Via 3pointD…

“Mark Warner, former Democratic governor of Virginia and likely “fallback” candidate for president should Hillary Clinton not run in 2008, will visit the virtual world of Second Life today for a chat with New World Notes’s Wagner James Au, at 12:30 SLT (3:30pm EST), in an event produced by Reuben Steiger’s Millions of Us”

Tags:  Second Life

I just got back from a book signing and presentation by Dean Takahashi, author of The XBox 360 Uncloaked. This is one of the things I like about living in the Bay Area, getting to go to cool things like this.

Dean had some interesting stories to tell about his journey writing this book and I began to see why Twichguru.com said, “You could argue that no one outside of Microsoft knows more about its Xbox game business than Dean Takahashi.”
Dean promises that there is “less profanity in this book” than in his last, Opening the XBox. (Kinda makes you want to read his first book, doesn’t it?) What the book does include is “blow by blow” coverage of heated internal debates as senior executives worked to bring the product to market. In particular, check out the chapter called Ed Fries Last Stand. The book also has plenty of interesting anecdotes about the launch events and all of the craziness and brilliance that went into developing the XBox 360.

Get the book on Amazon here and don’t forget to write a review when you’re finished.

Tags: Xbox 360 , Microsoft , Xbox , Gaming

Via PS3land.com…

“According to an IGN report, Sony has signed a partnership with the Folding@home distributed computing project which will allow the development of a client to “allow idle Cell Processors to turn their considerable computational power from crunching the polygons that makeup curvaceous videogame breasts to crunching the math of folding proteins hold the secret to curing cancer”. And instead of purchasing surper-computers which run on the Cell, Folding@home will be using 10,000 PlayStation 3s.

According to the IGN article, “The Cell Processor is expected to perform calculations for Folding@home on the scale of 100 gigaflops”, which translates to a quadrillion floating point operations a second- “enough so that project leaders are now considering expanding their simulations to study Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s Diseases and other forms of cancer.”

Tags: PS3 , PlayStation , Cancer , Sony , Cell

A warm welcome to the newest contributor to gametomorrow.com, Mike Acton.

Mike Acton is a Senior Architect at Highmoon Studios (Vivendi-Universal Games) working on PS3/Cell research. Mike is also the director and adminstrator of CellPerformance, which is an all-volunteer effort dedicated to researching and publishing code and articles for the Cell community.Most recently, Mike was the Lead Special Effects Programmer for Darkwatch at Highmoon Studios (previously Sammy Studios) in Carlsbad, CA. Previously Mike has held Lead Programming, Playstation 2 Engine Development and Research roles with Yuke’s, VBlank and BlueSky/Titus. He worked for Sony Interactive Studios in PSX development.Mike has made regular appearances as a speaker at SCEA develpment conferences and has spoken at GDC.

Mike Acton is not a framework-happy C++ programmer. He actually likes C. And assembly. In his spare time he develops hardware on FPGAs in VHDL.

He prefers vi.

This is the title of an up coming keynote speech from Graphics Hardware 2006. Matt Pharr is the speaker and his background at both Pixar and Nvidia makes the topic even more interesting.

On a similar note the August issue of Scientific American has an article entitled “A Great Leap in Graphics” where they also point to a quantum jump forward in computer graphics from both a shift to ray-tracing and multi-core CPUs like Cell.

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The above image is a frame from a Quake like game called kkrieger that has a disk foot print of 97KB. No, not 97MB, the creators of this game squeezed everything into a meager 97,280 bytes. In an age when state of the art PC games consume more than 1GB of disk space this is quite shocking. Where this game differs is that all of the art assets are generated procedurally at run time instead of created by teams of artists and stored on your hard drive. Many of the techniques used in this area can be attributed to Ken Perlin’s noise functions and Loren Carpenter’s work with fractals. Kkrieger generates the art assets at run time as part of the loading process turning the stored mathematical descriptions into megabytes of memory resident textures and 3D geometries. The next step in this area is to generate all these art assets on the fly as they are need in a resolution independent way thereby dramatically reducing the memory foot print if the game, off chip memory bandwidth requirements, and finally removing those annoying fuzzy low resolutions textures that are visible when you walk up close to an object. Next generation processors like Cell were designed to excel at these techniques. SPEs are great noise generators that can churn out gigabytes of dynamic textures and procedurally generated geometry on demand. Moving such techniques from load time to run time will dramatically improve the visual quality of games and produce dynamic ever changing worlds that can be different every time you experience them.

If you haven’t ever been to E3, you’re missing quite a show. What started as a great oppurtunity for game developers and companies to show their products and further their endeavors has become a crazy, glitzy event…. that never gets any work done.

Unlike the 10,000 other technology conferences that are out to make money and don’t care much about the effort, E3 announces they are going back to their mission.