Promit's Ventspace

A Glimpse of What I'm Working On

I’ve decided to focus a little less on complaining and a little more on the actual work I do. Here’s a teaser: I had a substantial amount of help with the over-water environmental rendering (not pictured) from a friend of mine, Nauful Shaikh. See his site for some great graphics work.

Follow-up on DirectX/XNA

Received today, and hopefully the “you can quote me” part means this is an exception to NDA because it’s important:

The message said “DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology.” That is definitely not true in any way, shape or form. Microsoft is actively investing in DirectX as the unified graphics foundation for our key platforms, including Xbox 360, Windows Phone and Windows. DirectX is evolving and will continue to evolve. For instance, right now we’re investing in some very cool graphics code authorizing [sic] technology in Visual Studio. We have absolutely no intention of stopping innovation with DirectX, and you can quote me on that. :)

My intent was not to start a firestorm of questioning on DirectX’s future viability, and I said up-front that I felt that communication was poorly worded with regards to intent. My frustrations were also apparently poorly worded. Since I accidentally launched this, let’s clear up a few things.

DirectX/XNA Phase Out Continues

Please read the follow up post. —

The Promise of Motion Control

I saw a blog post on IGN today: 4 reasons why the Nintendo Wii U will fail by Ian Fisch. I won’t comment on the WiiU, because I was one of the people who said the Wii was going to flop and man oh man was I ever off the mark on that one. But I did want to highlight a particular chunk of his post:

When people think of the massive success of the Nintendo Wii, they usually think of middle-aged moms playing Wii Fit, and senior citizens playing Wii Sports bowling at the retirement home. Indeed, the success of the Wii, much like the success of the Nintendo DS was due, in a large part, to casual gamers. We tend to forget that, originally, the excitement for the Wii was at a fever pitch among hardcore gamers. If you were a hardcore gamer then, you might remember sharing Eric Cartman's excitement over the potential of Wii's "motion control controls."

Gamma FAQ

I am working on Part 2 of my Digital Color posts, but it won’t be ready for a while yet. The goal of that post is to talk all about luminance, brightness, gamma, and the various other attributes and properties of how light a color is, rather than what shade it is.