The Mermaid's Madness is a fantasy novel by Jim C. Hines, published in October 2009. It is the sequel to his earlier novel The Stepsister Scheme (previously reviewed here).
The novel introduces to the setting Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, and of course twists it hard in one tiny little place. The characters and setting beneath the sea are fleshed out well.
But...
Well, I enjoyed reading it, but I'm not sure I enjoy having read it. There's little I can say about it without being spoilery (something I'm not generally fond of being, especially for recent works). Which means I'll be speaking in vague generalities.
It's just .... it felt very shounen. Seinen, at best: there was a great deal of politicking and power and action, and the storyline was reasonably strong, but the lead trio felt... two-dimensional at best. Oh, it's not that character development was lacking, but it seems to have all gone to the secondary cast or the antagonists rather than to the lead characters. (Except for the last bit where I promptly lose any and all compassion for Snow. I wasn't expecting that subplot to end happily, mind, but ... yeah.)
I dunno. Don't get me wrong -- I did enjoy it. It's just that I know better than to confuse my own enjoyment for quality or merit. If you've read and enjoyed the first book — as I did — you'll probably enjoy this one, too. Just don't confuse it for anything other than direct-to-paperback high fantasy. 1/1.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Review: Algorithm
Algorithm is a science-fiction novel by Jean Mark Gawron, written between 1973 and 1976, and published in 1978.
I may have just lied to you; if so the lie is contained in the word "novel". The book reads like E. E. "Doc" Smith and Jacques Derrida got drunk and started hitting each other over the head with typewriters. There is clear narrative sequencing and pacing, but that doesn't really help.
Partway through, I was asked what the book was about. My best and clearest response was this: "It's about a person I don't like very much doing things I don't care about or sympathize with in an attempt to prevent someone who may or may not even actually exist from performing an act that may or may not be an assassination in either a literal or metaphorical sense." (And I stand by that statement, even though the waveform of the Schrödinger's-plot did eventually collapse.)
There's also this mysterious thing called the Novak Transformation which is allegedly a mathematical construct (like the Fourier Transform); it actually seems to be an extended allegory for something-or-other that falls into the 'you haven't convinced me to care about this' category. (There's a technobabble explanation starting on page 123 that rambles about exactly like crank math.) I'd like to think it's perhaps supposed to be some sort of mapping between physical and metaphorical spaces, the way the FT maps between the time and frequency domains — but I doubt it; that, I'd probably have grokked.
Yeah, I dunno. It's a shame; I was drawn in mostly by the back-cover blurb:
As it is, I can't see fit to give Algorithm better than 1/1. Perhaps my opinion would have been improved if I'd come into it expecting the depravity of jaded philosophers, rather than that of a jaded populace. And then, perhaps not: I'm not sure Algorithm knows the difference.
I may have just lied to you; if so the lie is contained in the word "novel". The book reads like E. E. "Doc" Smith and Jacques Derrida got drunk and started hitting each other over the head with typewriters. There is clear narrative sequencing and pacing, but that doesn't really help.
Partway through, I was asked what the book was about. My best and clearest response was this: "It's about a person I don't like very much doing things I don't care about or sympathize with in an attempt to prevent someone who may or may not even actually exist from performing an act that may or may not be an assassination in either a literal or metaphorical sense." (And I stand by that statement, even though the waveform of the Schrödinger's-plot did eventually collapse.)
There's also this mysterious thing called the Novak Transformation which is allegedly a mathematical construct (like the Fourier Transform); it actually seems to be an extended allegory for something-or-other that falls into the 'you haven't convinced me to care about this' category. (There's a technobabble explanation starting on page 123 that rambles about exactly like crank math.) I'd like to think it's perhaps supposed to be some sort of mapping between physical and metaphorical spaces, the way the FT maps between the time and frequency domains — but I doubt it; that, I'd probably have grokked.
Yeah, I dunno. It's a shame; I was drawn in mostly by the back-cover blurb:
The Novak Transformation had altered the very shape of the universe and left proud Earth an outcast, a sleazy pleasure-colony at the outer edge of the Federation of planets "Way Up There."I think a good book could be written to match that blurb. It would probably involve a cyberpunk/noir-like Earth conjoined to an epic-scale SF setting in which the Novak Transformation had actually, y'know, altered the very shape of the universe.
