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A CHAT WITH NAUGHTY DOG ABOUT NEXT-GEN!


We chatted with Stephen White, co-president and programming manager 
of Santa Monica, CA-based videogame developer Naughty Dog about creating 
games for the next-generation consoles … and he offered some suggestions 
for dealing with next-gen hurdles.


Q. Naughty Dog is known for the “Crash Bandicoot” and “Jak and Daxter” 
franchises which have sold over 35 million units combined. What have 
been the fundamental keys to the success of your titles and how do 
you plan to apply those to your next-generation game development?


A. One of the biggest factors in the making of a successful game 
is hiring very talented people who are motivated and can get the 
job done without the need for extensive management and finely detailed 
schedules.

Yup, I knew Roman (the founded) when he introduced his stuff at SIGGRAPH, 
an when he first showed Calagari on the Amiga.  His stuff has come 
a LONG way.  Very impressive (very cool guy too).
I need only a 2D scripting system though.


BrianH, I did not know about EBML, but I don't see the advantage 
of EBML, or Rebin for that matter.  PCode (in my simple mind) servers 
several purposes:

- Portability to multiple systems.
- Faster execution
- Smaller size

Pretty much in that order.


Back when I did video games, I designed a language called MIDAS (which, 
while it looks like I made the name fit the acronym, I did not….Machine 
Independent Demonstration and Animation System)


It was designed to do the opening credits, scores, dialogs, win sequences, 
and it produced simple (very very simple pcode) out to the C64, IBM, 
Amiga, etc.  All you had to do was convert the art, and we had a 
tool to do that too.


Each command would become 1 byte (since there were less than 256 
commands.  So it produced something that looked like assembly.


With both EBML and Rebin, there would be (I assume) still parsing, 
unless you are writing everything yourself (in other words, a player).

Very cool James! Add it to the Games group.

James, that's one of the first REBOL games I've seen that looks as 
polished as if it was done in Flash. Which, as wierd as it sounds, 
is intended to be a compliment in this case! :-)

Agreed. It's got a very slick feel to it. Some of Allen's old games 
were very good in that regard as well.

i'm going to add gesture control to all my new games where its releveant 
because its so much fun ;)

I made some flash games (in HaXe mostly).. I have no idea how to 
make a game with so many details, animations, sound, things that 
need to work together...what else to do is in REBOL using some dialect

Anything that requires traditional I/O (not OpenGL or DirectX) will 
have a lot of variation on Windows. Video games use timers and delays 
to get consistent behavior.

in games, it won't be as obvious cause its not doing an exact same 
cycle at each refresh.

in the current stat of the host-kit and rebol architecture in general:
---------------------------

1) I cannot use data, since that is being used by r3_gui.r3 so it 
has in effect become a reserved word which we can't use.

2) if I use gob/draw, then I am in fact trying to hijack the meaning 
 of  draw gob... an AGG draw block.

3) the current gob! API is very limited because it was shrunk to 
handle a very specific use case.  I can't really play around with 
anything cause it just breaks up real quick (I tried).

4) the CGR API doesn't have a scene dialect yet, but that is just 
high-level use.  if you look at the code, its 4 lines of code to 
have an openGL high-rez model viewable in a window... I hardly consider 
that bloat.

5) using commands to manage a real life scene with several thousand 
animated, deforming objects and scene changes, is a nice dream. it 
doesn't work in practice since just managing the thousands of blocks 
this requires ends up eating a way a sizeable part of the CPU and 
ram.  

6) data marshalling is heavy, REBOL datatype access is heavy, datatypes 
use A LOT of ram, and the GC is extremely intrusive,  CGRs solve 
all of this while still making the high-level interface easy as pie.

7) primitives are more than just dead weight they allow direct access 
to/from rebol and the CGR itself.  they are the *low* level interface 
which can be used directly or directed by the use of a dialect later. 
  the difference from AGG is that these structures are persistent 
for many reasons, which will be much clearer in the future.

8) CGRs are not only for 3d graphics, but for any rendering.  primitives 
are a generic container to access/construct any rendering engine 
in the same way. ie. all CGR will use the same core cgr dialect.

