Well, I decided to give a voxel rock a go. It was interesting experience. Instead of getting the rock looking perfect, I wanted to understand the workflow and it was great. After watching a few YouTube videos I was able to achieve this. Key part was using Mudbox, which was the first time for me. It is an amazing tool.
Here is the sample that I was able to achieve.
Cheers!
Here is my attempt at some low poly plants and grass.
I intend to use this in a game mod that I am developing. Stay tuned for a YouTube video on that.
Cheers!
Well, it is about time I did another post. I have been busy with real life (RL) stuff. But I have some time off work and decided to get back to my modeling. It has been good to have some consecutive time to work on it. In the space of three days, I have accomplished what would take me 3 weeks on and off.
Okay, enough of that. Here is a couple of models that I am working on. I read a few articles around modular modeling game design and I must say I like the approach it gives a lot of flexibility.
Another reason is that I was want to build an array of houses and did not want to have to mess around with them individually. This approach makes it a lot easier, though to get it game ready is a different issue.
Here are some models that are concrete and metal. I am working on the others but they are pretty complete. Just some fine tuning, I want a more grunge look to the windows.
Concrete window
Metal Window
Getting there.. I will work on it over this week. Be sure to follow the updates, where I will have a completed house or houses using this method.
Cheers!
This is an interesting part after joining the gaming community that I did not realize.
I became very interested in modeling. The ARMA game has very good capability for modders, from the actual terrain to various other elements such as buildings, trees, tanks, people (soldiers).
There are tools that can be downloaded from the company. However, these tools are very rudimentary in their design. I use professional tools and then use these tools to get my models into the game as the final part of my workflow. More on the tools in other posts as well.
Here is some images from within the game that I created. This was really my first serious attempt at it. If you are a modeler you will notice some things that are not right. Think of it as an experiment to see if I like it and could do it. 
Here is another image, which is a day shot. The lights only work at night and the gates can be opened as needed and include a electric gate opening sound too. The towers are enter-able and you can climb a ladder to walk around the edge.
I would think of these models as ‘beta’ as I textured via materials instead of using UV maps. Like anything that is creative, you can always look at it and say “I need to change this, or I don’t like the look of this and will update it to that.”
I will post more on the tools and how I use them. Don’t think me as an expert in this area, but more as a self-taught amateur learning along the way.
Cheers!
Like I said I would start to post what I have been up to, post research.
I started gaming with this gaming community called “42nd Air Assault Regiment“.
My involvement was interesting, where I just mixed at a visitor type approach. I enjoyed playing with this community, that as a gift I update a dynamic custom mission called insurgency.
Then I decided to join as a subgroup “unit” called Whiteshield Inc. which mission was to create mods for a game title called “Armed Assault” (ARMA).
Well, it was quite ironic in that I could not find any good modders to assist in the subgroups mission. As a result, folded up the group and then became a main member of 42nd. I proposed the position of the S-2 Intel Officer. The gamers community model themselves similar to a US Army unit. My role essentially, is to provide Intel in games and out of games for the community.
Well, as you know reading this blog. I have a development background and immediately started to look at how could I contribute in other ways. The first thing I saw was that the web site needed a complete facelift. This was challenging as I looked around at various CMS (Content Management System) products, such as Joomla, WordPress, etc.
After scrounging around on the Internet, I came across an interesting product that is used by professional gaming groups. The product is called “WebSpell” it is most using by groups in Europe, that is coined in the category of e-sports. This is the fun bit, most of the information is in German, thanks google translate.
Here is a screenshot of the website.
The approach here is to provide a match and info hub for the community. Webspell uses a MVC (model-view-controller) approach using html, PHP, and MySQL. I think it is very easy to work with and it already has multiple language support. This web site is evolving all the time, most of the functionality is specifically for members only. But it is a fun project.
After the initial work of this project, I then became a senior member of the community. You could think of it as a founding type member. This allows me to have more of a say of the direction of the community. There are a number of founding members and we all understand the mission of gaming together and having fun.
Another aspect is the modding of the ARMA game, but I will leave that to other posts.
Cheers!
After a long journey of almost 6 years, I have finally finished my research quest. It was interesting to understand the whole research process in Academia.
As a result, I am going to change my blog to close off on the research part.
However, that doesn’t mean I am going to laze around and do nothing.
I have been up to a lot of other activities, plus a new adventure that sort of caught me by surprise. Stay tuned on that. My intent is to share what I have discovered along the way too.
Cheers!
Well, it has been a long time since I last posted something on my blog. So, I thought I would do a number of posts over the next few days and then I will try and post once a week on what has been going on. Sure comment on what you feel you want to.
Later!
At CodeConf, on 4/9/11, Dr. Nick gave an interesting session. I think this makes a ton of sense. All too often we will try to solve a problem here and now and gain that knowledge and move on to something else. The problem is this problem can arise again, and now it is someone different. In the data center/cloud world this makes a ton of sense.
He talked about the importance of building tools to help you solve the problems you face. He gave three steps for tool building:
1. Learn something
2. Encapsulate what you’ve learned in code
3. Repeat and go faster
Basically, any time he learns something new, he builds a tool with it, so he can forget what he’s learned. He gave an example of building a TextMate bundle with node.js as his first ever Node project.
Are long VM instance spin-up times in the cloud costing you money? That’s the question that immediately came to mind when James Urquhart, in an interview at the Stata Conference, made this thought provoking comment: the faster you can get the resources into the hands of the people who use them, the more money you save overall.
One of the many super powers of the cloud is elasticity, the ability to dynamically acquire and release resources in response to demand. But like any good superhero, their strength must also form the basis of a not quite fatal flaw. Years and years of angsty episodes are usually required to explore this contradiction.