As it is, I can't see fit to give Algorithm better than 1/1. Perhaps my opinion would have been improved if I'd come into it expecting the depravity of jaded philosophers, rather than that of a jaded populace. And then, perhaps not: I'm not sure Algorithm knows the difference.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Review: Soulless
Soulless is the debut novel of Gail Carriger, published by Orbit Books in October 2009. It is best described as "historical urban fantasy" &mdash, werewolves and vampires exist openly in Victorian London.
It's really very much like most Laurell-K.-Hamilton-descended urban-fantasy-slash-romance: the story centers around an unmarried, unattached young woman somewhat estranged from her family who has special powers that enable her to fight the supernatural; she does so, mostly unwillingly, and eventually ends up bedding one* of the most powerful members of the two supernatural groups (whichever the author prefers).
So yeah. If you're looking for a really original take on the urban-fantasy concept, this isn't it.
On the other hand, the characters are delightfully entertaining; arrogant and witty (or witless) in all the ways that make for excellent comedy-of-manners fodder. Miss Alexia Tarabotti, the titular soulless character, is delightfully snarky; many of the other characters have their moments as well.
The setting is supposedly Victorian London, but there is so much focus on the supernatural side that there's hardly any time for the time and the place to shine through. This may be because the author was trying for verisimilitude rather than comic effect (for an example of the latter, see the execrable Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, about which, I am sure, more anon). Regardless, I think this is something of a pity: I suspect most readers of urban fantasy would have found Imperial Britain a far more entertainingly alien place than Hamiltonville. Intead all we get are a few spectres of the past — Victorian prejudices turned up to eleven where their scientific failures were concerned, and very nearly ignored everywhere else.
(On a positive note, I do like the term hive for a group of related vampires, nasty talking mosquitos that they are. ^_^)
All in all, I'm not sure where I'd classify it. It's a decent read, and it's certainly funny, but it's clearly a product of the literature of the Twenty-Noughties rather than of the Eighteen-Umpties. I suppose I'll just have to give it a 1/1; it deserves a few caveats, but shouldn't be outright dismissed.
* Clearly not too LKH-derived, as it's just one. *rimshot*
It's really very much like most Laurell-K.-Hamilton-descended urban-fantasy-slash-romance: the story centers around an unmarried, unattached young woman somewhat estranged from her family who has special powers that enable her to fight the supernatural; she does so, mostly unwillingly, and eventually ends up bedding one* of the most powerful members of the two supernatural groups (whichever the author prefers).
So yeah. If you're looking for a really original take on the urban-fantasy concept, this isn't it.
On the other hand, the characters are delightfully entertaining; arrogant and witty (or witless) in all the ways that make for excellent comedy-of-manners fodder. Miss Alexia Tarabotti, the titular soulless character, is delightfully snarky; many of the other characters have their moments as well.
The setting is supposedly Victorian London, but there is so much focus on the supernatural side that there's hardly any time for the time and the place to shine through. This may be because the author was trying for verisimilitude rather than comic effect (for an example of the latter, see the execrable Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, about which, I am sure, more anon). Regardless, I think this is something of a pity: I suspect most readers of urban fantasy would have found Imperial Britain a far more entertainingly alien place than Hamiltonville. Intead all we get are a few spectres of the past — Victorian prejudices turned up to eleven where their scientific failures were concerned, and very nearly ignored everywhere else.
(On a positive note, I do like the term hive for a group of related vampires, nasty talking mosquitos that they are. ^_^)
All in all, I'm not sure where I'd classify it. It's a decent read, and it's certainly funny, but it's clearly a product of the literature of the Twenty-Noughties rather than of the Eighteen-Umpties. I suppose I'll just have to give it a 1/1; it deserves a few caveats, but shouldn't be outright dismissed.
* Clearly not too LKH-derived, as it's just one. *rimshot*
Friday, September 11, 2009
Rock Band: Beatles
Rock Band: Beatles is a video game by Harmonix, the latest in their Rock Band series, released with the assistance and oversight of Apple Corps. It is groovy and psychedelic.
