Year: 2007

  • The Sunday Poem: The Pangrammatic Fox

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 7 Comments

    I’ve got an even harder challenge than what I suggested previously. Construct a poem, or perhaps a haiku, using only pangrams. That’s not the challenge though. The challenge is do that and make sense. I bet you US$1.00 that you cannot do this. It’s impossible for even a Master Poet. ;P

    For those who do not know, a pangram is a sentence that contains every letter in the alphabet. (A perfect pangram doesn’t even repeat any). I went with a pangram per line, and in the spirit of self-enumerating pangrams, made the poem about pangrams, and their most famous exponent:

    The Pangrammatic Fox

    The quick brown fox, they claim, jumped the lazy dogs, over and more, forever
    cycling mad her quota’d alphabets, leveling Zipf, an indexed joker wild.

    Unlucky vixen, pangram beast, spending q’s and hoarding j’s, the thrifty ditzy wench!
    Why futz phonemes fro and to, when flow twixt verbs and jokes, the cogs of status quo,

    Delights us so? Books bursting free the japes, glyphs, queries, catalexis, zeugmas woven
    From words quotidian, to dazzle, vex, pry, illumine, beckon! Why judge letters equal?

    Math must be seizing Reynard’s mind, values coffling waxing jabber, equations poking
    Til nothing’s left except a pangrammatic sieve, quibbling z’s and k’s; hortatory, just, and swift.

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  • ACM Sandbox Symposium: Rendering Volumes with Per-Pixel Displacement Mapping

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 8 Comments

    OK, that sounds incredibly geeky. And it is. Here’s what Eric Risser just showed:

    250,000 unique asteroids that are each unique meshes, each turned into a single box mesh that is cheap to render, with the actual shape defined entirely in a shader.

    A sky full of tens of thousands of animating birds, each animating at a different stage in their anim, flying over the Everglades, in full 3d, so you can peek up close at them or fly through the flock — done as one single mesh, a single giant cube.

    A dog, standing still, with a high-detail texture and legs and everything, defined in a couple of textures and as a single cube.

    Basically, what Risser just demoed is an incredibly low-poly way of doing incredibly high-poly scenes.

    Very cool… but currently gated behind the challenge of having high-end shader support and knowing how to make shaders that can do something like this… And of course, any of these objects would collide as boxes, not as a high-poly dog. 🙂 Still, very cool. Usually displacement mapping is only used for making grates or bumpy walls…

    Some of the stuff he showed is available here.

  • Wonderland: BlizzCon pics

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 2 Comments

    Wonderland: BlizzCon pics

    It’s very big, bigger I think than I was expecting, but also very anti-social: everything that you could want (clothes, food, playmachines) has a MASSIVE queue, and then there’s lots of blank space in between.

    It’s funny how apt a description this is of World of Warcraft itself, in some ways. Like game, like con? A pity that the con can’t be instanced. 🙂

    I had dinner with the folks from Kingdom of Loathing just the other day — they play quite a bit of WoW — and we spent a long time talking about the ways in which design choices select for players and the way in which players gravitate towards design choices.  Referencing WoW specifically, we talked about how much the game selects for people who come to it with friends, and how unsocial it can feel for someone there by themselves. The case was made by them that you don’t want to meet all those people anyway. 🙂

    No one game fits all, of course.