In the case of the cloud, the weakness reveals itself in slow VM spin-up times. Spinning up a VM in EC2 can take a little as 1-3 minutes, or can average 5-10 minutes, or it can take much longer if there’s heavy usage in your availability zone. EC2 is not alone. A common complaint about Google App Engine is the cold-start problem. When a request comes in, an application must be initialized to handle it, which takes time, which means the end-user experiences increased latency.
This means with VM oriented systems–be they IaaS or PaaS–your ability to deal with bursty traffic is much more limited in the cloud than you might have expected. You could of course reserve capacity, but that kind of defeats the point of elasticity, and really just moves the point where the problem occurs further down the curve. App Engine will have a feature to keep warm instances around, but you will pay for those too, which again defeats the point of on-demand pay for what you use elasticity.
All this might not matter, if it weren’t for the idea that those spin-up times could cost you. Joe Weinman has taken a more formal look at this problem in his paper Time is Money: The Value of “On-Demand,” and this is the paper James was referring to when he made his observation.
Joe Weinman, as the founder of Cloudonomics, a rigorous analytical approach leveraging mathematics and Monte Carlo simulation to characterize the sometimes counterintuitive multi-dimensional business of cloud computing and pay-per-use business models, has written a string of interesting papers on his website. Some of the titles include: Smooth Operator: The Value of Demand Aggregation (PDF); Cloud Computing is NP-Complete (PDF); Mathematical Proof of the Inevitability of Cloud Computing(PDF). At the core of these papers are many many pages of rigorous mathematical analysis, but fortunately this creamy goodness is bookended with chocolatey cookies explaining what it all means.
From the abstract of Time is Money: The Value of “On-Demand” :
Cloud computing and related services offer resources and services “on demand.” Examples include access to “video on demand” via IPTV or over-the-top streaming; servers and storage allocated on demand in “infrastructure as a service;” or “software as a service” such as customer relationship management or sales force automation. Services delivered “on demand” certainly sound better than ones provided “after an interminable wait,” but how can we quantify the value of on-demand, and the scenarios in which it creates compelling value?
We show that the benefits of on-demand provisioning depend on the interplay of demand with forecasting, monitoring, and resource provisioning and de-provisioning processes and intervals, as well as likely asymmetries between excess capacity and unserved demand.
In any environment with constant demand or demand which may be accurately forecasted to an interval greater than the provisioning interval, on-demand provisioning has no value. However, in most cases, time is money. For linear demand, loss is proportional to demand monitoring and resource provisioning intervals. However, linear demand functions are easy to forecast, so this benefit may not arise empirically.
For exponential growth, such as found in social networks and games, any non-zero provisioning interval leads to an exponentially growing loss, underscoring the critical importance of on-demand in such environments.
For environments with randomly varying demand where the value at a given time is independent of the prior interval—similar to repeated rolls of a die—on-demand is essential, and generates clear value relative to a strategy of fixed resources, which in turn are best over provisioned.
For demand where the value is a random delta from the prior interval—similar to a Random Walk—there is a moderate benefit from time compression. Specifically, reducing process intervals by a factor of n results in loss being reduced to a level of 1/square root of n of its prior value. Thus, a two-fold reduction in cost requires a four-fold reduction in time.
Finally, behavioral economic factors and cognitive biases such as hyperbolic discounting, perception of wait times, neglect of probability, and normalcy and other biases modulate the hard dollar costs addressed here.
The degree of effect is related to traffic patterns:
We have seen that not only is there a time value of money, there is a money value of time, specifically, increased agility and responsiveness lead to reduced loss, including a reduction in missed opportunities. Time is money.
From a business perspective, one has to ask whether the reduction in monitoring or provisioning time that potentially results in reduced loss due to unserved demand or unused resources is worth it. I believe in most cases the answer is yes. The reason is that the costs of implementing such on-demand strategies are largely fixed, are a relatively minor portion of the total cost, or are already incorporated, say, into a cloud provider’s offerings. For example, the cost for an enterprise or cloud provider to acquire and deploy dynamic provisioning software compared to the losses associated with unserved demand or un-utilized capacity make it an attractive proposition.
For linearly growing or declining demand, a reduction in time (monitoring cycle or resource provisioning) offers a proportional reduction in cost.
For exponential demand, the loss associated with even fixed interval provisioning grows exponentially, so on-demand provisioning is essential.
The VM spin-up interval is your period of lost opportunity. If your traffic is bursty and/or growing exponentially, then you may be losing out on more profitable opportunities than you thought, because cloud elasticity doesn’t match demand elasticity. While not quite the cloud’s kryptonite, it is a flaw worth considering in your architecture.
CIAO!
So apparently, a chinese web site has released some details on the new chipset that Intel is set to launch, the X79 express.
It is suppose to work with Intel’s ‘E’ enthusiasts series processors.
The X79 Express will replace the X58 as the top desktop chipset when the new high-performance CPUs are launched in the fourth quarter of this year.
Along with the new processors and chipsets, Intel will roll out a new socket, the LGA2011. The X79 fully supports two PCIe x16 lanes, has 14 SATA ports — including 10 of the 6Gbps flavor — and possesses 8 ports that support SAS. There are 14 USB 2.0 ports, but no mention of USB 3.0 connections — or Thunderbolt ports, for that matter. PCI x1 support is eliminated.
Sandy Bridge E processors will replace the Gulftown-based Extreme six-core CPUs as the top performers in Intel’s desktop lineup.
Needless to say, like all bleeding edge technology this will be expensive no doubt.