Mysteries. I’m adding that category to this blog. When I forget the name of something and I’m on a mission for information. It’s happened with games, not just once. All of the following games were mystery games who’s names have been found/solved:

• Strike Force
• Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic
• Dungeon Explorer
• Continuum (aka: Alpha Waves)
• Legacy of the Wizard

It’s bound to happen with movies. Back in the 90s, I saw some really weird movie on TV. There was a scene that for some reason stands out in my memory. I posted the question on yahoo answers:

I hate asking questions like this but I’ve asked my friends and searched the net for about a year. Here’s what I know. Movie is from the 80s. Main character is in hell (or something like it, another dimension that looks like a barrens desert). He runs into a room and finds a normal bedroom with a bed and a full length freestanding mirror.

There is a beautiful woman on the bed, she isn’t saying anything. It’s obvious as the viewer that it’s a trap. He looks in the mirror and suddenly he sees her as a demon (she looks like she’s been burned). Then the demon woman goes crazy and he’s on the run again. I don’t know the actor or what happens next.

Hope someone knows.

Someone did. And they posted the answer Highway to Hell (1991) starring Chad Lowe, Kristy Swanson. Sure enough, I pulled these images from the trailer which is the exact scene I was talking about. The amazing part is the speed that someone could be monitoring the question threads. Her username is MystMoonstruck and she nailed the answer. I sent her a thank you note since this has been haunting me whenever I thought of horror films. I thought for sure it was hellraiser, pumpkinhead or one of those “mainstream” ones.

The idea that I had about it being nearly in hell is oddly accurate. Also I do remember his motivation being of kind of linear adventure which the plot synopsis seems to back up.

Freaky movie. I don’t remember a goddamn thing but these stills really bring it back. Yeah, I’m going to watch this one somehow. They don’t even have it on DVD anywhere! Youtube seems to have it though in 10 parts.

Ben Stiller is in it. Hitler does a musical number or something like that (Gilbert Godfrey?). I didn’t watch any of those parts originally. I haven’t seen most of the movie and thusly, why I wanted to add context to this strange bedroom scene.

A similar type of mystery mission happened a long time ago. It was quickly resolved by my good bud Tom (who is a movie database himself). I remember some weird scene where some guys are pushing a wall down a hallway and a floating head is chasing them. It was an extremely odd scene and there was little hope of me remembering anything about it since I saw it when I was 7 living in Houston. I had wandered into some teenager’s room at a dinner that my folks were having at someone else’s house. If you have a “fuzziest memory”, it’s similar to that. No chance to remember what a title of a movie was when it happened in the first 10% of your life.

So what movie has people pushing a wall down a hallway with a floating head? Time Bandits.

I mentioned it to Tom and he instantly got it. The hallway scene kinda made it easy to get. Of course when I watched it, I hardly recognized it. But that is the nature of the mystery category. It’s just to find the name.

Just popped into my head. Pretty abstract. Maybe only psych professors would get it or whatever.

Street Fighter IV is out. I don’t have it yet. I’m not very good at it so I’ll wait for the price to drop. Too many $60 games out there and I haven’t even finished GTA4 yet after starting in May 2008. Ouch. SFIV caught my eye in an early screenshot that was very confusing. It was a grid level of some kind. I mean, the walls and floor looked like graph paper. Awesome!

For some reason, I’m a sucker for grid patterns in 3d. I don’t know why. Maybe it started with the amiga 500. I remember their logo was this 3d red and white checkerball. The amiga logo a reference to 3D rendering. The checkerboard is like the basic of basics in computer graphics. You put a 3D ball on a checkboard plane and the 3d effect is clearly visible. Each block further from the focal point is distorted by perspective. You can look at each red and white block and clearly see the effect. The middle blocks on the ball are undistorted while the edge blocks hardly look like squares.

It’s just something I find interesting. When I see the Amiga ball, I get a feeling of “the test render is the final render”. The Amiga can do 3D. It’s already there. It’s just up to you to extend it. To me, the test ball is beautiful. It already has delivered.

I used to talk to this hobbyist 3D developer in Arlington. His name is Shamyl Zakariya. He’s a goddamn genius. He wrote this test app (among a million other things) that moved an inchworm model around in a 3d space. His 3d space was a big box with graph-paper type textures for the floor, walls and ceiling. He didn’t need to put textures up to do his test and procedurally creating grid lines is pretty easy to do in code. For many of his test apps and initial builds, he’d just render some grid lines all over the place. It’s not only fast and easy but it also can help with counting placement or measuring distances (like the ruler in Photoshop). Eventually he would replace the grids with textures and the illusion would be covered with something more realistic. How similar to SFIV’s training mode.

Fast forward many years later when I run into a Java based raytracer called sunflow. It’s got a processing library project called p5sunflow. Sunflow is a bit early on in its development and I was curious to see what people have done with it (if anything). I was checking out the gallery when I ran into a very familiar graph paper type 3d space that looks almost exactly like SFIV’s training mode. Note the wall at the back of the “room” and how similar it is to the SFIV room. I wonder what kind of approximation they used for the curve points? I wonder how much the level of detail was toyed with to make it look curved? I wonder if I could render a room like this?

The raytraced picture has the lovely advantage of depth of field. The blurring of the grid lines really make for a penciled graph paper look. Very nice with the lighting too. But then that’s exactly what rasterizing can’t do. But then there are no realtime raytracing apps yet.

