SteveStreeting.com

I’ve copied this message from ogre3d.org just in case there are those that track my blog more often than the main site:

2008 OGRE User Survey

One of the questions I always get asked when talking to other people in the industry is ‘How many people are using OGRE then?’. Compared to regular closed-source software where people can’t use it unless they pay, it’s hard for us to answer this question accurately, apart from pointing at download statistics (approximate 40,000 per month, if you were wondering). However, this doesn’t necessarily reflect how many people are seriously using OGRE.

So, why does it matter? Quite aside from it being nice to know, the practical reason is that the size of the user base influences how 3rd parties perceive us, and specifically how much priority is assigned to support requests we place with 3rd parties such as graphics card manufacturers and driver writers. Put simply, if we can show we have a large number of companies using OGRE for serious projects, the more resources we can get assigned to our support requests.

Since ‘gating’ downloads with forms requiring contact information is both undesirable and impractical in an open-source project, I’m instead running a survey to try to collect this information. It’s not perfect of course, since as an opt-in process it will ‘undersample’ the number of people using OGRE, but I’m hoping it will be enough. Please participate if you’re a serious OGRE user - the survey is short and sweet, and you don’t have to provide any identifying information if you don’t want to. However, if you are able, I would ask you to opt-in to provide a bit more information like your company name and projects, since having specific companies and projects to refer to can probably help our cause.

Thanks for your time!

I’ve had a pretty good response so far, in the last 12 hours or so we’ve had over 250 people completing the survey. However, the more the better! People I speak to at graphics card manufacturers etc regularly tell me that more definite information about the make-up of our user base is important for attracting more support resources to our cause when we need them, so I’d appreciate if you’d help us persuade them

With only a couple of days to go before the feature lock-down of Ogre 1.6, in time for a release candidate next week, I decided to squeeze in one more feature of my own - Alpha to Coverage support. This allows the use of Multi-sample Anti-aliasing (MSAA) on transparent texture edges as well as the more usual polygon edges.

It headlines as a Dx10 feature, but in fact both ATI and NVIDIA have exposed it on GL and on Dx9, the latter via some nasty ‘magic’ state hacks since Dx9’s API doesn’t include it. They weren’t as nasty as I thought though, and since someone raised it in the forum recently, plus the fact that I’d been manually turning it on in the NVIDIA control panel for OgreSpeedTree, I figured I might as well add proper support for it.

In the image (if you click to get the full-size version), you can probably tell that the leaf on the right has alpha to coverage enabled, and the one on the left doesn’t - the right-hand one looks nicer, obviously. It does have an overhead of course, but those with decent cards will appreciate the extra quality I’m sure, and you can enable it on a per-pass basis in your materials to target it where you need it, which is better than enabling it across the board in the control panel like I was doing before. I’ve tested it on Dx9 and OpenGL on my GeForce 9800, and my Radeon HD 2900 (I guess I could update that, but it’s only a test box after all!) and it works nicely.

Yet another reason to upgrade to Ogre 1.6

More patent silliness from those idiots in the US Patent Office, as they get exploited by soulless corporate types again:

US Patent 7415666: Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments

I really can’t imagine how messrs. Sellers, Grantham and Dersch can sleep at night, having officially claimed that calculating how far to advance down a document when you hit the PageDn is a significant innovation that warrants the protection of 20-year exclusivity that a patent brings. It beggars belief that an engineer could possibly think that way - I’m guessing a company-sponsored discount lobotomisation scheme, or perhaps it’s enough to run internal training courses such as ‘TKNGTHPSS101: Stifling innovation by patenting the bleeding obvious’.

Time to stop this nonsense. Now.

At the Leipzig Games Convention Sony announced several updates to its venerable SingStar franchise, and whilst the inclusion of Barry Manilow is wince-inducing, the inclusion of several Queen tracks on their compilation issues, and the announcement of a dedicated Queen disc for SingStar can only be a good thing. Not because I particularly like SingStar - we had it on the PS2 and to be honest the novelty wore off pretty fast - somehow picking up the microphone and crooning on your own or in a duet just feels like you should be in a seedy bar, full of beer with your arm around your best mate, desperately hoping the next morning that nobody had a video recording mode on their mobile. In contrast, singing in Rock Band feels a lot less awkward, especially when you have 3 other people shredding / drumming away. Maybe it’s just me.