9) the code does support multiple cgr gobs, but it might have bugs... 
I didn't even try it yet... I was busy getting this stable and released 
asap.

10) The opengl-cgr currently doesn't integrate into the view compositing, 
since that instantly *kills* rebol.  I mean... totally.  500x500 
a 30fps... = 100% cpu just blitting graphics (not even opengl rendering). 
 opengl-cgr uses the container mode, which actually uses up a sub-window 
(like every single construct in windows) and allows system double 
buffering in that area.

11) CGRs are compatible with all other gobs, though they must be 
built to support the internal gfx pipeline by using the compositor 
or image rendering modes.  That is how I started and it was quickly 
obvious how un feasible it was for opengl.

12) rendering performances ARE very implementation specific. using 
show instead of cgr-refresh on the display loop will show a performance 
penalty anywhere from 10-1000% (depending on nested gob depth & size). 
 If I didn't create internal data for the models, the large tree 
example would run much slower, if I used commands to call every opengl 
call in the large tree example, it would likely take several seconds 
a frame even with hw support.

in the future:
----------------------------

-there will be (hopefully) a small number of changes to the host-kit 
which will allow 1, 2, 3 to be resolved in a more natural REBOL feel... 
this current implementation actually highlights those needs and you 
where quick to point them out  :-)

-concurrency requires a bit more sophisticated structures to prevent 
locks, using the current design I solve some (though not all, yet) 
of the requirements for true concurrency, and this directly relates 
to issues and/or decisions in 5, 6, 7 & 8

-my goal is to have a high-performance rendering engine which isn't 
bound by any inherent design incompatibilities between REBOL and 
optimised native code, especially if the engine has access to hardware 
in parralel to the interpreter.  when i look at all the current games 
out there and they slow down even using only compiled code and sometimes 
not even really complex scenes, I don't want to fall into the trap 
of adding an additional layer of slowness which is to have the interpreter 
doing the renderer's job.

-I'm not trying to make a "cool" rebol plugin... I am trying to make 
an engine which is optimisized to run within REBOL.  the idea being 
not to help out rebolers per say, but to attract people with rendering 
needs TO REBOL because it has a high-perfomance engine *built-in* 
to which you can graph any actual renderer (DX, OpenGL, video frame 
buffers, etc).
-did I mention I want to make an AGG CGR ?  ;-)

I can see two reasons why a top 10 could have more than10 entries 
in it.....


.....First, it is about ranking -- if 100 people graduate from a 
class, and 30 of them all have identical top scores, then the top 
1 position is held by 30 people.
Depending then on how you define "top 10": the top 10 is either:
* the top 30 graduates; or

* some larger number (the total graduates with the highest distinct 
ten scores -- which could be all of them).


Second,. it could be an unconscious homage to the 10 reasons why 
Base Camp Sucks (It seems the Base Camp developers also chose to 
disregard user priorities, but they at least deny requests as they 
are made rather than play mind games with the user community):
http://www.whybasecampsux.org/

zero sum games are for those people who can't add.

I saw a similar issue with playsite when I used to play games online. 
 Kept on being booted due to crappy internet connections or

Yeah I'm sure it's just a false positive, I wasn't concerned or anything. 
I use Windows only for playing games, it doesn't have access to any 
important files and I use sandboxie for stuff I'm not sure about. 
Before MSE I used AntiVir and that one does report even more false 
positives, pretty annoying. Usually a company can contact anti virus 
software companies about these false positives in their products, 
do you know by any chance if that was done for REBOL in the past?
And thanks for the info about the file/group mapping :)

in high-end 3D and games you live with this imperfection daily.

for example a server that can replicate itself... or save it's state 
and then run from exactly same state, or in games, editing them without 
restarting... editing "live image" which should be possible because 
you can redefine words in rebol, but then you need to save whole 
current state.

