Things happen, but I don’t report much !
First of all, my dog peed on my futon
I finally saw DJ Tiesto live here in Tokyo. I went with a friend, it was a nice event. I took some weak pictures with my camera-phone while my friend took some better ones with the digital camera that he sneaked in (by virtue of hiding it in his underwear !!). They actually eventually caught him, but as usual, the pictures don’t get erased 8)
I said it was nice, actually it was very nice. Tiesto’s popoularity brought a lot of curiosity and enthusiasm. He mixed from 12am to 4am. And by morning I was very tired. The muscles of my legs were hurting for the next 2 days !
At work I’ve been doing some interesting stuff: 3D ..wow !! Working on both XBox 360 and PC. As usual the engine is developed in parallel for 2 platforms (useful for building tools, etc), but it’s been a bit of a problem because I decided to use OpenGL and CG on PC. The idea is that OpenGL can come in handy, and also CG is pretty much HLSL. But more honestly, I want to be multi-platform, especially I don’t want to be 100% committed to DirectX when PS3 will be using OpenGL with CG !
While CG and HLSL’s syntax is easily interchangeable, the system of passing parameters from the CPU code to the shaders is rather different. I find irritating the fact that one has to re-send parameters to each and every CG program, while with DirectX I can set the per-object or per-material parameters just once on some global registers, without the need to re-feed them for every shader.
In the past few days I’ve been working on some particle system. Trying to come up with some cool explosions. Using the XBox 360’s power to quickly test things without worrying to optimize too much ..eheh ! Doing “effects” is cool, but very time consuming. One enters this loop of changing parameters around, and hours go by, without much being actually done.. just testing different parameters.
At home I’ve been working on my latest videochat-whatever experiment. Working on and off, as usual.. but I already have some stuff going. Using the same framework developed during dsharingu, but with added clean-up. The video-compression part isn’t working yet, but that too, isn’t much of a big deal, as I have all this code laying around only waiting to be refreshed and to be put to use.
I can’t imagine how it would be if I were really starting from scratch. Nowadays there is a lot of stuff that one can grab from the net, but to actually put in place a whole application, one needs a minimal framework made of components known to be working along.
My code dirs are a junkyard, where I constantly go look for how I was doing something one some other program I wrote before.
It’s late, we zzzzz !!!
Posted by Davide Pasca in Programming, Diary