if you’re not up to date on the whole controversy:
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/03/28/igda-party-features-dancers-prompts-controversy-resignations/
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/04/09/igda-defines-new-rules-for-future-industry-parties-after-gdc-mi/
http://yetizen.com/2013/03/30/official-statement-by-the-yetizen-ceo-on-the-yetizen-igda-gdc-party/2/
I will comment that I thought that the controversy was a wholly pointless manufactured thing and Brenda Romero’s resignation did not help anybody. That said, I was a little surprised to discover that the scandalous, allegedly inappropriate outfits that created all this trouble aren’t actually shown anywhere, in any of the news about the incident. At all. Not on Joystiq, not on the Gawker owned Kotaku, nowhere. I thought that was strange. Luckily I have photos of the Yetizen models from the previous year, so… here it is. This is the outfit that forced two IGDA members to resign.
Now you know.
Promit's Ventspace
