Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Game developers – submit a SIGGRAPH Talk before February 18!

The deadline for submitting a Talk to SIGGRAPH is February 18 – less than two weeks away as I’m writing this.  Although the time is short, all game developers working in graphics should seriously consider submitting one; it’s not a lot of work, and the potential benefits are huge.  As a member of the 2010 conference committee, I thought I’d take a little time to elucidate.

SIGGRAPH 2010 is in Los Angeles this summer.  Although most people think of SIGGRAPH in connection with academic papers, it is also where film production people share practical tips and tricks, show off cool things they did on their last film, learn from their colleagues, and make professional connections.  Over the last few years, there has been a steadily growing game developer presence as well, which is exciting because SIGGRAPH is a unique opportunity for these two graphics communities to meet and learn from each other. The convergence between the technology, production methods, and artistic vision of film and games is a critical trend in both industries, and SIGGRAPH is where the rubber meets the road.

In 2010, SIGGRAPH is making a big push to increase the amount of game content.  Stop and think for a minute; isn’t there something you’ve done over the past year or two that’s just wicked awesome?  Wouldn’t it be cool to show it off not just to your fellow game developers, but to people from companies like ILM, Pixar and Sony Pictures Imageworks?  Imagine the conversations you could have, about adapting your technique for film use or improving it with ideas taken from film production!

Most film production content is presented as 20-minute Talks (formerly called Sketches); this makes the most sense for game developers as well.  Submitting a Talk requires only a one-page abstract and takes little time.  If you happen to have some video or additional documentation ready you can attach those as supplementary material.  This can help the reviewers assess your technique, but is not required.  If your talk is accepted, you have until the day of your presentation in late July to prepare slides (just 20 minutes worth).

To help see the level of detail expected in the one-page abstract, here are three examples.

A little time invested in submitting a Talk for SIGGRAPH 2010 can pay back considerable dividends in career development and advancement, so go for it!

Some Actual Larrabee Information

Tom Forsyth, one of the many programmers and engineers on Larrabee, passed on this link to a lecture he gave at Stanford on January 6 for their weekly Computer System Colloquium class. At the beginning he gives a bit about Intel’s view of Larrabee and the effect of “cancellation”, i.e., it’s not cancelled, just the first hardware release is off. He notes the day-to-day work of most Larrabee developers is unaffected. I appreciating him walking through the Intel position, as I haven’t been able to find any hard information (press releases, etc.) on their site. In retrospect, rumor-mill articles like this one (which we passed on earlier, lacking any sound data) appear to have extremely little resemblance to reality.

The rest of his lecture is about Larrabee itself. Early on he talks about the new instructions in Larrabee, something like Abrash’s article but more entertaining. Around minute 37 he gets more into graphics rendering per se. I’ve been listening to it in bits, in the background.

Shader variations and ifdefs

Morgan McGuire’s page is the only twitter feed I follow (though Marc Laidlaw’s Trog Act Manly But is darn tempting), as he simply offers up worthwhile links on computer graphics and on game design. Strangely, though, some ideas cannot be expressed in 140 characters. So, here’s our first guest post, from Morgan:

When experimenting on a new algorithm, I have a zillion variations I’m testing packed into one shader and a lot of #ifdefs and helper functions to switch between them.  Often you need the invoking C++ code to line up, and I’m always forgetting to switch the routines in both the shaders and C++ to keep them in sync…

I just realized that I can put my #defines in a header and include the exact same header into HLSL, Cg, GLSL, CUDA, and C++ code, since they have exactly the same syntax.  So I now have both C++ and GLSL files that say #include “myoptions.h” at the top.  Cool!

(Ok, my GLSL infrastructure adds #include to the base spec, but I assume everyone else’s does too).

US Gov Requests Feedback on Open Access – ACM Gets it Wrong (Again)

By Naty Hoffman

In 2008, legislation was passed requiring all NIH-funded researchers to submit their papers to an openly available repository within a year of publication.  Even this modest step towards full open access was immediately attacked by rent-seeking scientific publishers.

More recently the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy started to collect public feedback on expanding open access.  The first phase of this process ends on December 20th.

From ACM’s official comment, it is clearly joining the rent-seekers.  This is perhaps not surprising, considering the recent ACM take-down of Ke-Sen Huang’s paper link pages (Bernard Rous, who signed the comment, is also the person who issued the take-down).  In the paper link case ACM did eventually see reason.  At the time, I naively believed this marked a fundamental change in ACM’s approach; I have been proven wrong.

ACM’s comment can be found towards the bottom of this link; I will quote the salient parts here for comment.

ACM: “We think it is imperative that deposits be made in institutional repositories vs. a centralized repository…”

A centralized repository is more valuable than a scattering of papers on author’s institutional web pages.  ACM evidently agrees, given that it has gone to the trouble of setting up just such a repository (the Digital Library).  ACM’s only problem with a central, open access repository is that it would compete with its own (closed) one.  Since an open repository contributes far more value to the community than one locked behind a paywall, ACM appears to value its revenue streams over the good of the community it supposedly exists to serve.

ACM: “…essentially everything ACM publishes is freely available somewhere on the Web… In our community, as in others, voluntary posting is working.”

This is demonstrably false.  Almost every graphics conference has papers which are not openly available.  Many computing fields are even worse off.

Most infuriatingly, ACM presents a false balance between its own needs and the needs of the computing community:

ACM: “…there is a fundamental balance or compromise in how ACM and the community have approached this issue – a balance that serves both… We think it is imperative that any federally mandated open access policy maintain a similar balance… There is an approach to open access that allows the community immediate access to research results but also allows scholarly publishers like ACM to sustain their publishing programs. It is all about balance.”