The reason it’s interesting even though I won’t be buying SingStar is that it means that those who control Queen’s music are loosening their grip a little, and letting master tracks into video games, which hasn’t happened so far - this in turn might mean we’ll see them in Rock Band eventually. Covers of Queen tracks have appeared in several games, such as “Don’t Stop Me Now” in Donkey Konga, “Killer Queen” in Guitar Hero, and “I Was Born To Love You” in Elite Beat Agents, but no master tracks have ever appeared before now, as far as I’m aware.

Here’s hoping anyway, Queen are one of the major classic British rock bands and I’d love to see them in Rock Band, to go with other British favourites such as The Who, David Bowie, The Police and Oasis (I also hope they stop ignoring Supergrass some day, because I’m dying to play Diamond Hoo Ha Man). That is, unless Activision decide to try to sign them to an exclusive deal like they’ve done with Aerosmith and Metallica, although I’d hope the Brits will have more integrity than that. Harmonix of course have stated their opposition to exclusive deals with bands, sticking to their line that music should be able to be enjoyed freely everywhere (this principle also underpinned their support for instrument compatibility, something grubby old Activision opposed for ages until the console manufacturers slapped them). Whether this laudable approach will come back to bite them later as Activision continues to pursue the “business first, music second” angle I don’t know, but they have my respect for it anyway.

Ugh. I’ve liked the Prince Of Persia series (although I only mostly only experienced the latest lot as a spectator, my wife played them more), but I have some misgivings about the gameplay trailer for the latest one.

My gripes:

1. Firstly, all that jumping & grabbing. It really doesn’t seem very fluid, more of a vertical shuffling game than the graceful acrobatic series of moves I’ve come to expect of PoP.
2. That magic-using woman giving you a ‘leg up’ in mid-air seems to be a rather lame excuse for a double-jump system. From what people are saying it even sounds like her assistance is automatic,  saving you implicitly from death-by-plummetting (or rather, from the abrupt deceleration that comes at the end), which if correct would seem to completely undermine the peril that goes with doing aerial somersaults.
3. QTE-style combat moves that were getting repetitive even in the short trailer
4. That horrible Buffy the Vampire Slayer style banter. The American accent and jovial flippancy just grates on my nerves even in the demo. I know they have to be commercial, which means appealing to American generation X-ers, but it’s just completely at odds with the setting. I know they can’t give him a realistic accent and still hit their target demographic, any more than they can call it ‘Prince of the Islamic Republic of Iran’ and expect to it to sell to the white bread masses, but it just sounds so wrong. It may even exceed Assassin’s Creed’s ability to make the main protagonist sound like an annoying tit whenever he opens his mouth (Altair clearly should have been doing movie trailer voice-overs).

I might be being too harsh on the back of an early gameplay trailer, but I definitely have my misgivings. The graphical style is nice though.

We’re on the final home straight for Ogre 1.6 (aka Shoggoth), which should hit RC1 next week. One of the final features I wanted to squeeze in was support for Parallel-split Shadow Maps (PSSM), which uses multiple shadow maps per light in a hierarchical fashion to improve the quality while keeping the size down, particularly in outdoor scenes using global directional light. If you’ve played Assassin’s Creed, you will have seen this technique in action already.

For example, the screenshot on the right there is using 3 shadow maps for the single directional light, the closest one being 1024×1024, and the other two being 512×512 - together they are 38% of the size of a single 2048×2048 shadow map and yet provide greater detail. The 3 shadow textures are displayed for debug purposes on the right - notice that all 3 are using LiSPSM projection to bias the texture precision toward the camera which also helps. If you look really closely on the full resolution shot, you can see the transition from the highest resolution shadow map to the second shadow map about halfway up the screen, it changes near the top of the closest tree shadow. It’s quite hard to see though, which is kinda the point