I embedded lua and nekovm when I was working at some game to make 
levels scriptable instead of data driven. It was really nice way 
to make games, and if I could I would much rather use rebol. rebol 
is the data and dialect language which is main point of embedding 
dynamic languages in the first place

In my experience there are a number of applications, games, etc that 
use there own display settings but do not seem to change the actual 
desktop settings and therefore do not affect other running applications 
such as View.  This may or may not be what is actually going on I've 
just come to this conclusion because when some applications change 
the display settings or use different display settings then all the 
desktop icons are moved to fit within the alternate resolution whereas 
other applications do not have this effect.

I'm not sure what else it should be... AmigaDE is actually the same 
principle. They sell you a program which launches kind of a desktop 
where you can launch AmigaDE games and programs.

I'd wish they'd use this perspective twisted GUI stuff more in first 
person shooter games, instead of simple panels you poke with your 
gun or just press a key to activate.

It's probably a stupid idea, but I remember that gobs were intended 
to be used in the thousands on the screen for games and the like.

One thing that I noticed (an obviously *doh* moment) is that it's 
hard not to accidently start trying to reinvent the wheel with Rebol 
programs. There are so many excellent tools, utilities, and games 
allready made..  Question is more ofthem than not, where do I find 
what´s been made, how well it´s been kept updates etc.?

We can bundle closed-source apps, just like Linux and others can. 
We already do, with some games and demos that were released by their 
authors without source

I set up a system with AMD 780 chipset a month ago and put Ubuntu 
on it. Installed Ati drivers and it works :)
Movies, 3d games.... It works....
Also tried same system with nvidia 9600 and it also works...
Driver support is becoming better every day....

Could be useful for full-screen games/presentors and so on, but requires 
more code to handle events I think. Anyway, that wasn't really the 
goal; to implement NO-TITLE and NO-BORDER, not NO-TITLE-AND-NO-BORDER(-AND-NO-EVENTS...).

I never had any trouble with Java + Swing working everywhere, but 
I only recently started using Java for real (about a year ago I think) 
so maybe it's just gotten a lot better now and was awful in the past 
^^ But I guess it also depends a lot on what you are trying to do. 
Programming shouldn't be generalized. There are so many vastly different 
categories of programming (database, web, server, games, system, 
scripting, image/video processing, automation, A.I., embedded, etc.) 
that your mileage may vary depending on your area of interest. And 
don't get me wrong, I don't want to bash REBOL in any way. Apart 
from being completely new to the language which means that I can't 
really say if it's bad or good yet, I wouldn't be here if I didn't 
think it was useful and had potential :) Thankfully I already had 
some basic experience with Scheme, Clojure (a lisp) and Haskell so 
that REBOL's syntax didn't come as a shock for me :)

great ingo on the events Gabriele - that will make networked games 
much more viable

Henrik, funny you should post that.............I'm in need of a way 
to take a 2D diagram, and turn into exactly that (which is called 
an isometric view).


A cool feature would be that the colour of a 2D rectangle, and perhaps 
even the line weight and colour would dictate the 3D height, colour, 
and treatment.


The reason I want this is that I'm building a diagram of the architecture 
of Qtask, and want to make it easy to see and understand.


What I'm planning to do right now is draw it in 2D first.  Then pick 
a good angle (in my mind).  Then build all the 3D objects on an isometric 
field (sort of like old video games like Zaxxon).


Then scale them into place.  Then add the text words in front of 
them.

I like the words on top vs side as well of the image you posted.

If you know what was used to generate that I would like to know.

very important for games, for example.

In the 90'ies 3D styles were in, and it was overdone. It's interesting 
to see the GUIs choosen for games. Star Wars Galaxies use a solid 
colour for the edge of buttons, no 3D at all. Like the original Macintosh 
did.

public includes...A few REBOL games etc...

I'm guessing the reason Rebol was not modularized up front, is that 
his goals was that it be so small that it did not need to be.


It is sort of like when developers make games for handhelds, they 
think it will be easier somehow than full computers.  But a hand 
held is only small in size physically.


And yes, the Amiga was simply cool.  PCs still suck, even when they 
are 400 bloody times faster!!!

Henrik, ok got it. Well, in huge programs (like RPaint), I try to 
avoid garbage collection as much as possible. Garbage collection 
always works against performance, so it's bad in real-time applications 
(multi-media, games, etc.).

