Crytek aims for the cloud, sparse voxel octrees and sparse surfel octrees

Crytek's HPG 2010 presentation is available at http://www.crytek.com/fileadmin/user_upload/inside/presentations/2010_HPG_Keynotes/Notes.ppt According to the slides, Crytek is already using sparse voxel octree in the game asset pipeline. Because they are Crytek, they are also researching a variation on SVO, called the sparse surfel octree (I vaguely remember surfels from Michael Bunnell's point based ambient occlusion and indirect lighting technique in GPU Gems 2). I wonder what that is going to look like.

There are a few slides on server side rendering, which could "drastically change the direction" of the real-time rendering pipeline.

Other interesting tidbits:
- a configurable hardware scheduler which could make raytracing much faster
- Larrabee 2 still in the race for next-gen consoles?
- DX11 Compute Shaders suck
- Perception-driven graphics are the key to more efficient use of rendering resources (this is a very interesting future direction)

DysKinect

This one made me LOL:

'Aristotlean' Model of Contemporary Learning

There are many models of contemporary learning which have the student at the centre such as the CEO iLE@RN Model. Building on this, as part of my ISTE presentation on 'The Role of IWBs in a 1:1 Environment', I wanted to come up with a contemporary learning model, again with the student at the centre, but this time looking at the physical location (as opposed to the philosophical position) and the technologies that could facilitate this. To this end I came up with what I've termed the 'Aristotlean' Model of Contemporary Learning.

The term 'Aristotlean' was chosen with reference to the appearance of Aristotle's geocentric model of the universe (you can take the teacher out of Physics but you can't take the Physics out of the teacher!)

Taking this a step further, I wanted to emphasise that with 1-to-1, students could be learning at school, home, even dare I say it McDonalds, all the time working within the cloud via wireless:

Obviously with mobile learning this opens up so many possibilities for students to access anything, anytime, anywhere. Even with fixed devices such as IWBs in certain learning spaces i.e. school, students are still able of working within the cloud. Yet, whatever the scenario, students are always at the centre of learning, both physically and metaphorically.

Tom's Hardware review of OnLive

Tom's Hardware review: OnLive Cloud-Based Gaming: Is This the End of High-End PCs?

Interesting review, but the assumption in the article's title is already fundamentally flawed: high end PC gaming is already nearing it's end and it has nothing to do with cloud gaming, but everything with consoles. The article's conclusion is that OnLive doesn't come close to displace a high-end PC in gaming, but what the author seems to forget is that game publishers - not PC gamers - will ultimately decide if cloud gaming will succeed and they also have the power to kill off high-end PC gaming in no time (as they have been doing for the last 5 years).

Gone are the days when I was eagerly anticipating cutting-edge PC games like Doom III (before the name change to Doom 3), Half-Life 2 and Unreal 2. That was about 8 years ago. The last PC game worthy of being called cutting-edge was Crysis and that came out 3 years ago. Consoles have become the main focus of id Software, Epic games and now also Crytek. For a graphics enthusiast like myself, this is a very unfortunate trend, all dictated by economical laws.

So in essence, high-end PC gaming is already dead. Crysis still beats every other PC game (ported from consoles) in advanced effects. Cranking up resolution, AA, and AF settings in Modern Warfare 2 will not change the poor lighting and shadowing. I can't wait until the consoles, aka the high-end PC gaming killers, will be made obsolete themselves by cloud gaming. Considering the enthusiasm of game publishers and developers for the cloud (e.g. Crytek is a big proponent of server side rendering cfr. Yerli's presentation at HPG 2010), this might happen much sooner than thought, just like stereoscopic 3D is taking console gaming by storm.

UPDATE: CNET also has an excellent review of OnLive up, with an analysis of the benefits of cloud gaming for all actors in the playing field http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20009033-1.html

iray officially in the open with Bunkspeed Shot

Bunkspeed Shot (final version) was officially released last week. More importantly, it also means that the long awaited iray, which is powering SHOT, is finally available for everyone (it should have been here much earlier with 3ds max 2011, but was not integrated for some obscure reason).