What nonsense is this?  The ACM has no legitimate needs or interests other than those of its members!  How would U.S. voters react to a Senator claiming that a given piece of legislation (say, one reducing restrictions on campaign financing) “strikes a fundamental balance between the needs of the Senate and those of the United States of America”?  ACM has lost its way, profoundly and tragically.

As much as Mr. Rous would like to think otherwise, ACM’s publishing program is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.  ACM arguing that an open repository of papers would be harmful because it “undermines the unique value” of ACM’s closed repository is like the Salvation Army arguing that a food stamp program is harmful because it “undermines the unique value” of their soup kitchens.

If you are an ACM member, these statements were made in your name.  Regardless of membership, if you care at all about access to research publications please make your opinion known.  Read the OSTP blog post carefully, and post a polite, well-reasoned argument in the comments.  Note that first you need to register and log in – the DigitalKoans blog has the details:

Note: To post comments on the OSTP Blog, you must register and login. There are registration and login links on the sidebar of the blog home page at the bottom right (these links are not on individual blog postings).

Hurry!  The deadline for Phase I comments (which include the ACM comment) is December 20th, though you can make your opinion known in the other phases as well.

A Digression on Marketing

In my previous post on Larrabee I talked about the marketing of an ancient HP workstation. I ended with, “If anyone wants to confirm or deny, great!”

Followup from a reader: the story misses 3 additional changes to the machine. The more expensive business machine had: a bigger cabinet, more flashing lights on the front, and required 220 power. Apparently the business market wouldn’t take the machine seriously unless it required special power and wanted something with flashing lights so it looked more like a computer. The lights were completely random and the engineers wanted to hook them up so you could at least use them to see what was going on with the machine. And, no, the engineers didn’t win.

By the way, this isn’t meant as a diss against HP: I have two HP computers at home and love them, they make quality products. I’m just pointing out that even HP (which used to be known as the company that would market sushi by calling it “raw dead fish”) finds that marketing that contravenes rational thought is sometimes necessary. The “blinkenlights” story is a common theme, because it’s true. I recall an article (which I wish I had saved) from the early 90’s in the Wall Street Journal where people running the Social Security program were duped into thinking a computer company’s offerings were ready by being shown empty boxes with blinking lights inserted. “See, the computer is computing right now”. It was quite the scandal – front page news – when this ruse was uncovered.

Bonus quiz question: In researching (if you can call it that) this story, I ran across this site, which had an excellent question, “what was the world’s first personal computer?” Answer here. I was way wrong with the Altair. The answer, a computer I hadn’t heard of before, even bears on interactive computer graphics history, as it was the first computer experience for a famous graphics pioneer.

Real-time Mandelbulb visualization with GigaVoxels

See this post on Cyril Crassin’s blog (I just saw it linked on Tim Farrar’s blog and had to mention it here since it is wicked awesome and I wouldn’t want anyone to miss it).

Cyril is the primary inventor of the Gigavoxels technique which has been the subject of several recent publications.  The Mandelbulb is similar to the Mandelbrot set, but in 3D.  Cyril evaluates the Mandelbulb on the fly to fill the brick cache used by the Gigavoxels.

Mandelbulb + Gigavoxels = real-time Mandelbulb visualization = pure win.

Almost all of Ke-Sen’s pages now up

Ke-Sen Huang has put up almost all the remaining pages that were taken down, after revising them according to ACM’s requirements:

The only pages not up yet are those for ACM’s Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling (SPM) for the years 2005-2008.

Ke-Sen Huang’s paper pages are down, will soon go back up

We have mentioned Ke-Sen Huang’s awesome paper preprint link pages in many previous posts – they’re the best graphics resource on the web by a long shot.

Early last week, many people (including myself) were shocked to see most of the pages replaced by the following:

REMOVED – This page has been removed at the request of the ACM Publications Board

This resulted in an outpouring of anger as well as support for Ke-Sen.  Many people in the community contacted the ACM Publications Board to try to convince them to change their position.

Fortunately, the story has a happy ending.  Today, Ke-Sen received the following email:

Dear Ke-Sen,

As you are aware, the computer graphics community has expressed dismay and concern about the removal of your web pages. ACM wants to make it possible for you to continue this service that the community clearly values very highly. By this message ACM grants permission for you to repost the pages, with the addition of links to the authoritative versions of the papers in the ACM Digital Library. The author’s home page links may also be included, but should not be links directly to the author’s version of the paper. Please post on the site that the information is being provided with the permission of the ACM. This is the solution you proposed earlier, and it is clear from the community’s comments that it is the right thing to do.

As you know, the concern about your pages was ACM copyright policy with regard to links. As a result of the community discussion, ACM will institute a formal review of this portion of its copyright policy.

Please contact us with any concerns or questions.

Sincerely,

Patricia Ryan
ACM Chief Operating Officer

ACM also offered to help with the work of adding the Digital Library links.  So nothing will be removed from Ke-Sen’s pages, and additional useful links will be added.

It will take a little while until the pages are back up, but they will be better than ever.  In the meantime, you can go to the Way Back Machine and find his pages from 2007 and earlier.

The graphics community has engaged with the ACM in a much more active manner than usual, which is a good thing.  We need to remember that it is our organization, and it is only as good as we make it.  So consider volunteering for conferences, paying more attention to ACM elections, etc. – I know I will.

Flocking on steroids

Flocking (running a large number of independent agents with simple proximity-based rules and letting interesting behavior emerge) has been a popular graphics technique since the 1987 SIGGRAPH paper by Craig Reynolds.  The idea is, of course, inspired by examples from the animal kingdom such as bird flocks and fish schools.  Today I saw an internet clip of 300,000 (!) starlings flocking. With such a large number of entities, the flock looks like some kind of bizarre physical fluid or smoke simulation.