Game developers have solved many such problems, and often in efficient 
ways (games like performance). Intersections with Bezier curves are 
discussed here:
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=385751

Interesting...people still making Atari games.


One of my team makes emulators for about 15 old game machines, his 
goal is to preserve them before all is forgotten.

@Henrik: Im into demoscene :) Im one of those retrofreaks.... :) 
I made couple of never released games during 80s and 90s... As a 
matter of fact I never stopped coding for C64... Graphic routines, 
hardware projects, testing new effects.... Its a hobby for life....

@Steeve: I know your work :) I was impressed with galaga :) and I 
agree fully in using rebol as help for coding. I use it often to 
make table generators, and creating include files for c64 assembler.

Yes, I was thinking of the techniques used in games like Out Run 
while I making it.

All the good old racing games: http://eager.back2roots.org/RAC.html
:-)

games

No, there are multiple people involved in the game. They are also 
behind the Samorost 1 and 2 games, which you can play here:

http://amanita-design.net/samorost-1/

Oldes - truly awesome stuff!  In the past I only peeked at REBOL/Flash, 
but diving into it and LOVING the possibilities :)  I'll add a section 
about it to the http://re-bol.comtutorial after more experience. 
 Maybe Machinarium is REBOL's first killer app - certainly seems 
to be getting a lot of exposure.  Best of luck with it!  (just bought 
the games myself and really enjoying it :)

Oldes, the machinarium seems to be quite well known. I do hope you 
people have plans for wider distribution and/or sequel. For example 
it's been recently mentioned on PlayStation EU-blog comments, as 
an comparision basis for other indie games.


See message #4 on http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2010/01/19/monsters-probably-stole-my-princess/#comments

well with all those browser on my computer I  will not have any space 
left to install games :P

Adaptive A.I. Inc. launches commercial AGI-based virtual agent for 
call centers

Playa del Rey, California
January 12, 2009


Adaptive A.I. Inc. (a2i2) today released its first commercial product 
based on its artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology under 
development since 2001. It is a virtual call center operator that 
promises to propel speech-based interactive voice response (IVR) 
systems to much higher levels of performance.


Known as the SmartAction™ IVR System, it being sold and supported 
by a2i2’s recently formed commercial subsidiary, the Smart Action 
Company LLC.


The system is based on a2i2’s LiveAGI™ engine. Its integrated language 
processing, reasoning, memory, and knowledge-base capabilities allow 
it to hold smart, productive conversations. The LiveAGI brain manages 
conversation flow, meta-cognitive state (such as mood, degree of 
certainty and surprise), and determines when clarification or live-agent 
assistance is needed. Its built-in intelligence also allows the system 
to be taught new skills and knowledge, instead of these having to 
be custom programmed. Existing skills include email, as well as web 
and database interaction.


To achieve beyond state-of-the-art voice interaction, top of the 
line speech recognition technology is tightly integrated with the 
AGI brain to provide bi-directional benefits: The speech engine is 
dynamically tuned to current conversation context, while the cognitive 
engine analyzes multiple speech hypotheses for the most likely meaning 
and resolves ambiguities.


These innovations combine to provide solutions that significantly 
reduce the number of routine – and frequently boring and poorly handled 
-- calls taken by human agents while improving customer service levels. 
In addition to providing expected IVR capabilities such as 24/7 availability, 
consistent service quality, and the capacity to handle surges in 
call traffic, the SmartAction IVR System offers personalized responses 
by remembering the caller’s preferences, previous calls and other 
relevant data. Applied over multiple calls, callers don’t have to 
answer the same questions every time they call. If a call is interrupted, 
the system can call the customer back and pick up the conversation 
where it left off.


The company offers the SmartAction IVR System both as a hosted service 
and an in-house hardware-software turnkey solution. A web-based chat 
version is also available.


The ultimate purpose of a2i2’s LiveAGI Brain is to enable a major 
transformation of human-computer interfaces for a broad range of 
applications, such as websites, search engines, console and online 
games, virtual worlds, enterprise software, and consumer products. 
The company is currently researching and developing these applications, 
and under certain conditions will consider creating commercial versions 
in the near term.