Bunkspeed SHOT press release

You can download a 30-day trial demo at http://bunkspeed.com/shot/demo/index.html (Don't bother if you don't have a CUDA enabled card with at least 1GB of VRAM, else the software defaults to CPU only, totally retarded limitation if you ask me).

Funny enough, the press release makes it look like you'll need a Quadro or Tesla to run the software, but a Geforce should do fine and is probably faster. The amount of GPU memory will be the real decisive factor and Octane has shown that you can do a lot within a 1GB VRAM budget (it even has procedural textures now, which take up almost no memory).

Waiting for V-Ray GPU... hopefully another "Siggraph surprise" :-D

Tame Those Sculpties! (Second Life)

Ok, with the updates on Viewer 2 I've noticed that Sculpties tend to have a hard time rezzing correctly. If you're one of those people in-world who are afflicted with Sculptie Dysfunction (it's treatable, I swear!) then read on:

Simply crack open the Debug Settings (located in Advanced menu)

• Getting the Advanced menu to show up: Press CTRL ALT D

Then Type in the Debug Box: RenderVolumeLODFactor

You'll then see the following:



Chances are, it's set to something really low, like 1.25 which would be the problem with the sculpties not rezing correctly. Simply set that number to at least 4 in order to get the sculpties to load up the way the digital gods intended.

Enjoy the quick fix!

Demo of Brigade real-time path tracer out!

Available at http://igad.nhtv.nl/~bikker/

Anyone (remotely) interested in real-time raytracing, owning a CUDA enabled GPU or a powerful CPU, must definitely try this excellent demo! It works with Geforce 8000 cards and upwards, but can also use the CPU only if you don't have a CUDA card. (UPDATE: some people on XP machines cannot run the program because of a msvcrt.dll error. Removing opengl32.dll from the Brigade folder seems to solve the problem). There are 4 different scenes to choose from, some are animated with "planes" flying around. You can simply edit "scene.txt" to change scene, resolution, samples per pixel and so on. This is a video of one of the scenes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC2zKIqttzk

It's an amazing piece of software with huge potential. Afaik, the CPU uses bidirectional path tracing while divergent rays are path traced on the GPU. Scenes and materials are very simple, but nevertheless I am still stunned that real-time path tracing with animated objects is possible today. (Bidirectional) path tracing solves most limitations encountered by other real-time GI methods which rely on image space techniques or can only be used in diffuse and semi-glossy scenes. Speed is the only limit. I can't wait to see Brigade run on a cluster of PC's each containing multiple Fermi's (as is suggested in the readme file). Looking very forward to the games that the Dutchies will produce with this technology ;-)

vBusiness Link

This week has definitely been an interesting and productive week in the virtual world, with the announcement of Mark Kingdon stepping down from CEO of Linden Lab and Phil Rosedale filling the void, to the uneasy silence on community issues from Mr Rosedale's speech at SL7B, the virtual world has been all abuzz as to the implications going forward.

Among this, though, it was business as (un)usual for myself on behalf of Pixel Labs, as I gave a presentation during the grand opening of vBusiness Link in Second Life. While the rest of the virtual world fretted and dissected the meanings of what was said in Linden Lab this week, I was busy addressing a rather large turnout in The Crucible (Auditorium) of vBusiness Link sim in Second Life, and explaining why it is imperative that we consistently do everything wrong.
I wouldn't say my performance was stellar, but I did manage to get my points across in a manner by which the audience was pleased. With a total turnout of around 24 simultaneous attendees, it is safe to say the presentation was a success.







It is at this point you may be wondering exactly what vBusiness Link is all about?

vBusiness Link is a virtual community of practice, specializing in virtual business operations and supportive services, for entities wishing to harness virtual environments and/or virtualized systems in their day to day operations. Through experience, client engagement, comprehensive capabilities and extensive research, we collaborate with customers to achieve milestones through prudence and mindful conversation.

It's also an interesting business community to explore, and attend for presentations and classes when available. With offices for rent, business services, and attention to detail.