Groovy describes the music; psychedelic describes the accompanying visuals, which should surprise exactly no one. It's not complete — notable songs missing, hopefully to be offered for sale later, include "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Eleanor Rigby", "Nowhere Man", "I'll Follow the Sun", "Magical Mystery Tour", and "Yesterday". (In fact I can confirm that "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is intended to be offered for sale via the various online distribution channels on either October 20 or November 20 of this year.) A complete list of the songs that are included is here, courtesy of Gamespot.
I'm not terribly fond of the guitar included with the game: the keys near the head don't rebound to full extension the way a Guitar Hero controller's do. It's difficult to tell when one is actually pressing the keys as opposed to pressing blindly on the solid plastic below them. (I played briefly with a GH-style controller at the game store where I purchased it, and did much better than with the Rock Band guitar.) One could probably argue that this makes it more like playing an actual guitar, but if I cared about that I'd just learn to play, y'know, an actual guitar. Gripe, grumble.
As for the vocals: it is, I suppose, nice to have concrete, objective data concerning just how badly I sing. (This apparently being "very badly indeed".) I've noticed that my score goes up measurably when I just sing 'Aaaah' rather than the lyrics, so probably at least part of my problem is a failure to project properly: the white-noise of unvoiced stops and fricatives is registering as much on the vocals-measurement as does the portion of my vocalization with a meaningful primary frequency. (The fact that I have a tin ear composes`{::}^1` the other nine-tenths of my failure.)
The drums I fail at not so much due to a lack of rhythm (DDR is good for a few things!) as because of a lack of off-hand (or rather, off-arm) coordination.
Still and all, it's 1:47 in the morning as I type this, and I've spent the last I don't-know-how-long pretending I have something vaguely like musical ability. On a scale of 1 to 1, I'll have to rate it a gas. ^_^
`{::}^1` Pun only vaguely intentional.
Groovy describes the music; psychedelic describes the accompanying visuals, which should surprise exactly no one. It's not complete — notable songs missing, hopefully to be offered for sale later, include "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", "Eleanor Rigby", "Nowhere Man", "I'll Follow the Sun", "Magical Mystery Tour", and "Yesterday". (In fact I can confirm that "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is intended to be offered for sale via the various online distribution channels on either October 20 or November 20 of this year.) A complete list of the songs that are included is here, courtesy of Gamespot.
I'm not terribly fond of the guitar included with the game: the keys near the head don't rebound to full extension the way a Guitar Hero controller's do. It's difficult to tell when one is actually pressing the keys as opposed to pressing blindly on the solid plastic below them. (I played briefly with a GH-style controller at the game store where I purchased it, and did much better than with the Rock Band guitar.) One could probably argue that this makes it more like playing an actual guitar, but if I cared about that I'd just learn to play, y'know, an actual guitar. Gripe, grumble.
As for the vocals: it is, I suppose, nice to have concrete, objective data concerning just how badly I sing. (This apparently being "very badly indeed".) I've noticed that my score goes up measurably when I just sing 'Aaaah' rather than the lyrics, so probably at least part of my problem is a failure to project properly: the white-noise of unvoiced stops and fricatives is registering as much on the vocals-measurement as does the portion of my vocalization with a meaningful primary frequency. (The fact that I have a tin ear composes`{::}^1` the other nine-tenths of my failure.)
The drums I fail at not so much due to a lack of rhythm (DDR is good for a few things!) as because of a lack of off-hand (or rather, off-arm) coordination.
Still and all, it's 1:47 in the morning as I type this, and I've spent the last I don't-know-how-long pretending I have something vaguely like musical ability. On a scale of 1 to 1, I'll have to rate it a gas. ^_^
`{::}^1` Pun only vaguely intentional.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Capsaicin + Eyeballs = ?
If you answered "PAIN", you're right!
Having your eyes have a Scoville rating is no fun at all.
Having your eyes have a Scoville rating is no fun at all.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
New Orleans (day 3 of 7)
(This post has been backdated, from 2009-08-06.)
Tuesday was more productive than Monday. It's also more abbreviable, so let me first lay out SIGGRAPH's general schedule for clarity.
