Thought for the Day

From here, no idea who made it; I’d like to shake his hand. Found here, but the poster found it via StumbleUpon.

HDR in games

Having seen way too much bloom on the Atacama Desert map for the Russian pilots in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (my current addiction, e.g. this and this), I can relate.

Edit: please do read the comments for why both pairs of images are wrong. I’m so used to HDR == tone mapping that I pretty much forgot the top pair is also technically incorrect (HDR is the range of the data, tone mapping can take such data and map it nicely to a displayable 8-bit image without banding) – thank you, Jaakko.

FMX and Triangle Game Conference 2010

This post is about two conferences that might not be as familiar to readers of this blog as SIGGRAPH and GDC.

FMX is an annual conference run by the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, held in Stuttgart, Germany at the beginning of May.  This year is the 15th one for FMX, and the content appears quite promising.

There are a bunch of game talks, including talks about Split/Second, Heavy Rain, Fight Night 4, Alan Wake, Habbo Hotel, two talks on God of War III and one on Arkham Asylum (the last three are repeats of GDC talks).  However, most of the talks relate to film production, including presentations on The Princess and The Frog, Tangled, 2012, Alice in Wonderland, Ice Age 3, Iron Man 2, Clash of the Titans, Sherlock Holmes, District 9, Shutter Island, Planet 51, Avatar, A Christmas Carol, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, How to Train Your Dragon, and Where the Wild Things Are.  FMX 2010 also has various master classes on the use of various DCC applications and middleware libraries, recruiting talks, presentation of selected SIGGRAPH 2009 papers, and more.  Attendance fees are quite reasonable (200 Euros, 90 for students) so this conference should be good value for readers in Europe who can travel cheaply to Germany.

The Triangle Game Conference is held in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Its name comes from the “research triangle” defined by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.  This area is home to several prominent game companies, such as Epic Games, Red Storm Entertainment, and branches of Electronic Arts and Insomniac Games.  I first heard of this conference last year, when it hosted a very good talk by Crytek on deferred shading in CryEngine 3.  This year, the content looks interesting, if a bit mixed; the presentations by Epic and Insomniac seem to be the best ones.  Definitely worth attending if you’re in that area, but I wouldn’t travel far for it.

Morphological Antialiasing in God of War III

Eric wrote a post back in July about a paper called Morphological Antialiasing which had been presented at HPG 2009 (source code for the paper is available here).  The paper described a post-processing algorithm which could smooth out edges as if by magic.  Although the screenshots were impressive, the technique seemed too expensive to be practical for games on current hardware; also there were reportedly bad artifacts when applied to moving images.  For these reasons I didn’t pay too much attention to the technique.  It was reported (including by us) that the game The Saboteur was using this technique on the PS3 but this turned out to be a false alarm.

However, God of War III is actually using Morphological Antialiasing.  I’ve looked closely at the game and the technique they use appears not to exhibit significant motion artifacts; it definitely looks better than the MSAA2X technique it replaced (which was used in the E3 2009 demo).  According to the game’s art director, the technique used “goes beyond” the original paper; this may mean that they improved it in ways that reduce the motion artifacts.

My initial impression that the technique is too expensive did not take into account the impressive horsepower of the PS3’s Cell chip.  After optimization, the technique runs in 20 milliseconds on a single SPU; running it on 5 SPUs in parallel enables it to complete execution in 4 milliseconds.  Most importantly, turning off MSAA saved them 5 milliseconds of GPU time, which on the PS3 is a significant gain (the GPU is most often the bottleneck on PS3 games).

Best Book Title Ever, Period

I’ll get back to actual informational posts realsoonnow when I have some time, but I had to put this up immediately.

Amazon sent this one on to me, a book recommendation entitled Polygon Mesh: Unstructured Grid, 3D Computer Graphics, Solid Modeling, Convex Polygon, Rendering, Vertices, Computational Geometry. I am a bit sad there’s no cover image nor “Look Inside!” feature; it’s these little touches that no doubt would have convinced me to lay out $47 for such a fine-sounding volume, even though it’s only 88 pages long. The book Rasterisation: Vector Graphics, Raster Graphics, Pixel, Rendering, 3D Computer Graphics, Persistence of Vision, Ray Tracing by the same editor has a nice cover (though no “Look Inside!”), but at $62 is just a dollar too much for me.

