071115 / Critic II

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Ok, only two blog posts...

Genius in Mario Galaxy

The true genius of the Mario Galaxy game is in how they have found a workaround for the under powered Wii graphics hardware. Simply reduce both the geometry and fragment fill by building sparse small worlds. Simply awesome!

Image Processing In the Game Graphics Pipeline

Ultimately games will end up with a film like image post processing and compositing engine. Sure the hardware is not fast enough yet, but it will be in my lifetime. Little Big Planet is a great example with its integrated motion blur and depth of field. Looking at the screen shot, they are doing a image space blur which has image space velocity and is semi-depth aware (see the color bleeding between some foreground and background elements). Interesting results on the rolling wheels...

How about something even more OT...

Thou Know Thou Ist In Hell When

Dealing with Linux developers dynamic linking abuse.

No matter how you write it, the story ends with tons of wasted time and lots of profanity. Why re-invent the wheel? Sure hear that a lot these days, and the results of this can been seen in the multi-page library dependency trees of most Linux applications. KISS, Keep it Simple Stupid! Yep, has been tossed out the window.

The point is the same on Mac, Windows, and Linux: hardware gets faster, software gets slower! Net result, my wife is at the gym power lifting to take out the frustration of dealing with many second user response latency. No joke here, she is dead-lifting her own weight now, and I'm under 100 lbs from joining the 1000 lbs club (which is tough for a tall once skinny programmer).

Busy with Photography



All this dynamic linking mess is in regards to getting the libraries needed for an open source photo-stitching tool working on the Linux machine so that I can off load my over-burdened Mac which just cannot handle stitching of GB files. Unfortunately I have about a 2-3 week backlog of Photography work which has been and is going to take me away from Atom for a while ... hence the OT posts and lack of Atom updates!