About Adaptive AI, Inc.


Adaptive A.I. Inc. was founded in 2001 with the mission of researching, 
developing and commercializing far-reaching inventions in artificial 
general intelligence. Its founder, Peter Voss, has an accomplished 
career as an entrepreneur, inventor, engineer and scientist. His 
contributions to artificial general intelligence cover the fields 
of cognitive science, philosophy and theory of knowledge, psychology, 
intelligence and learning theory, and computer science.

www.adaptiveai.com    www.SmartAction.com

O3D is an open-source web API for creating rich, interactive 3D applications 
in the browser.


Wow, 3D games in the browser! It just gets better and better! What 
a wonderful world! ;-)

plugins that offer hardware accelerated rendering are not that rare 
but there is none except shockwave (and now unity slowly) that have 
any worthwile base of users that have it already installed. This 
one would be great if it gets forward becuase it's the "google's" 
plugin, but for games it also needs sound, good input / fullscreen 
switching and to compete to ston3d and unity physics

That's why so many games for the iPhone are written in C#, on the 
other professional C# dev environment for iPhone: Unity3D.

I was part of the school board for the elementary school where I 
live in and this kind of project would have been refused at the school. 
 its wrong in every respect.  every school is missing some amount 
of money, and when 5 million in cash is spent in such a random manner, 
unfortunately, kids loose in every way.  


this kind of drastic change  requires a top-down revisit of policy, 
structure, curriculum, teachers professionals, etc.   people don't 
realized that individual schools often have to pay for a lot of details 
which school boards don't readily acknowledge.


who pays for the (usually costly) full/part time technician at every 
school.  what happens in class when some laptops die, etc, etc.  


One (rich) school in montreal did something similar by purchasing 
a (real) laptop for every 5th and 6th grader.  Although the computers 
where school property.  


By the time they arrived, they where integrated into every aspect 
of the school's daily operations.  paper for all assignments was 
made illegal, educational games where pre-installed, and complemented 
the curriculum, every student was given training on some word editor, 
email, how to get, send assignments, and IIRC there was a school 
portal for the program, where kids could get/provide all they needed.

How evil, kids playing games. They're not going to learn anything 
from play ;-)

Watching my brother's 9-year old playing action games is amazing. 
He can move faster than I can keep up, which I never had the opportunity 
to at that age. I'm sure he gains a lot of knowledge in the area 
of quick thinking along with reflexes.

I think it can also help aging people, if the games are appropriate 
for them.

The brain can be trained like a muscle. The more one uses the brain 
to solve all kinds of puzzles, eye-hand reflexes, etc. the better 
one become at using the brain overall, also in different situations. 
I think, games can help a lot in exercising the brain.

mental faculties reach a peak in one's early 20s

I don't think, that's true either. I can do many things better and 
faster now, than 20 years ago, when I was in my early 20ies. I can 
program a lot faster and with fewer errors now than back then. Now 
and then I try a computer game on my Amiga, that I haven't touched 
in 20 years. I can finish games now, I couldn't figure out back then. 
My reactions might be a bit slower now, even if I'm not really sure 
about that either. But I solve the puzzles better now. Many years 
of practise has also made me a better piano player now, than 20 years 
ago.


I don't know, where that saying come from, but I can't see it being 
true.

A technical preview of Kodu for PCs is available from Microsoft Labs. 

http://fuse.microsoft.com/kodu/


This is a really nice game creation application for kids. It's completely 
graphical and requires good 3D hardware for best effects (I'm using 
it with an embedded Intel 945G chipset and it's almost acceptable 
at a 1280x720 res, though I don't get the nice shaders, glow, etc.). 
If you've got kids of around 8+, I would really recommend you check 
this out. I've been looking at what's available out there and there 
aren't too many really nice environments.


Part of the problem with most development environments is that the 
little guys expect quite a lot in terms of whizzbang from the exposure 
to all the latest games and it's quite a lot of work to do anything 
approaching this in most kid friendly tools. Kodu seems to be an 
exception.  