One of the challenges with supporting PSSM is that Ogre had previously assumed that there is a 1:1 mapping between lights and shadow maps, which clearly had to be overcome - this limitation also prevented easy use of dual parabaloid and full cubic shadow maps for point lights of course. It was one of those things that had been languishing on my TODO for a while, begging me to find some time for it, and that’s where it still was until Pang Lih-Hern (aka lf3thn4d) from Malaysia came along and did it for me What a star! His initial patch allowed multiple shadow textures per light in a very sensible way, and he then implemented a PSSM facility on top of that, via our pluggable ShadowCameraSetup system (which he also extended in the patch to be aware of shadow map iteration). I adapted the PSSM code from his demo to be a little more flexible (it now handles any number of splits, and a more flexible split configuration) , so that setting it up goes something like this (simple projected shadows here, depth shadowmaps are also possible of course but let’s not overcomplicate it):


float shadowFarDistance = 3000;
mSceneMgr->setShadowTechnique(SHADOWTYPE_TEXTURE_ADDITIVE_INTEGRATED);
mSceneMgr->setShadowTextureCountPerLightType(Light::LT_DIRECTIONAL, 3);
mSceneMgr->setShadowTextureCount(3);
mSceneMgr->setShadowTextureConfig(0, 1024, 1024, PF_X8R8G8B8);
mSceneMgr->setShadowTextureConfig(1, 512, 512, PF_X8R8G8B8);
mSceneMgr->setShadowTextureConfig(2, 512, 512, PF_X8R8G8B8);
PSSMShadowCameraSetup* pssm = new PSSMShadowCameraSetup();
pssm->calculateSplitPoints(3, mCamera->getNearClipDistance(), shadowFarDistance);
pssm->setSplitPadding(mCamera->getNearClipDistance());
pssm->setOptimalAdjustFactor(0, 2);
pssm->setOptimalAdjustFactor(1, 1);
pssm->setOptimalAdjustFactor(2, 0.5);
mSceneMgr->setShadowCameraSetup(ShadowCameraSetupPtr(pssm));
mSceneMgr->setShadowFarDistance(shadowFarDistance);


Notice that I used Integrated Shadows, this is a requirement of PSSM since only shaders with integrated shadow support can decide on the fly which shadowmap to sample from.

My sincere thanks to lf3thn4d for helping us get this feature in to Ogre 1.6 (and to all those who send us patches in fact). If you want to see it and OgreSpeedTree in motion, there is a video available; that’s the low-quality streamed version but you can also download the higher resolution version if you want.

Oh…..my……God.

I stumbled across this for the first time ever today, and I’m left completely horrified. I thought it was only relatively recently that George Lucas had jettisonned his quality filter into deep space - sure, I could see the beginnings of his lunacy in Return of the Jedi’s Ewoks, but it was forgiveable (just). Then, I saw this TV monstrosity created in 1978 of all times, between Star Wars and the pinnacle that is the Empire Strikes Back and starring all of the major characters. Warning: this is a truly horrifying experience for any fan of the original movies, so brace yourself!

I’m not surprised Lucas tried to bury this, but now it’s back thanks to the magic of the Internet. It allegedly aired only once on US TV and once in Australia, which might explain why I’ve never seen it (I’m just not hardcore enough to be on the bootleg circulation list). This is only the first and last parts (out of a total 10); I couldn’t even bring myself to watch these 2 in their entirety. If you make it through them, congratulations, but I’d advise seeking professional help.

Damn, this game is good. The first one was great of course, but suffered from being a bit too limited in scope - it was great for a quick blast but the fact that there was really only one game mode worth playing (the other being a retro take on the same thing) made long sessions unlikely. The sequel resolves this by including 6 different game modes, with competitive and co-operative multiplayer variations thrown into the mix.

All the game modes are fun, and all quite different, with the possible exception of ‘Evolved’ and ‘Deadline’, which are variations on a theme; the former being ended by losing all your lives, the latter giving you a fixed time limit. The addition of new enemy types, and the genius of the ‘gates’, which both reflect shots (giving you extra points if you hit things with the reflections), and give you a bonus if you fly through them (destroying nearby enemies), but include the twin dangers of lethal points on either end and that they can lure you into flying into difficult situations to chase a bonus. Definitely a great risk / reward system. They’ve also changed the multiplier system, basing it on collecting ‘geoms’ from vanquished enemies, and it has no upper limit, leading to multiple-hundred multipliers if you’re good. It really does separate the men from the boys, and I can only look on in awe at some of the scores in my friend list (Falagard, how the hell?). This surely does harken from the arcade machine era.

