30 minutes to 2007 !
Yesterday I went to Tokyo Disney Sea. It was very cold.. I got there in the afternoon and only had time for two rides, two small meals and some shopping.
Rides are fun I guess. But waiting in line for one hour to get 20 seconds of excitement doesn’t seem very fair !
It’s even more unfair to be sprayed with a coffee-milk drink: going back home, in the train I had the great idea to try a bottled drink I was offered. As I sipped in, cough kicked in and wht was in my mouth sprayed out on one guy and 2 girls sitting in front of me, standing in front of them.
Not much actual damage, but definitely one of the worst case scenarios ! I was ashamed but also laughing as I pretended to clean the poor victims. They were young and cool and didn’t say anything.. cool !!

zzzzzzzzzzzz

Posted by Davide Pasca as Diary at 11:38 PM EST

4 Comments »

Posting this from Google Docs & Spreadsheet .
Light years ahead of WordPresse’s pressing editor.

Enjoy and be gay !

Posted by Davide Pasca as Uncategorized at 2:58 PM EST

2 Comments »

Gears of War is a hot game. One morning I read about it.. the title of the game and the screenshot, and I said to myself: What The Fuck ?!
Tough war-scared marines, killing monsters. That’s the latest video gaming experience ? Wow..
I suppose I would like the game if I played it, but it’s sort of stupid, do we really need to constantly simulate killings ?

Technically it supposed to be great. The graphics, it’s great alright, great ugly monster rendering !
In my career as a graphics programmer I often got my monitor to display ugly things. It doesn’t take much skills, a bug, lower resolution, and you’re set for for your ugly experience !

I’m definitely not a Wii person. But isn’t it a bit stupid that so many top selling titles are about simulating war ? Craving for war, when we could instead go join real ones.

Next time you go buy Gears of War, or Deference, Defance (what’s the name of the PS3 war title ? Ahh Resistance !), Rainbow Six, Spersmackfackkill.. I don’t really know the titles. What’s that, Counter Strike.
Next time you go about buying one of those games, try to feel a little bit stupid, because one it’s got to be a bit stupid craving so much for realistic killing experiences.
And if you don’t feel stupid, try enroll in the military and ask to get sent to Iraq. Don’t worry, there is still time left to get training and be shipped over. I’m sure there are a plenty of disillusioned marines over there willing to exchange with you.. you killing machine you !!

Fuck those games already !!!

P.S. I’m not linking the official Gears of War site because it’s a Flash, browser-facking kind experience.

Posted by Davide Pasca as Society, Videogames at 6:04 PM EST

13 Comments »

I’ve been fiddling with 3D with the goal of implementing Shadow Mapping for almost a month now.
I spent quite a bit of time around the engine, ironing things, getting it ready to quickly plug-in shaders.. and now I’ve been stuck on the facking Shadow Mapping for several days !
In theory it’s nothing special, in practice 3D graphics sometimes really sucks !
The problem is that there is a general concept, a lot of half-assed implementations, many ambiguous discussions on the net, a million papers and books that focus on different details. But no real complete reference. This is for Shadow Mapping but also for many other things.

The main issue with 3D graphics is that one works with transformation matrices and different 3D spaces. Matrix manipulation is not that difficult, but millions of ambiguities raise with coordinate systems, order of concatenation, inversion of matrices… plus the fact that shaders are hard to impossible to debug.
Doing an actual implementation is a royal pain in the ass, and it’s especially sad that I tend to try solve by trial and error. Flip matrices, swap orders, try to do something like some reference implementation does… but never actually really being sure what details am I missing.
For example I saw some code arbitrarily adding w to (x,y,z) to the light-view homogeneous space vertex after being transformed in a shader. Why ?! Why the fuck ?!  ..nobody knows, there is no telling. It’s something that needs to be done because of the specific situation.
I hate feeling stupid and fiddling for hours with parameters. Trying to grow a working implementation out of web-searches.
It doesn’t help that I still don’t have a credit card to buy English books via Internet, and the best library with English books I knew here in Tokyo seems to have given up on carrying the good coding books. Of course one can find a lot of shit on how to use Office and code in Perl and Ruby.. but who the fuck needs those ?! I need my 3D books !!!
…but I also know that to get something to work one needs about 10 books treating the same subject. That has always been the case, but more so now that there are tons of Game Programming Gems, GPU Gems, ShaderX. All written by hundreds of people.

If everyone is so good, why can’t I find a decent explanation on-line ?!

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Posted by Davide Pasca as Programming, 3D Graphics at 1:54 AM EST

11 Comments »