So there’s my weird meme of grids that started many years ago. At least I’ve put this idea into a condensed post that I can point to if I ever get stuck trying to explain this to someone. And even then it probably won’t make any sense. But that’s ok.

Fios bumped me from 15M down / 2M up to 20M/5M for free today when I asked them to. My old package wasn’t sold anymore.

(sung to the tune of The Sound of Silence)

Hello Kleenex, my old friend
I’ve come to blow you once again
While the pollen count was creeping
From my nose some crap was seeping
Some say the sound from my nose carries like a duck call
!@#$ you all
It’s the sound … of Tree Sex.

I took Benadryll too soon.
And now my head is a balloon.
All the trees are getting it on.
While I sneeze out my pollen song.
And the words on the box say “take only 2 a day”.
I OD’d last May.
On the sound … of Tree Sex.

Flight404 is a blog about visualization by Robert Hodgin. He’s a brilliant designer with a sweet full-time gig doing all matter of experimentation in flash, processing and whatever. One of his older pieces is a realtime music video of sorts. It’s pretty amazing (and got a lot of coverage) but he’s done lots of other things. In short, I’m a fan of his poop.

Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo.

Recently, I’ve been cranking away on a Tetris clone in Processing. It’s a rite of passage so I’ve read. Everyone must make Tetris before moving on. And this prophecy has been true so far. It’s a challenge in which collision detection, clean design, drawing, timing and states all have to come together. Otherwise, it turns into a mess of spaghetti pick-up sticks that won’t produce even a now pedestrian game of Tetris. In his latest post about doing branching in 3D, I was happy to see this:

I am going to work on understanding the code a bit more first. I know I wrote it, but that doesn’t mean I fully understand it.

Been there. There now actually.

Had it with gallery2. Thought I lost all my crap today. Had a backup. It’s cool doing your own thing I guess but photos are something I’d like to keep for the long-haul. Set up Flickr Pro account. Currently merging all gallery2 and iPhoto dealies. You can see the new link at the top.

Also, fixed some CSS problems finally and changed the goddamn banner. Enjoy.

Update: Oh this has taken me about 10 hours to export all this crap. Holy hell.

My current contract at work is coming to a close (yawn: work talk) and I requested lots of time off before something new comes along. A few coworkers were very confused as to what I was going to do with all this time. I guess this is maybe a difference in culture or interests. I have plenty of things to do and really time is all I need. I recently finished reading Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy and they talk about how contractors polish up their skills at the end of a contract. This is exactly what I wanted to do even before reading about it.

So with one week off, here’s what I did:

Ordered an arduino and got through an entire starter book with little exercises and electronics tutorials.

Got a vector domokun rendered using only lines.

Started and finished Prey by Michael Crichton.

Did my taxes, got my piano tuned, got my oil changed (2 attempts), 2 dentist appointments and had our water heater repaired. The rest of the time was spent watching movies, surfing, listening to old podcasts that I was very much behind on or practicing piano (piano ate a ton of time up). Actually, the raw piano time has really helped my chops.

And for a split second in this time, I realized how dead this blog is. Most likely, I’ll shut it down soon and just start using twitter and flickr.

Back in 2004, when I was working at a small private company, I built a “God Box” gaming rig at work. I shipped all the parts to the office versus my apartment because that was easier for the shipper. Coworkers stopped by and oogled at the parts, we fired up some Nvidia demos. It was pretty stunning at the time running a single core AMD FX-57 and 7800gtx with DDR400. It cost about $3100. It was expensive and fast back then and now it’s not.

Fast forward to this past weekend when all my new parts came in for a brand new gaming rig. The parts were much less money and much faster. It’s a hilarious cycle. And even as shiny as my new toy is, I know it will return to dust when FPSTechDemo 2012 requires a house-glowing flux capacitor to run.

Here are some quick stats.
BOX: Antec P182 Case
CPU: E8600 3.33ghz dual core
MEM: 4gb DDR3-1600
VID: ATI 4870X2 2gb
MB: asus rampage extreme x48
evga 790i ultra

It was a dramatic build. I spent 16 hours straight (skipping dinner and lunch the next day) putting it together. At first, I cabled it all up. Then it would just turn on / turn off. It wouldn’t even stay on. So piece by piece, I dismantled it trying to figure out what was wrong. I thought it was a short, I thought it was the CPU, it could be anything.

So then I dismantled everything and put the motherboard on a towel. I had the power supply in the case powering the board with a single cpu fan hooked up to the motherboard. The board has a power button on the board itself so I didn’t even have to hook up the chassis jumpers. Nothing else (no cpu, no memory, no cards) were hooked up. Eventually I replaced the power supply and the motherboard with retail-bought replacements. This was annoying because ripping out a motherboard and power supply is like removing your skeletal system and then your circulatory system.

After making these swaps, everything seemed to run fine on an EVGA 790i Ultra motherboard. I lost the ability to do crossfire but I was fine with that for now. About 3 months later, I wasn’t quite done with this thing. I ordered another 4870×2 to do quad gpu. I put the asus crossfire board back in. It was a tight fit in the case and the heat coming out of the back really did warm the room. It was a bit louder too (the whole thing was loud by itself). It was marginal gain for the titles I play so I returned it.

Yes it plays Crysis. Although Very High still isn’t playable. High looks just fine. Even the developers said that they threw that setting in for future systems.

Saw this dude at a traffic light. He’s got

• A list of names on a scroll hanging from his stocking
• Snowflakes on the windshield
• A real helmet that’s red
• Toys in the back
• A goddamn real Harley with Santa on it

He wins the cookie.