Cody Russell

NeoEngine

Just committed GLX updates for the pixel buffer class. I haven’t started implementing it for Macintosh yet, and I’m sort of hoping that someone else will do it for me because I hate working on the Mac version now. It looks like you have to render to framebuffer and do glCopyTexSubImage() since there isn’t a real pbuffer extension on Mac yet.

elanthis: There is some sort of networking layer in the engine right now, but as far as I’m aware it isn’t very complete or well-tested yet. Personally, I feel like the networking (and audio) stuff doesn’t belong in the core engine; if anything it possibly should exist as a separate module and provide a good abstraction and portability. But I have never done any networking in game code yet, so I have absolutely no plans for the networking code at the moment.

I also have no current plans in terms of scripting. There is a separate project called NeoScript, but at this point in development I think it’s sort of a waste of time. I think we should just get the rendering engine into really good shape before we try to tackle these other things, but we really have nothing to do with NeoScript so it’s not affecting us one way or the other.

Right now all of my current plans are of graphics features. Later on I may be interested in working on other stuff for it, but I don’t know. I think everything I do on this project is in based upon what I want out of the engine for myself, and at the moment I don’t care about scripting or networking. In the future I probably will, though.

Email me if you have any other questions about it.

Concerts

I missed the Murray Perahia concert at Shriver Hall. That really sucks. I found out that we couldn’t get the $8 student tickets like normal.. this time they were $39. I heard it was an amazing performance though.

I heard Yuri Bashmet play the Bartok viola concerto with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on Thursday. It was by far the worst performance I think I’ve ever heard by a major orchestra and/or professional soloist. Yuri Bashmet is supposed to be one of the biggest violists in the world, but he gave every indication that he didn’t really know the piece that well and it was very clear that he and the orchestra had little or no rehearsal time on the concerto. The sorts of ensemble problems they had were astounding, and at one point he came in like a beat early. The entire third movement was a disaster and seemed on the edge of falling apart at any moment. He also faked his way through more than one spot in the concerto. It made me really pissed, and I walked out during the applause.

My quartet performed on Tuesday, and it went really well. We were color-coordinated, as always. This time the color scheme was blue and gold. I’ve posted a photo of the group on my webpage. I’m so sad that our quartet is breaking up.

My string trio is performing Schnittke in the seminar concert at Peabody tonight. It should be interesting. Also on the program is Prokofiev’s second string quartet, performed by the Rivendell Quartet, seven songs for soprano and piano by Mussorgsky, and the second Shostakovich piano trio. It’s going to be a pretty kickass concert, I think, and it’s finally going to be the last all-Russian concert at Peabody this year.

Hacking..

I finally got my huge render device hack finished for NeoEngine and will commit tonight sometime. All windowing code and render context related code is split out of the render device and moved into a new RenderTarget inheritance tree, and render targets are stored in a stack container on the render device. There’s also a new PixelBuffer class for offscreen rendering using WGL_ARB_pbuffer and WGL_ARB_render_texture. I’ve almost got this implemented for X using GLX stuff also, but it’s not quite ready to be committed.

Mattias is working on a new render op queue now. Once that is finished, I can use both of our new features together to do cool planar reflections and stuff, which is what got all this started.

I’m working on a generalized fragment shader class now as well, so I hope to get that finished fairly soon as well.

Johns Hopkins Film Festival

It’s time again for this year’s Hopkins Film Festival. Actually, it’s been going for a couple days already I think, but I just went tonight. Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter was showing tonight. It was a terrible movie, but it definitely had some funny parts to it. It actually had out-takes at the end. When a movie is this bad, it’s difficult to believe that there was footage that wasn’t good enough to go into the movie.

I’m not sure what else is showing this year. They do actually show good movies, though. Last year I saw Dog Day Afternoon at the Hopkins Film Festival, and it was my first time to see it. I remember that the volume was too loud and it was really pissing me off during the movie.

Chamber music concert

The Peabody Trio played a concert the other day that included the Dvorak piano quintet. Maria Lambros played the viola part on it, and she sounded awesome as usual. I didn’t like some of the stuff they did, especially in the third movement (taking time in very awkward, artificial places I thought), but it was still good.

Of course, Daphne really stole the show. She was turning pages for Seth, the pianist, for the whole concert. At one point I nearly stood up and yelled up to the stage, “Uhh.. excuse me, Seth, could you move out of the way? You’re blocking the page turner.”

… okay, well not really. But this is what I told Daphne, and of course this made her quite happy. And of course anything that makes Daffs happy tends also to make Val happy.

GTA3 Goodness

Whilst out trying to get more hidden packages and rampages in Grand Theft Auto 3 tonight, I stumbled across this.

Of course, it’s possible to get just about anywhere in the game by flying the Dodo there. The guys who made GTA3 really screwed up there, because you can find a whole lot of bugs in the map when you fly the Dodo. But I got to this point without flying the Dodo.