Every day has essentially four segments: I 8:30 to 10:15, II 10:30 to 12:15, III 1:45 to 3:30, and IV 3:45 to 5:30. Some sessions span I and II or III and IV; and there are dozens of smaller gatherings or sessions or activities that don't respect the segments listed above, such as FJORG! or the various BOFs, or the Computer Animation Festival showings, which mostly come after IV.
Anyway, for me, I was occupied by Real-Time Illumination for Dynamic Scenes, which was interesting and useful; it primarily focused on screen-space methods, which aren't of much use to me in my current job (we try for photorealism, although we only occasionally succeed) but at least had shiny algorithms.
Contrasting this, in II I attended a presentation of technical papers grouped together as Perception andDeception Depiction. I admit that toward evaluating lighting design interface paradigms for novice users was useful -- not in the particular, although I cede that the concept of a light-painting interface was interesting`{::}^1` -- but in the fact that it actually collected hard, reproducible data about HCI, which hardly ever seems to happen, and that it laid out its method and methodology for collecting the data. However, I still probably shouldn't have attended, since it was a Technical Papers presentation-collection, and those are all included on the DVD I got with the full-conference admission ticket. (Well, that my employer got with my ticket, anyway.)
So leaving that session early, somewhere in the middle of evaluating human color perception in high-luminance conditions, meant I got to head to the Exhibition Hall and collect swag for the rest of II and the lunch break. Alas, there was little swag to collect -- or, from a less self-centered position, the exhibition hall was strangely small compared to last year's SIGGRAPH, with fewer interesting exhibitors. (Also those exhibitors that were present were much more aggressive about scanning the barcodes of my badge without first asking permission to flood me with their e-mail advertisements.)
... also I had what purported to be a muffaletta from the exhibition hall food dispensary. I have officially learned my lesson concerning food from within the convention-hall (that lesson being DON'T).
III and IV were taken up by a course on OpenGL, updated to use OpenGL 3.1. Alas, I am not sure what its intended audience was: the OpenGL 3.1 material did not make up much of the course, that being instead almost entirely taken up by a rehash of my college Computer Graphics course -- very basic 'how rendering works' stuff. I thought it was intended for artists who wanted to get into programming, but an one such artist considered it beneath him, and a second artist (less interested in programming) found the entire talk to have been over his head. I'm still not sure what the intended audience of the talk was. It may have been a set of people unlikely to attend SIGGRAPH.
`{::}^1` However, the primary conclusion of the paper was that 'interesting' doesn't imply 'useful' here, so don't get too enraptured with the concept. Even manually positioning the lights turned out to be more usable than that.
Tuesday was more productive than Monday. It's also more abbreviable, so let me first lay out SIGGRAPH's general schedule for clarity.
Every day has essentially four segments: I 8:30 to 10:15, II 10:30 to 12:15, III 1:45 to 3:30, and IV 3:45 to 5:30. Some sessions span I and II or III and IV; and there are dozens of smaller gatherings or sessions or activities that don't respect the segments listed above, such as FJORG! or the various BOFs, or the Computer Animation Festival showings, which mostly come after IV.
Anyway, for me, I was occupied by Real-Time Illumination for Dynamic Scenes, which was interesting and useful; it primarily focused on screen-space methods, which aren't of much use to me in my current job (we try for photorealism, although we only occasionally succeed) but at least had shiny algorithms.
Contrasting this, in II I attended a presentation of technical papers grouped together as Perception and
So leaving that session early, somewhere in the middle of evaluating human color perception in high-luminance conditions, meant I got to head to the Exhibition Hall and collect swag for the rest of II and the lunch break. Alas, there was little swag to collect -- or, from a less self-centered position, the exhibition hall was strangely small compared to last year's SIGGRAPH, with fewer interesting exhibitors. (Also those exhibitors that were present were much more aggressive about scanning the barcodes of my badge without first asking permission to flood me with their e-mail advertisements.)
... also I had what purported to be a muffaletta from the exhibition hall food dispensary. I have officially learned my lesson concerning food from within the convention-hall (that lesson being DON'T).
