Monday 2 June 2014

Meeting Day And Live Interview Prep

Big meeting day today so no coding from me. Ravey did some cool AI fixes and occlusion cache work and Simon embellished our two-compounds level with new eye candy, plus drew up plans for the creation of a LOT more art for the modern day assets!  More on this as it happens.

Spent the PM side of my day in a rehearsal for the live interview event that will take place on Wednesday. If you would like to join in, here are the details:

* Live Q&A with Lee at 8pm UTC (12pm Pacific) Wednesday June 4
* If you have questions, use the hashtag #IDZLive on Twitter or Google Plus before or during the Q&A
* Or, post your questions live using Google Hangouts

The Link: https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/c45mt1hcdiph2ak25n8613lskgc

My plan Tuesday is a full day of enjoyable coding, where I will be adding a technique I am calling 'Very Low' terrain and entity shading, along with a slider you can er, slide, which will reduce the fragment shader complexity of whole chunks of geometry in the scene. The upshot is that we will be able to increase the performance by further reducing the need for expensive shader code in the distance.  I will also add transition code to the main shader so the transition between the two techniques is smoothed out and I will strike a default slider setting which will hopefully create a transition you do not notice. The benefit of this will potentially yields the greatest single FPS boost we have so far achieved, but it's all theory so far so come back in 30 hours to this blog to find out what happened.


I also got my confirmation for attendance at IDF 2014, so if anyone is in San Francisco between the 9th and 11th of September, drop a tweet, post or comment and you can buy me a Guinness ;)  Right now I have no plans to present, speak or showcase right now so I will mostly be wearing my party hat and party grin, talking about Reloaded to anyone who will listen and becoming a regular developer attending sessions and learning a bunch of stuff.  Always a good event and am now looking forward to what will probably be my only holiday this year :)

1 comment:

  1. Hi Lee! Really enjoyed your interview. I found it inspiring. I like your vision of creating a tool that can allow lots of people to do something very big, fast and easy. From some of what you said it was clear to me that you think much the same way I do in what I've found to be very unique ways, even having come to some of the same conclusions (one example being that all things being equal, it's more profitable (and beneficial to others) to market to more people at less money per person than the reverse, because there's word of mouth. That would certainly rear a longer-term reward that narrow figures can't really predict).

    I was pleasantly surprised to here you say you throw programs away and start again, often. That was a lesson I learned just a few years ago, I made the decision to take the extra time to do that. Turns out it pays for itself in time almost right away and the rest is a better software, code, and efficiency. It's win/win/win all the way. Being willing and ready to do that anytime it becomes clearly appropriate in a long-and-coming project, has probably helped me to grow as a programmer more and faster than anything else. So many people in my society (America) don't have the patience or foresight to do that, so it's a real pleasure to hear that you regularly do that too. :) It's so refreshing to be able to take what I've learned and start again fresh from a clean slate.

    You're probably ending the evening with a beer, so enjoy :)

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