I'd also recommend StarLogo TNG from MIT, Scratch (and the enhanced 
version BYOB -build your own blocks) from MIT, as well as the newsest 
version of Alice (3.0 beta) from Carnegie Mellon.


It would be a good little project to create REBOL tools for content 
creation/edition for Kodu. Later, when Maxim's 3D and other UI candy 
is in place, maybe REBOL could be used to create the best kids' programming 
tool ever.

I wonder if this is a trend... I just saw a demo of Ribbon Hero for 
MS Office. Instead of having Clippy, you have a scoreboard and a 
list of "challenges" shaped like little games to help you use various 
features in Word, Excel and Powerpoint. You can share your scores 
on facebook just like any other game. It's very game oriented, but 
I wonder if this will help or hinder Office users in the future.

same with my motion sensing ps3 controllers - I love them in the 
games that use them well, but other people prefer the joysticks

yes, your PS3 games probably work well, because the display is not 
on the controller, but a still-standing TV in your livingroom. :-)

I just played a bunch of trial games. Not bad at all.

PS3 Hacked Once and For All?
http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=94339

Sony sues Geohot and his team over PS3 3.55 jailbreak

http://www.geek.com/articles/games/sony-sues-geohot-and-his-team-over-ps3-3-55-jailbreak-20110112/


Does Sony have a case? Was it ok, when Sony removed the "install 
other OS" feature? Was it legal?

So in the near future, we can buy microwave ovens, fridges, tv's 
etc. that isn't completely ready for market, but need upgrade afterwards, 
like with games today. That'll be fun! :-)

Depixelizing Pixel Art: Upscaling Retro 8-bit Games http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2385811,00.asp

(unfortunately, original pages and also mirros seems to be down at 
this moment)

Imagine Mario and all the other cool 8-bit games, but with this kind 
of graphics. Makes you wanna play them again. Or is the nostalgic 
factor removed, so it is dull?

Maxim - no matter how you try - you was not part of initial release. 
There is no point in playing moron games here ...

huh, I just looked into vocabulary, what moron means. I wanted to 
say something like "fool" games, or "fool plays", but that probably 
does not translate too :-) I should not use words, where I only anticipate 
their meanings :-)

keyboard support for games

I think that we need few tweaks to it. BrianH and one other guy had 
some nice suggestions. Adding few instructions would allow emulation 
of some old machines :-) Porting some nice simple games could be 
easier :-)

GLUT is just some extra functions, that have same kind of interface 
as OpenGL OpenGL is just only basic graphics, where GLU and GLUT 
add things, that is used in e.g. games ... or in REBOL.

will we be able to build networked games with 1000s of concurrent 
users ?  :)

Dunno :-) But - why not. Surely View is not the right engine to create 
games ;-)

Narrow field? Why do you consider them being narrow? Is Action Scrip 
somehow limited? And look into most mp3 players, their UI, their 
games, etc. - everything Flash based. The market for such device 
starts being crowded. We will see what impact will there be on Android 
and Symbian in the future ...

I said it already many times and now there is a new opportunity, 
quicktime browser plugin is today much more popular thanks to iTunes, 
it is installed in more than 80% of personal computers. quicktime 
once had a wired scripting language (qscript), Live stage Pro was 
the only editor for that. Now apple just announced they are working 
on Quicktime X, they will either drop scripting completely or they 
will put something new in. That new scripting in the quicktime plugin 
SHOULD BE REBOL !! it is a win-win solution. rebol would have access 
to  about 200 media formats, apple will offer the best language for 
scripting medias, and not limited to that. See, apple really has 
no interest in seeing flash ported to the iPhone, because the sell 
iPhones games on their iTunes store, and many other reason. Also 
in the last year apple has enhanced javascript ability to control 
quicktime movies in the browser. I have no idea about waht agreement 
apple and RT should come to, but I'm sure nobody can argument against 
this theory! Long life rebol! 8-)

( + if I will need gui for desktop server, rebol has lighweight software 
rendered gui, factor also has a gui but on windows it's opengl based 
which is not really practical for a gui.. even casual games on windows 
try to use DX7 renderer for maximum compatibitily and avoid opengl 
beacause of driver issues)

It's like making games.. if you are cloning another then you have 
a model that you just need to do as efectively and good as you can 
and add a few features and twists here and there. If you are developing 
an unique gameplay, you don't code it up.. you prototype .. work 
here and there because you learn what to do next as you do things

maybe, but STL already allows us to do 3d object things like inverse 
IK for games or 3D modeling applications ... that is what one of 
the engineers was using to build plugins for Maya.

nope... Apple doesn't want you to use flash in the browser... it 
kills their app market  :-(   
for example:

  bejeweled, one of the most successfull flash games ever, is available 
  as an app... they wouldn't want you to just play in on the net.. 