III and IV were taken up by a course on OpenGL, updated to use OpenGL 3.1. Alas, I am not sure what its intended audience was: the OpenGL 3.1 material did not make up much of the course, that being instead almost entirely taken up by a rehash of my college Computer Graphics course -- very basic 'how rendering works' stuff. I thought it was intended for artists who wanted to get into programming, but an one such artist considered it beneath him, and a second artist (less interested in programming) found the entire talk to have been over his head. I'm still not sure what the intended audience of the talk was. It may have been a set of people unlikely to attend SIGGRAPH.
`{::}^1` However, the primary conclusion of the paper was that 'interesting' doesn't imply 'useful' here, so don't get too enraptured with the concept. Even manually positioning the lights turned out to be more usable than that.
Monday, August 3, 2009
New Orleans (day 2 of 7)
So today was almost entirely taken up by SIGGRAPH. Which is reasonable, as it's why I'm here, but it does mean I'm putting in longer hours than I would if I were back in Houston, actually coding.
The day started at 8:30, which is reasonable enough, with a complete waste of time, which wasn't. One of the topics of this year's SIGGRAPH is "Informational Aesthetics" — a perfectly reasonable concept, especially in the context of HCI, but unfortunately this opening talk was... notsomuch, and I'll cover it in detail simply because I'm in an exceedingly lousy mood.
The talk opened with a description of the construction of various visualizations of a graph of the intercitations of articles published in various scientific journals. (An overview is at well-formed.eigenfactor.org, if you're curious.) The speaker referred to this as a "graph of science," which grated on my nerves — use of "science" to refer to the social phenomenon of the interaction of scientists, rather than the abstract process of learning about the world possible in a social vacuum, has never sat well with me. (On a similar note, he referred to the emergence of the discipline of 'neuroscience' — shown on one graph as a recategorization of journals originally from several distinct disciplines (1997) into a distinct cluster not previously extant (2005) — as a "story." This sets off all sorts of alarm bells.)
This was the most relevant talk of the three.
The next speaker presented this. While it was a reasonable application of computer graphics to augment dance, I'm not convinced it was very useful to non-choreographers. There didn't seem to be any analysis done; it was all representation and re-presentation of the data, as far as I saw. Once upon a time, this would possibly have been suitable for a video presentation, but while this may represent the cutting edge of choreography, it doesn't seem to be much of a SIGGRAPH topic.
The final speaker of the talk ... may have had potential, but did not use it. He had simply taken the output of the electricity-usage monitors in the Dartmouth undergraduate dorms and hooked them up to a gauge instantiated as the hand-drawn animated image of a polar bear — depicted as happy when usage is low, and in danger when usage is high. (Apparently this has measurably reduced electricity consumption in the dorms.) This is all well and good, but hardly seems to be SIGGRAPH material. Apparently there was some novelty, or at least nontriviality, to his data processing (determining what constituted 'low' and 'high' respectively). It might have been better if he'd gone into more detail about that...
At any rate, while fragments might possibly become useful in unforeseen future days, apparently I should have been attending Advances in Real-Time Rendering, where there was hard math to be had. Alas, when I entered around 10:00, the presenter said she was done with the integrals and filter equations and would now pass the stand to another. Indeed, the rest of the talk was relatively useless — there was a description of a deferred-lighting engine, and then a read-from-the-slides talk about light volumes (?) in Crysis.
I ate lunch between those two, around 11:00. This becomes relevant later.
After that, I wandered around upstairs, looking at the Emerging Technologies and Art sections, groups which tended to shade into one another at times. I note specifically, and with some fondness, the Funbrella — an electric motor / kinetic sensor mounted on an umbrella, allowing the wielder to feel the recorded sensations of spaghetti, marbles, and plush toys raining down upon them. More serious was the installation Hylozoic Soil, which is (as one attendee put it) "terrifying and beautiful" — a jungle made out of plastic and actuators that moves on its own in ways a (Terran?) jungle shouldn't. The creaking and buzzing vibrations that pervaded the setup (from the plastic and actuators respectively) were as much what brought it to life as the motions were, though.