The presentation carried on for about two hours, despite being scheduled for one hour, and the crowd enjoyed the interactive portion of the presentation which saw the group taking a field trip to the Pixel Labs island for a marketing challenge. While I strived to do absolutely everything wrong in the first half of my presentation (reading off of the slides, using dark backgrounds for good news, giving the presentation a ridiculously long name) the point of which was to illustrate the massive difference between that and how to actually do it right in the second half of the presentation.

vBusiness Link is scheduled up until August 2010 with presentations, so by all means check their website and find out who will be coming to the Crucible soon! If you're interested in doing a presentation at vBusiness Link, I'd suggest getting in contact with the staff there to make arrangements. As they are booking up quickly, I was lucky to have been invited personally to present on opening day, and I didn't disappoint with the crowd :)

Visit vBusiness Link: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Business%20Link/129/108/27

vBusiness Link Website: http://wwww.vbusinesslink.net

Presentation Download: http://bit.ly/9g7xtc [slideshare link]

Cloud gaming just works

The last couple of days, I have been reading a lot of impressions from gamers who have tried the OnLive service and I must say that I'm surprised at the amount of positive feedback. Many people don't seem to perceive any lag and the ones that do don't mind it too much and it never makes the games unplayable. I am stunned reading that OnLive works so well, I've been hoping that cloud gaming would work great, but this is even better than I had expected. I thought it would initially be plagued by major lag fluctuations, stuttering, connections shutting down when the service launched, but everything seems fine till now.

When cloud gaming really catches on and other services like OTOY and Gaikai will join the battlefield, these game clouds will have the capability to go beyond what consoles and even high-end PCs can offer in terms of graphics processing:

- insane geometrical detail with e.g. sparse voxel octree raycasting/-tracing for environments and characters
- advanced lighting and global illumination through GPU accelerated raytracing
- physics on every dynamic object
- procedural sound
- more human-like A.I. (just hook up the server to Blue Gene ;-))

This will be imo the ultimate argument to drop restricted console architecture in favor of cloud gaming.

Cloud gaming is also a great way for offering time-limited game demo's, which is Gaikai's main focus: play a demo of a soon to be released game right in your browser. How easy and customer friendly can it get? There are many other options beyond gaming, such as a Facebook-ish virtual reality world (LivePlace powered by OTOY), CAD programs, Photoshop, Matlab, anything compute intensive...

UPDATE: Two interesting short articles on Dave Perry's Gaikai:

http://www.nowgamer.com/news/3548/perry-big-3-will-embrace-cloud-gaming
http://www.nowgamer.com/news/3547/perry-gaikai-demo-surprised-publishers

Video review of OnLive

Cloud gaming, it's finally here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir4B0rgta0Y

Two written reviews:

http://gizmodo.com/5567770/onlive-streaming-game-service-tested-at-home-finally

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/06/Thoughts-on-OnLive

The reviews are surprisingly positive about the lag: some say it's noticeable, others say it isn't, but in either case it's not really an issue during gameplay, not even for "fast twitched" games like Unreal Tournament 3 and Batman Arkham Asylum. I(UPDATE: I have been watching 5 video reviews from casual gamers on YouTube, and every single one says that lag is unnoticeable, which is fuck awesome, I guess this settles anyones doubts about latency!). mage quality is a mixed bag: one reviewer says it looks almost identical to 720p local play, another says it's significantly worse. due to compression. I guess it depends on the bandwidth connection. Image quality is imo definitely not the biggest hurdle for cloud gaming, latency is much more important and apparently it's all very playable. Games are the most challenging software to make work through cloud computing and OnLive has apparently succeeded at this daunting task. OTOY and Gaikai will surely follow. When these services mature and gain popularity, consoles will face a difficult time. Ultimately, when every thinkable piece of software can be run on the cloud, who will still need Windows?

There's no doubt that cloud gaming is the future of games, the killer app for iPad and iPhone, probably sooner than most people think, and a serious problem for next-gen consoles. I think Larrabee/MIC/Knight's Corner might resurface in a cloud game server environment instead of being sold as a stand-alone PC card. I also think that at some point in the future, Nvidia and AMD will make hardware that is specifically aimed at game cloud servers and will be more efficient at memory use and power management in order to serve multiple users with the same hardware resources (like OTOY). A super beefed-up version of AMD Fusion for example.

