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notpete

WFG Retired
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Posts posted by notpete

  1. Something small to do for me (that isn't being done by Heron)?

    in Game Development & Technical Discussion

    Posted

    Ah, good work, Ykkrosh! Z-sorting analogy spot on, never thought of that Will see if that opens up any new avenues for exploration.

    Instinctively, I do agree that the current system should work as is (ie no enduser changes required), although no idea why I think that - guess it just looks/feels close to final.

    { By the way, in case you're expecting rapid progress on this: my availability is a little limited, especially at weekends .. and, er, usually during the week too .. figure this isn't on any kind of critical must-fix list right now, though, so I'll just tinker away until someone pokes me into action :) }

  2. Something small to do for me (that isn't being done by Heron)?

    in Game Development & Technical Discussion

    Posted

    Hmm, that's quite a lot of cases. Glad I'm not a member of the test team.

    Was trying to work out if I could somehow automate testing. Found the majority of visual errors are caused when two adjacent tiles can't work out the blending they're supposed to do, based on other surrounding tiles. I'm seeing cases where two tiles on an edge both think they should overlap the other, which obviously isn't correct, and could be found simply by storing which blendshape each tile/texture combination is using.

    Fortunately, I can find errors without having to bother doing that - might investigate how useful it is later. I've found and fixed a few small issues which improve what happens presently, but it's still easy to break. In the two texture case, issues tend to occur iff texture A has tiles with priorities both higher and lower than an adjacent tile with texture B (this is probably why ScEd was a little more robust, using one priority per texture). In this case, I don't think it's sufficient for a tile just to look at it's neighbours to work out how to blend - it needs to look to see how it's neighbours are blending their own neighbours. All horribly recursive: my new fangled - still broken - system, allows you to paint in one corner of the world and magically update the blending in the other.

    I'm umm-ing and ahh-ing over a couple of ideas for exploration:

    1. More intelligent priority assignment: rather than blindly assigning priorities, look at the current priorities, and those of neighbouring tiles, and adjust things up as we go.

    2. Modifying the current system to hold a list of textures applied to the terrain. If a tile is completely overwritten, replace the texture on that tile, otherwise, append to a list of textures on the tile (and which part of the tile (ie which alphamap is required)). Then, to render, just render the base texture stored in the tile, and apply any partial textures that have been applied to it.

    #1 I'm not sure on; I'd guess you could get more "intelligent" terrain painting behaviour with some work, but whether it'd eliminate errors, I'm not sure.

    #2 could possibly take up lots of fill rate, if artists use lots of textures per tile (but optimising that could easily be done later, some preprocess step before data gets packaged or whatever), but should be fairly trivial to implement.

    I also found this, which has been published since I last investigated this. I've - ahem - only looked at the pictures, but seems to give better results on close-ups than the simple linear blending we use. Have to read the thing to determine whether it's worth further investigation.

  6. Whats your workout schedual?

    in Introductions & Off-Topic Discussion

    Posted

    Hm, well I am 17, so that has quite a bit to do with it I bet. ;)

    Tsk, you pesky kids :)

    Also, I really couldn't advise you on how to train, especially since my body really leans towards the mid distance races, and yours towards ld. Oh, and I'm not a coach :banger:.

    Can appreciate that. Just seeking out all advice. Think to some extent age determines distance, too - it is (largely) easier to absorb higher mileage between 20 and 40 years old than in teenagers, I guess. Of course, whether your brain wants to spend endless hours trawling round the suburbs each morning - that's a different question :P

    I can't imagine going faster than 6:20 or 6:25 per mile for 10k, and your thursdays sound like a beast. Does "inc" mean incline? If you're retired and running 8 mile tempos like that, you have no right to say I'm any better than you! :banger:

    Sorry - "inc" just shorthand for including. Set out at 8 min/mile, accelerate gradually over a couple of miles to 6:30. 3 miles at that speed, 3 mile deceleration back to 8 m.m. And yes, it's toughest session of the week :banger: I hate it .. running long doesn't hurt; running fast does.

    LOL .. retired. Nice. Sadly, still only 30 and a long, long way to go to retirement.

    Oh, and to answer your question, 7:30 for 6-7 isn't really any problem while in season, 7:00 is usually less talking (I run with my team), but towards the end of the season, we can talk the whole way through a 7 miler at 7:00. It's funny since below 7:00, the amount of talking drops off sharply, and at 6:30 pace, we're all pretty much silent... at least after the first mile, then we realize we should stop talking bc it's so hard!