The technical portion of the conference got back underway at 13:45. For me, that meant part II of the Real-Time Rendering talks, which started off with essentially an hour-long advertisement for Disney Interactive's Pure (racing game) and Split/Second (racing game with explosions explosions with a racing game attached). To be fair, Pure's segment described in reasonable detail their foliage-drawing methods... although their sort-avoidance algorithm seems kind of silly, given that you can "sort" the points in a regular lattice in a square by distance from any point not in the square in constant time. (Go old-school; think Bresenham's algorithm.)
Split/Second's segment had no such redeeming qualities, though. It was an ad.
After that, things picked up relatively quickly: the remainder of the talk had actual substance, covering depth-of-field, antialiasing, real-time raytracing (on two-generation-old hardware, no less!), and concluding with a detailed analysis and explication ("postmortem") of the graphics engine for Little Big Planet. (Note to non-PS3 owners: yeah, don't expect this to come out for any other platform anytime soon. The engine viciously exploits not merely the SPEs — essentially the entire vertex portion of the graphics pipeline is performed there — but specific quirks of the nVidia RSX's MSAA implementation.)
As this wound to a close, I went upstairs to the Sandbox, where a number of games were on display: Flower, most notably, but there were several, most being independent titles such as Akrasia and ... damn, I don't remember any of the others' names. There was an Xbox360 boxing game, a vaguely Silent-Hill-esque third-person game involving a goth girl running around in a foggy forest that I only got to see over someone's shoulder, and a game involving being a sphere that consumes other spheres by touch -- the only real mechanics for the last are 'momentum is conserved', 'large spheres consume small spheres' and 'you can eject very tiny spheres at high speed in any direction'. Fun. Also frustrating at the level I found myself playing. (Edit 2009-08-06: These are, respectively, Fight Night: Round 4, The Path, and... okay, I still don't know the last one.)
This was just to kill time in between the last talks and the previews of the Technical Papers, which lasted from 18:00 to 20:00. Two full hours of 50-second previews for some four-fifths of the papers to be presented. At least this lets me have some sense of which presentations to avoid on the grounds that their presenters will just be reading off of their slides, and whose papers I could as easily absorb without their presence.
I'm going to give those three at the beginning some credit -- none of them did that.
So I came to the convention center at 8:30; I left eleven and a half hours later; and I promptly staggered northward to the first restaurant I found, one Mulate's. (Which, for the record, had better music than food. Which is not to say the food was bad; it was just nothing to write home about. So I won't.)
To close the day, which had already been long enough that I should probably have had the sense to throw in the towel for the night, I headed to the ACM SIGGRAPH party, at the Generations Hall -- a fairly standard club, and a fairly standard party, and therefore as much of a waste of time for me as the day's opening had been. (It was worth a shot, I suppose.)
Tomorrow will hopefully be less full than today.
The day started at 8:30, which is reasonable enough, with a complete waste of time, which wasn't. One of the topics of this year's SIGGRAPH is "Informational Aesthetics" — a perfectly reasonable concept, especially in the context of HCI, but unfortunately this opening talk was... notsomuch, and I'll cover it in detail simply because I'm in an exceedingly lousy mood.
The talk opened with a description of the construction of various visualizations of a graph of the intercitations of articles published in various scientific journals. (An overview is at well-formed.eigenfactor.org, if you're curious.) The speaker referred to this as a "graph of science," which grated on my nerves — use of "science" to refer to the social phenomenon of the interaction of scientists, rather than the abstract process of learning about the world possible in a social vacuum, has never sat well with me. (On a similar note, he referred to the emergence of the discipline of 'neuroscience' — shown on one graph as a recategorization of journals originally from several distinct disciplines (1997) into a distinct cluster not previously extant (2005) — as a "story." This sets off all sorts of alarm bells.)
This was the most relevant talk of the three.
The next speaker presented this. While it was a reasonable application of computer graphics to augment dance, I'm not convinced it was very useful to non-choreographers. There didn't seem to be any analysis done; it was all representation and re-presentation of the data, as far as I saw. Once upon a time, this would possibly have been suitable for a video presentation, but while this may represent the cutting edge of choreography, it doesn't seem to be much of a SIGGRAPH topic.