Using the GPU for precomputing GI in game development

I just read on the Real-Time Rendering blog, that Ubi Montreal used GPUs to precompute ambient occlusion for Splinter Cell Conviction. The technique used was invented by Toshiya Hachisuka and described in GPU Gems 2 in the chapter "High-Quality Global Illumination Rendering Using Rasterization".

I also read that Bungie uses a GPU-accelerated photon mapping technique from the Siggraph 2009 paper "An Efficient GPU-based Approach for Interactive Global Illumination" by Rui Wang et al. to precompute GI in some of the Halo games (ODST?, Reach?).

It's nice to see that GPUs are actually used for precomputating lighting in games and movies (e.g. PantaRay in Avatar) and I believe this is a very interesting trend. On a PC stuffed with multiple Fermi's, some of these techniques might be close to real-time and achieve very high quality. With the latest breakthroughs in GPU-accelerated GI algorithms (path tracing, bidirectional path tracing (Brigade), soon realtime MLT?, (image space) GPU photon mapping, sppm) it should be possible to have movie-quality real-time GI on the next generation of consoles coming in 2012 (at the earliest). Or maybe not on consoles, but definitely on GPU clouds. :-).

Twitter loses it

It's fun to watch Twitter spaz out like it did yesterday. Even though there were 'internal server errors' and lots of fail whale watching (a picture that comes up when Twitter is over capacity) everyone kept on tweeting. We were possibly causing Twitter to go mental even more with millions of tweets about Twitter crashing. Paradox.

I also found myself thinking "Gee.. what do I do now?". Mind you I have a 2 year old and a whole house to clean.. it's Twitter that keeps me somewhat social and up to date with the news. I had to resort to Tumblr and making the above fail whale picture to post. I love it. I might send it to BP along with a sample of pimple cream that is guaranteed to reduce oil.. :D

Stochastic progressive photon mapping in Luxrender GPU

The guys behind Luxrender have released smallppmGPU and smallsppmgpu, two demos that incorporate ppm and sppm, which are very interesting unbiased algorithms that are much more efficient in rendering caustics than other unbiased methods (plain path tracing in particular) and which also offers nice DOF and motion blur. Link: http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=4024 (registration is needed)

The next step for the GPU renderers which rely on brute force path tracing is to investigate more efficient and faster algorithms such as bidirectional path tracing and Metropolis light transport running entirely on the GPU. There is already research going on in this area e.g. "Path Regeneration for Interactive Path Tracing" by Novak, Havran and Dachsbacher describes an efficient bidirectional path tracer running on the GPU (http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/~novakjn/paper/eg2010_pt.pdf).

Another logical evolution is getting biased algorithms (photon mapping, irradiance cache) to work efficiently on the GPU. This seems to be a much more difficult (but not impossible) task than having unbiased rendering on the GPU because these biased algo's are much more difficult to parallellize. Some recent papers in this area:

Morgan McGuire and David Luebke: Hardware-Accelerated Global Illumination by Image Space Photon Mapping

Bartosz Fabianowski and John Dingliana: Compact BVH Storage for Ray Tracing and Photon Mapping

Rui Wang et al.: An Efficient GPU-based Approach for Interactive Global Illumination

Maybe Chaos Group will stun us again at Siggraph 2010 with a biased GPU renderer, which renders 10 times faster than V-Ray GPU :-). Lots of interesting approaches to be explored and more exciting times ahead!

Knowledge Consuming or Knowledge Creating?

