Excluding years before 1985 (when the conference was still “finding its legs” and acceptance rates were very high), the acceptance rate has hovered between 14.9% (1998) and 23.7% (2007).  The long-term trend appears to be that the acceptance rate is flat, and the number of submitted and accepted papers steadily increase.  In the shorter term, submitted papers appear to be flat or even declining after 2003, with accepted papers following suit (2009 has the lowest number of accepted papers since 2002).  I’m not sure why that is; a 2003 flattening seems too late to be attributable to the dot-com collapse and too early to be related to the big graphics conference restructuring of 2008 (where Eurographics was moved to spring and SIGGRAPH Asia was introduced).  If anyone has a good guess, please leave a comment.

I didn’t bother graphing the other conferences.  The Eurographics table only has information from 1998 (the conference has existed since 1979, only five years less than SIGGRAPH).  From 2002 on the acceptance rate has been similar to SIGGRAPH (before that it was significantly higher).  The I3D table is pretty complete; it shows consistently high acceptance rates, between 25% (1999) and 42% (2008).  Graphics Interface and EGSR (EGWR in earlier years) have similarly high acceptance rates.

New blogs added: Pandemonium, C0DE517E, Gates 381, GameDevKicks, Chris Hecker’s, and Beyond3D. Being a trailing-edge adoption kind of a guy (I’ve kept my Tivo 1 alive by replacing the disk drives three times so far, my cell phone’s $90 from Indonesia via eBay), I ignored blogs for the most part until last year, when I finally learned how simple it was to use an RSS reader (I like Google’s). My philosophy since then is that if a blog has any articles relevant to interactive rendering techniques, I’ll subscribe. Since most graphics blogs don’t post daily, traffic is low, so checking new postings takes a minute or two a day. That said, if I had to pick just one, it would probably be GameDevKicks, since it’s an aggregator, similar to Digg (though the low counts on the digs, excuse me, kicks, means that some things may fall through the cracks). This service means I’m off the hook in noting new articles on Gamasutra on this blog, since these usually get listed there.

Ogre Forums has been added to the list of developer sites. Ogre is a popular free game development platform. I can’t say I frequent the forum, but on the strength of this article on using the pixel shader to generate the illusion of geometry, there are obviously good things happening here.

The Unity Web Player Hardware Statistics page is similar to the well-known Steam survey, but for machines used by casual gamers.

A site that’s been around a long while and should have been on the portal from the start is the Virtual Terrain Project, a constantly-expanding repository of algorithms about and models of terrain, vegetation, natural phenomena, etc.

… and that’s it for now.