The final speaker of the talk ... may have had potential, but did not use it. He had simply taken the output of the electricity-usage monitors in the Dartmouth undergraduate dorms and hooked them up to a gauge instantiated as the hand-drawn animated image of a polar bear — depicted as happy when usage is low, and in danger when usage is high. (Apparently this has measurably reduced electricity consumption in the dorms.) This is all well and good, but hardly seems to be SIGGRAPH material. Apparently there was some novelty, or at least nontriviality, to his data processing (determining what constituted 'low' and 'high' respectively). It might have been better if he'd gone into more detail about that...
At any rate, while fragments might possibly become useful in unforeseen future days, apparently I should have been attending Advances in Real-Time Rendering, where there was hard math to be had. Alas, when I entered around 10:00, the presenter said she was done with the integrals and filter equations and would now pass the stand to another. Indeed, the rest of the talk was relatively useless — there was a description of a deferred-lighting engine, and then a read-from-the-slides talk about light volumes (?) in Crysis.
I ate lunch between those two, around 11:00. This becomes relevant later.
After that, I wandered around upstairs, looking at the Emerging Technologies and Art sections, groups which tended to shade into one another at times. I note specifically, and with some fondness, the Funbrella — an electric motor / kinetic sensor mounted on an umbrella, allowing the wielder to feel the recorded sensations of spaghetti, marbles, and plush toys raining down upon them. More serious was the installation Hylozoic Soil, which is (as one attendee put it) "terrifying and beautiful" — a jungle made out of plastic and actuators that moves on its own in ways a (Terran?) jungle shouldn't. The creaking and buzzing vibrations that pervaded the setup (from the plastic and actuators respectively) were as much what brought it to life as the motions were, though.
The technical portion of the conference got back underway at 13:45. For me, that meant part II of the Real-Time Rendering talks, which started off with essentially an hour-long advertisement for Disney Interactive's Pure (racing game) and Split/Second (
Split/Second's segment had no such redeeming qualities, though. It was an ad.
After that, things picked up relatively quickly: the remainder of the talk had actual substance, covering depth-of-field, antialiasing, real-time raytracing (on two-generation-old hardware, no less!), and concluding with a detailed analysis and explication ("postmortem") of the graphics engine for Little Big Planet. (Note to non-PS3 owners: yeah, don't expect this to come out for any other platform anytime soon. The engine viciously exploits not merely the SPEs — essentially the entire vertex portion of the graphics pipeline is performed there — but specific quirks of the nVidia RSX's MSAA implementation.)
As this wound to a close, I went upstairs to the Sandbox, where a number of games were on display: Flower, most notably, but there were several, most being independent titles such as Akrasia and ... damn, I don't remember any of the others' names. There was an Xbox360 boxing game, a vaguely Silent-Hill-esque third-person game involving a goth girl running around in a foggy forest that I only got to see over someone's shoulder, and a game involving being a sphere that consumes other spheres by touch -- the only real mechanics for the last are 'momentum is conserved', 'large spheres consume small spheres' and 'you can eject very tiny spheres at high speed in any direction'. Fun. Also frustrating at the level I found myself playing. (Edit 2009-08-06: These are, respectively, Fight Night: Round 4, The Path, and... okay, I still don't know the last one.)
This was just to kill time in between the last talks and the previews of the Technical Papers, which lasted from 18:00 to 20:00. Two full hours of 50-second previews for some four-fifths of the papers to be presented. At least this lets me have some sense of which presentations to avoid on the grounds that their presenters will just be reading off of their slides, and whose papers I could as easily absorb without their presence.
I'm going to give those three at the beginning some credit -- none of them did that.
So I came to the convention center at 8:30; I left eleven and a half hours later; and I promptly staggered northward to the first restaurant I found, one Mulate's. (Which, for the record, had better music than food. Which is not to say the food was bad; it was just nothing to write home about. So I won't.)
To close the day, which had already been long enough that I should probably have had the sense to throw in the towel for the night, I headed to the ACM SIGGRAPH party, at the Generations Hall -- a fairly standard club, and a fairly standard party, and therefore as much of a waste of time for me as the day's opening had been. (It was worth a shot, I suppose.)
Tomorrow will hopefully be less full than today.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