Supposedly I shall be receiving an iPad to 'play' with shortly, prior to some trials in some of our schools. Am I excited? More curious (I have to support schools with Mac or PC so have no zealous affiliation either way) yet I'm excited about the possibilities in schools. However, in conversations, blogs and tweets I am hearing and reading lots of naysayers harping on about the iPad's shortfalls. Problems with school wireless, security breaches and not being able to edit in Wikispaces I'm sure will be sorted out in due course. A bigger issue for me is the problem with Flash (I'm a big user of Prezi for instance) but maybe such applications with migrate to HTML5? However, I can't buy the argument that is now almost a cliché: "its for consumption not knowledge creation". More and more we are moving to 'cloud computing'. We can create and collaborate on documents, audio edit, video edit and more all within the 'aether'. The iPad is a Cloud device. It is not a problem not having a USB port, use dropbox.com. The biggest problem, particularly in Australia, in the short-term is bandwidth. In a few years time we will look back and wonder what the fuss was about. Everything will be in the cloud and we won't need tonnes of ports. The one thing missing in all of the posturing by adults is the students' opinions. They will love using iPads and similar devices in the classroom and will find ways of achieving many of the outcomes we adults say are impossible.

SecondLife Gets a Dose of Reality

With a 30% expected reduction in staff at LindenLab, and a push toward a browser based integration solution, any betting man (or woman) can see that the powers that be over at SecondLife don't seem to understand the magnitude of what they've taken on.

Simply put, you can't remove the technology evangelists from the equation, toss in some high profile management and a world-class marketing team, and redesign the viewer while expecting the ship to continue to float. At some point, one must realize you've essentially ripped the soul out of the company.

In the world of virtual environments, you need that holistic thinking if you want to succeed.

One of two things is happening at Lindenlab right now:

1. They are hitting dire straights and trying to spin it so it doesn't look as bad as it seems.
2. They are trying to lower operating costs to maximize revenue so they can paint a big red "buy out" target on the company.

I'll let you decide.

MCM London Expo May 2010 review

Friday was an absolute nightmare. Some idiot decided to bring in a steam train to my local station, and cordon off an area for the spotters. What they didn't take into account was by choosing platform 2, they were blocking off access to platform 1 (the regular train to London). And more importantly they hadn't accounted for lateness or bothered to keep staff and passengers informed about what was going on.

My poor girlfriend was trying to transport my birthday cake through the crowds of oblivious morons, and was getting more and more stressed by the second, but once we were lost in the scrum there was nothing that could be done. She couldn't even pass lugagge to me, put it down, or even find space to stop and catch her breath.

When we finally got on the train with minutes to spare she was nursing bruised and aching arms and we were both out of breath and stressed.

Fortunately we were in better spirits when we arrived in London, although miles of stairs and escalators at Bank to get to the DLR link didn't help matters.

When we got to our hotel we were releived to dump everything and just lay down for a bit and unwind.

When we were better we had a quick exploration of the area (plenty of shops and fast food choices), and then retired to the hotel pub for an enormous burger and fries. So huge I couldn't even finish mine!

Before settling down for the night, we checked over the early entry info, and set our alarms...

Woke up before the alarm. I don't sleep well in unusual beds, and I was still stressed from the day before, and excited about the Expo.

We'd decided to leave our cosplaying until later in the day, and hit the shopping stalls ASAP. Unfortunately I had miscalculated.

Arriving in the main hallway of Excel half an hour before early entry started (2.5 hours before regular entry is allowed) we found a gigantic queue. After walking half the length of the building we found a friend has saved us a space. Fortunately we were not lynched for queue jumping.

After what seemd like hours, but was probably 30 mins we got to the gates and saw another vast queue. Fortunately our advance tickets allowed us to bypass it, but after we exhanged them for wristbands and got our goodybags, we had to queue again in the cattle-pens to enter the main hall.

We eventually entered the main hall at 9:40, forty minutes after opening (and over an hour since we started queuing), and boy was it busy already. Fortunately with a bit of patience, and some deft footwork, you could get to any of the stalls.

The majority of the stalls at the front of the hall were selling plush toys, merchandise, and comics. But once you started digging there were DVDs, hats, figures, games, replica and prop weapons, and even CDs.

Past the sales stalls there was a large section for the Yugioh competitions; some promo areas for forthcoming films, video games and TV programmes; a wrestling ring (not sure why); an area for artists to promote their comics; and a couple of stage areas for events.

I wasn't really in the buying mood, but did get to chat to a really nice lady who drew Hetalia postcards and posters, and the creator of Fetishman. My girlfriend pointed out the similarity in our personalities after I'd chatted to him for a while, and she'd bought me a Tea-Master General pack (comic, poster,embroidered patch, and ID card).