‘King’ involves only being able to shoot while inside ‘bubbles’ which decay as soon as you enter them, ‘Pacifism’ is a grueling mode where you can’t shoot, and can only destroy enemies by flying through gates (incredibly tricky), ‘Waves’ is a continuous onslaught of waves of ‘rocket’ enemies that travel from edge of the arena to the other in great lines that you have to frantically shoot holes in to survive, and ‘Sequence’ is a series of setpiece levels that you just have to survive, destroying all the enemies in 30 seconds, and feature some of the most outrageously intimidating enemy sequences since Robotron 2084. If you’re not squealing like a girl by level 5 as you desperately bolt for cover, you’re clearly on some kind of chill-out medication.

This is easily my favourite arcade game so far, finally edging out Pac Man Championship Edition (a stellar game too - buy it). If this was 1982 you could put this in a cabinet and take it down to some public area and just watch it devour people’s money insatiably for weeks. Having just watched King of Kong recently (great film if you’re a retro game geek in need of some nostalgia) it seemed highly appropriate. Now we get to pay a mere £6.80 for unlimited number of plays - we’re so spoiled. Highly recommended.

I’m finally back at home and beginning to return to normal, trying to iron out the wrinkles in my sleep cycles. I’ve done 12 flights in the last month (I’m trying not to think of my carbon footprint, although at least I rarely drive back home) with a time zone range of 10 hours and I’m certainly feeling it - I’ll be happy to be settled in one place again for a while!

Siggraph was fine, very hectic with some long hours on the booth and some very late evenings at the office - as such I was lucky if I got to check my email for 10 minutes in the day, never mind trying to cope with the OGRE forum. I managed to meet up with a number of people from various companies in between working for my client which was great (such as AMD, NVIDIA, IDV, FMX), and even got recognised a couple of times by people I didn’t know which was kinda cool. On a personal level it was also great to finally meet Andres Carrera, aka Lioric, oFusion creator and long-time OGRE community member & GSoC mentor, who turned out to be a really nice bloke who was a lot of fun to be around. He doesn’t like to travel much and getting a US Visa from his home in Argentina is stupidly difficult so I was really happy to get the rare opportunity to meet him. I was also very happy to run into Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD and BZFlag again, which I always seem to do whenever I’m in the US!

It might have been nice to have some leisure time in LA, but there really wasn’t any time prior to or during the show, and I literally went straight from the closing of the show in the afternoon to the airport for my overnight flight, because I needed to get back in time for my cousin’s wedding yesterday. Luckily I made it, although a combination of sleep deprivation and jet lag meant I needed precision doses of coffee and Red Bull throughout the day

So, I plan to catch up with my email today and perhaps brave the Ogre forums tomorrow, although ‘catching up’ with those is probably impossible - I’ll skim and try to pick out anything important. My focus for the coming week will mostly be OgreSpeedTree and getting Ogre 1.6 even closer to RC status. The Google Summer of Code also finishes this week so I’ll be on hand for that if any organisation assistance is needed.

I arrived in LA either Saturday night or Sunday morning depending on whose watch you believe, and am coping with the inevitable jet lag. Working helps to some degree, since it keeps you active, until you hit that ‘wall’ where suddenly your brain holds up it’s hands and says “I don’t care what the clock says, it’s 3am”, before grabbing its hat and coat and sodding off, leaving you a hollow shell looking at a screen full of C++ going ‘buh?’.

I’m staying in Torrance since that’s close to my client’s offices, but we’ll be heading downtown to get registered for Siggraph today I’m sure. I have a fair few things in my diary for the next few days so hopefully I’ll be lucid enough.

If you’re at Siggraph too and want to say hi, drop me an email (sinbad at ogre3d dot org or steve at torusknot dot com), I’ll check my email as often as I can. Alternatively you may find me on the ‘Works Zebra’ stand on the AMD booth (#323) where I’ll probably be from 3:30pm Tuesday, 12:30pm Wednesday and 1pm Thursday. The company will also have a presence on the Vicon booth (#1101) at times although I don’t think I’ll be needed for that. Bear in mind I’m there for my clients while on booth duty though, so if you want to yak about Ogre & unrelated TorusKnot stuff we’ll have to arrange to meet again later on.