[research] SIGcrash

Yet again, like so many others, our work has been rejected. It is not worth it. We won't talk about it. Ouch.

Submitting a paper to SIGGRAPH is a very emotional thing in fact. You put a lot of you in each paper. A lot of ideas. A lot of time. A lot of work. But here it is. It is rejected. Well, well, well. Sometimes it gets in, often not.

Anyway, you won't learn about the cool stuff we did ... but it should not bother you too much since our work was not above the threshold ...

Ouch. It is hard to keep a cold mind :-) Of course you'll learn about our stuff, we'll improve the paper and find a more friendly place for it!

Tonight I just want to have a special thought for all those who put so much in their work and will see it rejected from SIGGRAPH. As a reviewer, I am part of the whole reject / accept process. Giving fair scores is not an easy thing. I know deciding who gets in and who is rejected is not an easy thing for the committee either. But well, it still hurts.

[gpu] G80: The gritty details

Icare3D just released some in-depth tests on the G80 behaviour Read it here!.

[game] Zombie gameplay

I just came accross this flash game 'The Last Stand':
http://armorgames.com/play/269/the-last-stand

I like the gameplay. Everytime I thought about doing a zombie game it was something along these lines: Build barricades at day, fight for your life at night. The game asks to choose how to allocate day time (repair, or search for weapons / survivors), rather than having you wander around and search for items. It is a neat idea.

[mmorpg] Notes on economy in MMORPG

By the Eternal Lands creator:
http://eternal-lands.blogspot.com/

[gamedev] Don't do it!

I just came accross this 'Why you should not do an MMORPG' page: http://sol.gfxile.net/mmorpg.html. I think it is really worth a read for anybody planning on doing something like a massive online game.

The main reason is that I strongly agree with the bottom line: It is a lot more fun to actually engage in smaller projects that you can hope to finish. My very first game project was very ambitious - of course I did not realize that at the time. Even now I just could not do it unless I stop doing anything else for 4 years :-) (and find some good artists to help! ;-) ). Now, note that I learned *a lot* from it, so I do not regret a single second the time I spent on it. But it would have been even more fun to have a game in the end. I am definitely not saying hobbyists should not engage in crazy projects - it is amazing what someone determined can achieve with a lot of work. So if you feel this is what you should be doing, just do it.

However, if you are beginning in game programming you should definitely start with a first small project. Just to experience how great it feels when your game is finished, when you prepare this final zip that will be available for download on your web site, when you receive first comments from players (typically bug reports ;-) ). Sure, plenty of people will tell you 'your game looks ugly', 'it's been done before', etc ... But it will be your game, your creation, your contribution to the ocean of 'fun time wasters'.

I recall when I did my first game. It was a Breakout game. I worked very hard. I was very proud. Nobody was impressed. The number of time I heard 'Why are you doing that? It's been done before!'. Hell ... not by me! But then, as you make more projects, as you gain experience with your game development skills, you'll start to make more impressive stuff. And then you'll realize it's not about being impressive. It's about making something fun. And this is where it starts to be both easier and more interesting :-)

Anyway, I agree with this web page. I know its right. I know I shouldn't. I am still working on this MMO game project ;-)

[dev] Tile based world

Here is a screenshot of my 'tile' world editor. Its written in C#. The tiles are Danc's free tile set (many thanks to him!).

I am sort of planning to use this for my next project - which is supposed to be a networked game ...

Anyway, making such an editor is a very good exercise, highly recommended! (I am new to C#)

[opengl] gluX

After a couple years without any improvements (I had a long DirectX period :-) ) I finally updated gluX with latest extensions (which only required running the perl script on the new header files!). I also added a mechanism to automatically load extensions on first function call (Thanks to Xadec for suggesting the idea a long time ago). This simplifies using gluX, even though it is less 'robust' than declaring used extensions - if an extension is missing the program will exit on the missing function call. But of course both mechanisms are available and can work together!

gluX is here!