Hmmm been ages since I produced a blog….. missed me? Yea I miss me too. You also may have noticed that I crumbled to the pressures of society and put a tag at the beginning of my title.

RANT

Now that I've been around the GMC for a while now I’m beginning to understand why many experienced users don’t visit regularly. It seems to follow a cycle where nobody learns from what has already been done and redone….. the same crappy example using the same already superseded technique. The simple fact is ignorant people are easily fooled…. its one of the mainstays of game programming in general. You paint a pretty picture, and bam - people believe it…. while you chuckle under your breath.

As a precursory experiment I decided to see what would happen if I simply modified the textures on my bump mapping example to be more bumpy, bamm 15 more replies. Its the nigh on the EXACT SAME example yet simply artificially exaggerating the effect made people think WOW.

If I can be bothered I would really like to demonstrate how easily the GMC can be fooled, I’ld bring together all my cheating wisdom and release an exe with the following advanced features:

• Only updating the scene ~60 times per second but display the game fps, I’m pretty sure this will also work with FRAPS, nobody would notice…. Yea its been done before but its just so effective.

• Render all effects at a lower resolution than the screen, 99% of people probably wouldn’t notice and really helps for fill-rate dependant lower end systems.

• Use ultra high quality sprites, ripped from where ever…. Probably from the Filter forge site. Very distracting, most people associate the general prettiness of the scene with that of the effect.

• Pre-render as much as possible. This would be especially funny with a huge kernel blur, wow that blurs fast…. XD. As long as I don’t start impacting upon the GFX memory limit or the bandwidth (unlikely) it’ll be fine.

• Create a singular static environment where the effects happen to work. Like I’ve got a realistic soft shadow (non blur based) example, but it only works with boxes and when the lights/shadow casters are at certain positions.

• Whatever else I can think of, or you guys can suggest…

I would then state that after I reach 100 (or something) replies I would release the source. Upon reaching this I would change the topic to GOT YOU FUCKERS and release the source…. Damn maybe I shouldn’t post this blog, I’m beginning to think I might actually do this.

This brings up another one of my little pet hates, The concept of releasing "demo" effects, is entirely flawed when you release an exe. Nobody learns anything, your simply displaying a pretty picture. Its like the ultimate convergence of ignorance and stupidity.

In many ways I think we need another GearGOD from his badass days…. to let people know that nothing is really as spectacular/new as they think it is. Or even better, Maybe I should sacrifice to the greater good of the GMC and become a condescending prick…. In fact, I’m already half way there.

Yes I’m an idealist, so shoot me…. I probably wont shoot back because I’m also a nihilistic left wing atheistic hippy.

LIFE…. or lack of:

Waiting for my GP2X-F200 to turn up. Should be fun: open source development, good emulation (MAME, Snes, NeoGeo, GBA, etc), Good ports/interpreters (Quake, Descent, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max)…. and only cost me $200AU.