{"id":108,"date":"2009-07-18T08:08:01","date_gmt":"2009-07-18T14:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/?p=108"},"modified":"2009-07-18T22:02:40","modified_gmt":"2009-07-19T04:02:40","slug":"7-things-for-july-18th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/7-things-for-july-18th\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Things for July 18th"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I have 69 links stored up, wade through them <a href=\"http:\/\/delicious.com\/erich666\/rtrblog\">here<\/a> if you want unedited content. I&#8217;ve decided that getting 7 links out per post is a good round number, so here&#8217;s the first.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>This is my screen-saver du jour: <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/pixelcity\/downloads\/list\">Pixel City<\/a> (put the .scr file in your Windows directory). It&#8217;s fully described (along with source) in this <a href=\"http:\/\/flowingdata.com\/2009\/05\/14\/pixel-city-computer-generated-city\/\">great set of articles<\/a>; if you&#8217;re too busy to read it all (though you should: it&#8217;s an fun read and he has some interesting insights), watch the video summary on that page. If you feel like researching the area of procedural modeling of cities more thoroughly, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vision.ee.ethz.ch\/~pmueller\/wiki\/Courses\/SIGGRAPH2006\">start here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>The book <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Real-Time-Cameras-Mark-Haigh-Hutchinson\/dp\/0123116341?tag=realtimerenderin\">Real-Time Cameras<\/a><\/em>, which is about camera control for games, now has a <a href=\"http:\/\/gamasutra.com\/php-bin\/article_display.php?story=4065\">sample excerpt<\/a> on Gamasutra.<\/li>\n<li>NPR: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.princeton.edu\/~fcole\/\">Forrester Cole<\/a> has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.princeton.edu\/gfx\/pubs\/Cole_2009_FHL\/index.php\">two worthwhile GPU methods<\/a> for deriving visible line segments for a set of edges (e.g., computing partial visibility of geometric lines). He&#8217;s put source code for his methods up at his site, the program &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.princeton.edu\/gfx\/proj\/dpix\/\">dpix<\/a>&#8220;. Note: you&#8217;ll need Qt to compile &amp; link.<\/li>\n<li>The author of the <a href=\"http:\/\/legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com\/\">Legalize Adulthood blog<\/a> has recently had a number of <a href=\"http:\/\/legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com\/category\/computers\/programming\/directx\/\">posts on using DirectX10<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>DirectX9 is still with us. Richard Thomson has a free draft of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xmission.com\/~legalize\/book\/download\/\">his book about DirectX 9<\/a> online. He knows what he&#8217;s about; witness his detailed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xmission.com\/~legalize\/book\/preview\/poster\/index.html\">pipeline posters<\/a>. The bad news is that the book&#8217;s coverage of shaders is mostly about 1.X shaders (a walk down memory lane, if by &#8220;lane&#8221; you mean &#8220;horrifically complex assembly language&#8221;). The good news is that there&#8217;s some solid coverage of the theory and practice of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xmission.com\/~legalize\/book\/download\/06-Vertex%20Transformations.pdf\">vertex blending<\/a>, for example. Anyway, grist for the mill &#8211; you might find something of use.<\/li>\n<li>Around September I have 6 weeks off, so like every other programmer on the planet I&#8217;ve contemplated playing around with making a program for the iPhone. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/feature\/4038\/persuasive_games_i_want_my_99_.php\">economics<\/a> are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stromcode.com\/2009\/05\/24\/the-incredible-app-store-hype\">terrible<\/a> for most developers, but I&#8217;d do it just for fun. It&#8217;s also interesting to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/feature\/4002\/iphone_devs_rethinking_the_art_of_.php\">see people thinking<\/a> about what this new platform means for games. Naturally, Wolfenstein 3D, the &#8220;Hello World&#8221; of 3D games, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geeks3d.com\/20090325\/source-code-of-wolfenstein-3d-for-the-iphone-available\/\">has been ported<\/a>. Andrew Glassner recommended\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Beginning-iPhone-Development-Exploring-SDK\/dp\/1430216263?tag=realtimerenderin\">this book<\/a> for iPhone development, he said it&#8217;s the best one he found for beginners.<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of Andrew, he pointed me at an interesting little language he&#8217;s been messing with, <a href=\"http:\/\/processing.org\/\">Processing<\/a>. It&#8217;s essentially Java with a lot of built-in 2D (and to a lesser extent, 3D) graphics support: color, primitives, transforms, mouse control, lerps, window, etc., all right there and trivial to use. You can make fun little programs in just a page or two of code. That said, there are some very minor inconsistencies, like transparency not working against the background fill color. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.offworld.com\/2009\/05\/wayfarer-ben-hemmendingers-dan.html\">Pretty elaborate programs<\/a> can be made, and it&#8217;s also handy for just drawing stuff easily via a program. Here&#8217;s a simple image I did in just a few lines, based on mouse moves:<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/07\/mouse_processing.png\" alt=\"Processing output\" \/><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>That&#8217;s seven &#8211; ship it.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I have 69 links stored up, wade through them here if you want unedited content. I&#8217;ve decided that getting 7 links out per post is a good round number, so here&#8217;s the first. This is my screen-saver du jour: Pixel City (put the .scr file in your Windows directory). It&#8217;s fully described (along with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[16,33,35,38,203,202],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources","tag-books","tag-directx","tag-iphone","tag-npr","tag-procedural-modeling","tag-processing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realtimerendering.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}