    Thanks, Erik. Doesn't seem too far from the kind of (relative) pace I run at. Can always talk at the start of long runs, but slightly below and it gets tricky.

    Thanks for the info; it was your sub 5 min mile that caught my attention - fantastic! I've never run track - and not much opportunity to, now - but good luck with rest of the season. I'm aiming next for London Marathon next April; ran 3:13 last month, aiming for 3:00 then. Quite doable, I'm thinking now .. but no doubt come March will be plagued by doubt ..

  7. Whats your workout schedual?

    in Introductions & Off-Topic Discussion

    Posted

    Monday: long distance, 6-7 miles at 7:00-7:30 mile pace

    EKen, is this easy run pace? You're obviously way faster than me, but I'm curious just how fast you run your long runs are (eg 10K race pace for me is 6:30ish, are my long runs too fast/slow?). Typical week for me:

    Monday: 6-7 miles @ 8:00-8:30 min/mile

    Tuesday: 10-12 miles @ 7:30-8:00 min/mile

    Wednesday: 4 miles @ 9 min/mile am, 5 miles @ 8 min/mile pm + 1 hr weights

    Thursday: 8 miles tempo, inc 3 miles @ 6:30 min/mile

    Friday: 4 miles 9 min/mile am, 6-7 miles @ 8:00-8:30 min/mile pm

    Saturday: 16-24 miles @ 7:30-8:00 min/miles

    Sunday: 1 hr circuits am

    Obviously, I'm (ooh, quite a bit) older and at the opposite end of the distance running spectrum (halves and marathons), but am interested in the kind of training you're doing to acheive the kind of times you're running at the minute.

    MP3s - Author/Title editor?

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    Ah, lovely. CDDB works flawlessly - hasn't failed on anything yet. Even recognises obscure CD singles from the early 90s. Very impressive.

    But just changing the filename doesn't work, unfortunately. My player is one of these (it's truly fantastic :)), and even though the LCD display only shows the song name and band, it insists on looking at MP3 tags rather than just a simple filename :yiepie:.

    MP3s - Author/Title editor?

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    A quick request: I've been using CDEx to rip music from CDs to a digital audio player. It works fine, except it doesn't store the author or title of the track in the MP3, so I just end up with multiple files called "Audiotrack 01", "Audiotrack 02", etc on my player. Anyone know of anything decent (and free) for just manually adding this information to an MP3? Or alternatively, a different CD ripper that'll do this when it actually rips.

    Ta.

    C++ Question

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    You need to handle the WM_PAINT message for this (and probably handle WM_ERASEBKGND by simply returning 1 from your WndProc). A quick Google turned up this; although if the image is actually in a file, rather than stored as a resource, LoadBitmap won't help much. LoadImage might work for you.

    Computer Deathmatch #2

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    I'm with ATI, at the minute - although, like a lot of others, I guess, it's a recent switch. And from a programmers' perspective: their Developer Relationships department (devrel@ati.com) does actually respond, and, more often than not, very helpfully. Never heard a peep from NVidia on this score.

    EDIT: in fairness, I should also say that 3Dlabs Developer Relationship is probably the best I've encountered, although I agree they don't make cards targeted at gamers and are therefore of little interest to most here.

    Why Is It Taboo T O Discuss Personal Financial

    in Hall of Intellectuals

    Posted

    Nefarious? Yes, but my point is, corporations only exist for one thing: Profit. They do all sorts of cutesy stuff to help the community or what have you, but it's all for a positive public image, which will translate to profit. They will cheat their employees in compensation whenever possible, and it starts with the first interview, continues through the "salary negotiations," and throughout your employment of their company.

    Thus speaks the cynic. Yes, corporations exist solely to make money, but to say that they cheat employees at every opportunity sounds a step too far. I doubled my salary in my last job, without even asking for a pay rise. Admittedly, at the end of the day, it was likely done because they felt I was valuable to the company; an asset worth keeping. But I certainly don't think I was cheated in any way by them doing so.

    Maybe I'm just naïve.

  23. A Riddle

    in Introductions & Off-Topic Discussion

    Posted

    Their should There

    erorrs should be errors

    Which is two errors; hence the statement itself is an error - there are only two errors in the sentence - this is the third error.

    Um .. so now there are three errors is the sentence, and so the sentence is correct. So my third assumption is now incorrect .. uhoh. See brain melting down soon. Best stop while I'm behind.

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