Excellent Game Programming Book

I’ve lately been reading 3D
Game Engine Design : A Practical Approach to Real-Time Computer Graphics. It is
excellent. It’s exactly the book I’ve been looking for on my quest to
understand Direct3D better – it starts with talking about how a generic render
pipeline works and from there moves into things like collision detection, terrain
generation, and all sorts of good stuff.

But before you run out and buy it, a few caveats:

·        The
book is extremely thorough. In graphics, this means there are scads of equations.
While I think it’s important to understand vector and matrix operations if you
want to do 3D game work, I’ve been able to read the book without actually going
through most of the proofs and derivations. “OK, there’s a formula for
intersecting a triangle and a sphere. I’ll come back to the details if I ever
need them. Knowing where the formula is suffices for now.”

·        It
is not DirectX-specific. It’s fairly technology-agnostic, in fact. So if you’re
looking for something to teach you the API, don’t look here.

If you want some good theory and a big pile of pseudocode, I recommend it.

Site Upgrade Completed

Well, it was sort of painful, but I got the site up and running on dasBlog. Which,
I have to say, is a fairly big improvement on BlogX. If I can convince the powers-that-be
to somehow install CDO on the web server I run the site on, it’ll be even better,
since dasBlog has some nice email-related features.

Sorry if your aggregator blew a bunch of recent entries in your face as being new
– not much I could do about that. At any rate, it shouldn’t happen again
any time soon.

If you have any problems with the site or the feed, let me know by leaving a comment
here or by sending me an email, and I’ll get it fixed.  

Site Maintainence Today

I’m going to be cutting over to dasBlog today, so you may see intermittent availability
of this site. Further, your aggregator may show you a whole bunch of old posts
as being new ones. Apologies on both counts!

At any rate, no change of URL for either HTML or RSS content is expected – I’m
doing a bunch of work to ensure that nothing moves around on you from a URI standpoint.

Unexpected Repercussions

Here’s a little something I wrote last week that somehow never made it onto
this blog:

I’m here at DevDays in
Zurich, Switzerland. My talks start in about two hours, and I find myself with a few
spare minutes.

I just got done listening to an interesting presentation by Rafal
Lukawiecki on IPv6. It was interesting not only because Rafal is a good speaker
and the topic a relevant one, but because of a comment he made that resonated with
me, particularly so since I was (probably) the only American in a European crowd of
300 or so.

Rafal observed that the current version of IP (IPv4) has an incredibly uneven distribution
of addresses. In particular, he noted that some US universities have more addresses
assigned to them than the entire continent of Asia. While I found that surprising
enough, what really caught me was the implicit sense that having a global Internet
infrastructure that depends disproportionately on the US is a bad thing. This makes
logical sense for purely technical reasons, of course, but Rafal’s comments
made it clear that from a social standpoint, the appeal of IPv6 would not be
hurt by the current political climate.

I find the idea that the adoption of IPv6 might be due in part to the current US administration’s
global policies [1] amusing, troubling, and an excellent example of the Law
of Unintended Consequences.

[1] Policies with which I largely disagree, but I’ll leave it at that in this
forum.

A Bit of an Earthquake

You may have seen on the news that there was a small earthquake near Richmond, Virginia.
I live near Washington, D.C., about 100 miles from the epicenter. Here’s how
it went for me:

Wife: Did you hear something?

Me: No.

Wife: I’m from the Pacific Rim. That felt like an earthquake.

Me: I didn’t feel anything.

She was right, of course. She usually is.

New Articles Added

Frederic just shipped me the latest Direct3D translation, so you can click here to read “Rendering Basics” in Danish.

I’ve also started a new article, Craig’s Random Link List. For now, it’s just a few things I’ve thrown together, but I’m hoping to build on it over time to keep track of things I’ve found useful and/or interesting.

You might also have noticed that I’ve moved pretty much all the writing over from my old site. With luck, I can shake some time free this week to get redirects in place so I can have a single source of truth, which will allow me to maintain everything in one place without breaking any existing links.

Back from Switzerland

Well, we made it back from Switzerland. West is the easy direction in terms of jet
lag, but I’m starting to droop pretty badly at the moment. Hopefully that means
I’ll get a solid night’s sleep tonight – I woke up at midnight Zurich-local
time last night, and couldn’t get back to sleep before the alarm went off at
3:15AM so we could catch our flight.

At any rate, the conference was great. Most of the sessions were in German, but there
were a few in English. Based on the ones I did catch, I think the attendees got a
really great deal. And I had a great time delivering my talks on threading and on
Managed DirectX. The Managed DirectX one in particular went quite well – I managed
to cover the absolute basics of Direct3D, DirectSound, DirectInput, and DirectPlay
(including nine demos that all worked!) in 80 minutes. The slides and demos should
be up on the conference website either now or in the near future, but since I can’t
read German, it’s pretty hard for me to figure out which link it is, so I’ll
be posting the content here as well. Just give me a few days to dig through my email
and recover mentally.

The conference was also enjoyable in that I got to see some old friends as well as
make some new ones. I’ll refrain from doing the Great Blog Name Drop and listing
them, but I have to thank Sascha Corti in
particular for acting the perfect host. My wife and I both felt extremely welcome
and well taken care of.

Now that I’m back and no longer have conference talk prep work to do, I can
devote some time to a few projects that I’ve had on hold. In particular, I want
to get my blog ported to dasBlog 1.5 (just
released), to write the next article or articles in my Direct3D series (I’ve
done a bunch of reading and understand some things better now) and to finally get
a start on one or two games that I’ve been wanting to write. We’ll see
how it all goes what with the holidays and all the other, normal things that need
doing.