The first of three editors for both books, Lambert M. Surhone, has 18,247 books that he’s worked on personally. Miriam T. Timpledon and Susan F. Marseken are also pretty productive, with 17,697 titles each. If they would only take a chance to break out and edit their own books, they could overtake Lambert in no time, I’m sure.

Welcome to Betascript Publishing. The idea is to grab (possibly) related Wikipedia pages, print them out, and put them in a book. More about this here. I don’t know who would buy such books, but I guess you need just 100 customers to net you perhaps $5000 or more. Peculiar. I expect with 18,247 titles, there are likely to be a hundred that sound like real books. The part that is sad to me is to see such books listed on foreign bookseller pages. I guess the good news is that the system works only once per customer, though I would guess the next step is to make 18,247 imprint names with 18,247 different editor names.

I thought the editors’ names were perhaps anagrams. Using the Internet Anagram Server, the first combination for each name is:

Lambert M. Surhone gives Blather Summoner

Miriam T. Timpledon gives Immolated Imprint

Susan F. Marseken gives Frankness Amuse

Probably just a coincidence. Anyway, I am frankly unamused by the idea of books automatically being produced, then automatically being recommended by Amazon, given that some people will undoubtedly pay for something they could get for nothing.

Now I just need an AI that will automatically buy these with robo-dollars and the cycle will be complete. Really, better yet would be to write a script that would automatically post a review for each one and note the content is free on Wikipedia. That would be the best automation of all.

Update: I wrote Amazon to complain. They reply (among other boilerplate sentences), “As a retailer, our goal is to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover, and buy any item they might be seeking.” They forgot the words “and pay us.” No one in their right mind seeks to pay for information they could get for free. It turns out Betascript is just one of three imprints under VDM Publishing – reading the Wikipedia article on VDM Publishing is fascinating, especially the discussion section. Amazon currently lists 38,909 Alphascript and 18,289 Betascript books, plus 321 books in German by Fastbook Publishing.

If you’re as disgusted by Amazon’s behavior as I am, I suggest two strategies: write and complain (and get a boilerplate response, but enough complaints might add up) by going here and clicking on Contact Us in the right column, and post 1-star reviews for any of these you run across, e.g., mine here – something to do while waiting for your code to compile.

Update: as of January 24th, 2011, Alphascript is up to 112,420 titles and Betascript has 230,460 titles. What a crock – shame on you, Amazon. Sadly, Miriam and Susan never caught up to Lambert: he has 230,535 titles to his name, while they each have only 69,395.

One more update: see my followup article here.

Bring On the Errors!

We just found out that we’re about due for a second printing of “Real-Time Rendering, 3rd Edition.” A new printing means we can correct small errors. So, please, let us know of any mistakes or glitches you’ve found in the book, no matter how minor. Our list of known corrigenda (fancy name for errors) is here, and the very minor errors here. Due date is April 13th.

CFP for “Game Development Tools” book

Marwan Ansari has put out a call for participation (i.e., articles) for an upcoming book, “Game Development Tools”. The CFP is short, so I’ve included it below. Please pass on the URL http://gamedevelopmenttools.com/ for the book’s website to anyone you think would be interested.

To me, the things I most appreciate from Marwan are his two articles in ShaderX 2: Tips & Tricks (free for download). These are still relevant today: “Advanced Image Processing with DirectX® 9 Pixel Shaders” (written with Jason Mitchell, now at Valve, and Evan Hart, and the article “Image Effects with DirectX® 9 Pixel Shaders”. He’s worked for a number of games companies since his ATI days.

The CFP:

We invite you to submit a proposal for an  innovative article to be included in a forthcoming book, Game Development Tools, which will be edited by Marwan Y. Ansari and published by A. K. Peters. We expect to publish the volume in time for GDC 2011.

We are open to any tools articles that you feel would make a valuable contribution to this book.

Some topics that would be of interest include:

  • Content Pipeline tools (creation, streamlining, management)
  • Graphics/Rendering tools
  • Profiling tools
  • Collada import/export/inspection
  • Sound tools
  • In-Game debugging tools
  • Memory management & analysis
  • Console tools (single and cross platform)

This list is not meant to be exclusive and other topics are welcome.