My girlfriend and her friend tried to buy some yaoi comics, but discovered they didn't bring any ID to the expo. While tey were rummaging and grumbling, I got chatting to an Arcanine cosplayer, and made a friend by sharing my fan. Fursuiters get HOT in those things!

The day was not lst however, as a second pass of the stalls turned up a Hetalia Yaoi compilation called Under The Same Sky which proved very popular among the fans that day!

After we'd had our fill of the hall, we dropped off our friend with some cosplayers and went to change. My girlfriend was crossplaying as the cute Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and I was also crossplaying as Belarus.

I actually spent most of the weekend with the Hetalia cosplayers. They were a fun bunch and really friendly. Possibly a bit too friendy if you've seen some of my pictures on Facebook ;-)

I was celebrating my birthday that weekend so while when my GF took her friend to get chaged into her second outfit, she also picked up my birthday cake from our room.

It was a large sponge frosted with butter-icing, coloured to look like the Belarsian flag! It was awesome. We joined some other Hetali cosplayers who were picnicing, but sadly no-one had a knife. Fortunately we got chatting to an Eldar Dire Avenger cosplayer who offered to cut the cake with his sword. It was a bit messy, but we all got cake. And he was amused by being able to eat cake from a sword :)

The wind was picking up now, and a few spots of rain were felt, so we retreated undercover. But not before doing the Carameldansen

I also got to meet breifly with Helena Love, who I've corresponded with online, but never actually met. She also took the best photo of me that weekend (much better than the so-called pro by the white shutters!) Sadly she had other commitment, as did I, but it was nice to finally speak in person.

The weather was variable for quite a while, but it was nice to chat with everyone. We took a break at lunch time to visit the local shops (buying food in a kebabshop is hlarious while crossplaying!)

When the rain got too heavy, we retreated back inside, for a bit more shopping, and eventually retired to the hotel bar for fried calamari and spicy potato wedges.But not afte a long walk escorting my GF's friend back to her hotel.

There was an organised party at the Ibis, but as it was ticket only, and we were very tired, we didn't really care.

Even with the air-con on it was a stuffy night and I didn't really sleep well. As I lay half away I debated whether to cosplay again or not on the Sunday.

Waking up with the sun on Sunday morning I decided to wear my costume again. This time we had to wait for my GF's mate to arrive as she was storing her stuff in our room (and didn't want to walk a couple of miles from her hotel in a skimpy costume!)

This time we arrived one hour early, and outside the hall there were no queues, and inside things moved smoothly to the holding area where we ended up sitting for most of the hour. Although this was punctuated by cries of "CARD GAMES ON MOTORCYCLES!" and other silliness.

People musy have realised how much better the queues were on Sunday because spirits were high, and as we filed out of the final row of the cattle run, people were high-fiving the next row as they passed.

Sunday was a lot more laid back. We had a look around the sales hall again, and Geof, the creator of Fetishman, wished me a happy birthday and complimented me on my entourage (My girlfriend was clearing a path before us, and her friend was following behind with a flag :) ).

After that we spent most of the day out in the sun photographing cosplayers and chilling out. As the sun went down we escorted my GFs friend to the station, then we went back to the hotel bar for a very yummy cod and chips.

I did some packing, and we went to sleep. I still didn't sleep well.

Which didn't help on Monday morning. The DLR was out of service and the replacement bus was packed. Changing at Tower Gateway means leaving the station, crossing a busy road, and enetering via another entrance. Kings Cross Station is horrible and I never want to use it again. The Cambridge Express didn't open its doors until one minute before departure time. And for some reason the hourly trains from Norwich to the sticks pause for mid-afternoon.

I arrived home very frazzled and short tempered. :(

Overall (apart from the travel nightmares) it was a really good weekend. Even the bad weather didn't stop us having fun, and I've learned a few lessons for next time. I'm not sure if I prefer the expo style to the more intimite hotel-cons, but I'm definitely going again in October.

I suppose I'd better start work on that costume then...