If you read the right blogs, you have seen all of this already. Consider yourself warned!
Videos of the panels are posted. If you missed the conference, or are interested in the way new business models are hitting the industry, these are something you should check out.
My panel was “Making Virtual Economies Work.” But they’re all worth watching.
I’ve got an even harder challenge than what I suggested previously. Construct a poem, or perhaps a haiku, using only pangrams. That’s not the challenge though. The challenge is do that and make sense. I bet you US$1.00 that you cannot do this. It’s impossible for even a Master Poet. ;P
For those who do not know, a pangram is a sentence that contains every letter in the alphabet. (A perfect pangram doesn’t even repeat any). I went with a pangram per line, and in the spirit of self-enumerating pangrams, made the poem about pangrams, and their most famous exponent:
The Pangrammatic Fox
The quick brown fox, they claim, jumped the lazy dogs, over and more, forever
cycling mad her quota’d alphabets, leveling Zipf, an indexed joker wild.
Unlucky vixen, pangram beast, spending q’s and hoarding j’s, the thrifty ditzy wench!
Why futz phonemes fro and to, when flow twixt verbs and jokes, the cogs of status quo,
Delights us so? Books bursting free the japes, glyphs, queries, catalexis, zeugmas woven
From words quotidian, to dazzle, vex, pry, illumine, beckon! Why judge letters equal?
Math must be seizing Reynard’s mind, values coffling waxing jabber, equations poking
Til nothing’s left except a pangrammatic sieve, quibbling z’s and k’s; hortatory, just, and swift.
OK, that sounds incredibly geeky. And it is. Here’s what Eric Risser just showed:
250,000 unique asteroids that are each unique meshes, each turned into a single box mesh that is cheap to render, with the actual shape defined entirely in a shader.
A sky full of tens of thousands of animating birds, each animating at a different stage in their anim, flying over the Everglades, in full 3d, so you can peek up close at them or fly through the flock — done as one single mesh, a single giant cube.
A dog, standing still, with a high-detail texture and legs and everything, defined in a couple of textures and as a single cube.
Basically, what Risser just demoed is an incredibly low-poly way of doing incredibly high-poly scenes.
Very cool… but currently gated behind the challenge of having high-end shader support and knowing how to make shaders that can do something like this… And of course, any of these objects would collide as boxes, not as a high-poly dog. 🙂 Still, very cool. Usually displacement mapping is only used for making grates or bumpy walls…
Some of the stuff he showed is available here.
My question is, why would you intentionally make the possible audience for your world smaller? A lot of people can’t run CryENGINE2 — it’s a high-end gaming graphics engine.