The schedule for the book is as follows:

June 30th           – All proposals in.

July 15th            – Final list of accepted authors are informed and begin articles.

August 15th       – First draft in to editor

September 15th  – Drafts sent to other book authors for peer review

October 15th      – Final articles in to editor

November 30th   – Final articles to publisher (A K Peters)

GDC 2011          – Book is released.

Please send proposals to marwan at gamedevelopmenttools dot com.

SIGGRAPH 2010 hotel room reservation service is open

Really, the title says it all, just go to the SIGGRAPH site and reserve one now. Even if there’s only a 5% chance you’ll go, book one anyway; you’re not charged until after July 9th and can cancel at any time. When you cancel your room will almost assuredly be snapped up by someone else. I’ve lost count of the times people have told me, “well, I had to stay 3 miles outside the city, next to the freeway”—no, you didn’t, you just had to book now.

Me, I like the Figueroa for walkability and its bar & pool area (plus it’s next to the brand new HQ hotel this year), some people like the Holiday Inn as it’s generally less funky, is even closer, but across the wide street. Neither is a bargain this year; the Ritz Milner is a bargain and is walkable, but has some downsides. Everything else is about in the same $143-$199 price range except some of the more distant hotels (Kawada, Wilshire Plaza), but of course these have shuttle service. See the map, and prices are listed on the second page.

Just Cause 2 makes 3

A demo of the game Just Cause 2 is available on Steam today. What’s interesting is that this is the third DirectX 10-only game to be released. There have been any number of DirectX 10 enhanced games, but until a few months ago there was just one DirectX 10-only game release, Stormrise, a mediocre game released in March 2009. Shattered Horizon then came out in November from Futuremark, who are known more for their graphics benchmarks. Just Cause 2 is a sequel, and distributed by a well-known publisher. Humus describes the logic in going DirectX 10-only.

I’m looking forward to see how DirectX 11’s DirectCompute gets used in commercial applications. Perhaps the day there’s a DirectX 11-only game of any significance is the day we need to start writing a fourth edition. Let’s see: DirectX 10 was released November 2006 with Vista, so it took about three and a quarter years for an anticipated game to be released that was DirectX 10-only (and even now it’s considered dangerous by many to do so). DirectX 11 was released in October 2009, so if the same rule holds, then we’ll need to start writing in February 2013. Pre-order today!

Even now, 13% of Steam gamers have only SM 2.0. Games like World of Warcraft and Left 4 Dead 2 don’t require more, for example. So what’s the magic percentage where the AAA games decide to set the minimum level to the next shader model? I don’t recall it being much of a deal between shader model 2.0 and 3.0 games; there was a little hype, but I think this was because going from SM 2.0 to 3.0 involved just a card upgrade, vs. an OS upgrade. Which is funny, in that an OS upgrade is usually cheaper than a new GPU, but I think it’s also because it’s more critical, like a heart transplant vs. a cornea transplant.

Poking around, I found the interesting graphs below. I’m sure games have been left off, and some are miscategorized, e.g. Cryostatis is the only one under SM 4.0, and it doesn’t require DirectX 10. But, let’s assume this data is semi-reasonable; I’m guessing the games are categorized more by a “recommended configuration” than a minimum. So Shader Model 1.x game releases (and remember, 1.x was pretty darn limited) peaked in 2006, 2.0 peaked in 2007 but outnumbered 3.0 until 2009. SM 3.0 hasn’t peaked yet, I’d say (ignore 2010 and 2011 graph values at this point, of course). Remember that SM 2.0 hardware came out around 2002, so it peaked 5-6 years later and still was strong 7 years later (and perhaps longer, we’ll see). SM 3.0 came out in 2004, and seems likely to continue to be strong through 2010 and into 2011. 4.0 came out in 2006, so I’d go with it peaking in 2011-2012 from just staring at these charts. Which entirely ignores the swirl of other data—Vista and Windows 7, Xbox trends, GPU trends, blah-di-blah—but it’ll be interesting to see if this prediction is about right. (Click on a graph for the lists of games for that shader model.)

Shader Model 1.x

Shader Model 2.0

Shader Model 3.0