This is my only real Anger generating aspect of the iphone.   but 
this is true of just about every digital device out there... the 
provider wants to make money out of their appliances, so they control 
as much of what you can do on it, so they get a few cents every time.

As a practical example, if you are doing device-independent rendering 
you work in proportions (floating point ratios) and then convert 
to exact values (integer coordinates) on final rendering to the real 
device. Video games do this all the time - that is why GPUs need 
floating point hardware. Same with sub-pixel rendering. If you are 
working in proportions, your modulus functions will need to handle 
them. And modulus could be used for bounding box calculations on 
textured surfaces too.


In both those cases, the programmer will probably know enough about 
accumulated error to want to control it themselves. The non-rounding 
behavior of // would be a benefit to them then, so rounding can be 
minimized.

I stopped programming games in c/c++ because IDE-s for it have so 
damn many settings.. getting things to compile was harder for me 
than program them

actually, I buy all of my digital enternainment.  games, DVDs music, 
etc.  I mean, I (have/do/will) live off of all three mediums... so 
it would be a bit hypocritical for me not to encourage others in 
my own trades

The desktop is dead, unless you're building a better browser, or 
games.. and even that distinction is blurring. I'll bet people play 
more online browser based games than desktop.. Folks have moved from 
desktop to console.

Maybe Flash usage for sockets, animations, games and videos might 
start dropping soon, but as an application framework engine, its 
usage keeps raising.

only good for games then?

anyhow... OGL is the most widely used 3D library in the world... 
all scientific, professional gfx, multi-platform games, and more 
use OGL... and as John says, all 3d not on windows is OGL.

Who cares of blistering fast GFX apart from games, when you can't 
have the same anti-aliased font output on your form? :-)

jocko,  yes and no.   ;-)  


Glass is going to be rebol code only, but its going to be based on 
rebogl, the OpenGL extension I am currently working on (as I write 
this).  Rebogl its going to be an evolutionary process, starting 
with simple high-level pre-defined primitives and colors and then 
will get more and more customisable (deformers, animation, textures, 
programmable shaders, etc).


I am still not sure how the Glass engine will evolve, but there is 
a good chance that it will be based on the scene graph technology 
I am working on for the Scream game engine.  This has the benefit 
that Glass can be used to build the interfaces within the games themselves. 
 But it most definitely won't require you to load a complete  (and 
inherently complex) 3d world manager, just to build a window with 
a form.  if possible, I'd like to have window masks, so that the 
3D forms can actually live like 3d models direclty on the desktop... 
so some of the nice 3d feature isn't wrapped within an OS window 
border.

I digged following from Max in the past:
---------------------------------

My pet peeve about R3 view is that we still don't have access to 
the actual AGG elements directly within rebol.

We still have to go through a clumsy interface called draw dialect.

The dialect is fine (great actually) for initialisation, but after 
that, its not adapted to actual manipulation of what is going on 
inside, you have to go trough a rebol -> agg convertion stage at 
each refresh.

It's not the speed, it's the fact that it's complicated cause you 
have to create "virtual" draw components and then assemble them on 
the fly reducing blocks and stuff.
I'd love to be able to do:

a: draw [circle 30x30 15]
a/radius: 30
a/offset: 100x100
show a


If graphic elements where first class datatypes, we could completely 
ignore the gobs, and build real canvases, uber fast.

Another example, more appropriate:

; this draws a box...
draw [s: polygon 10x10  30x10 30x-30 10x-30]

; make it a house outline
insert at s/vertices 4 20x-40

; raise the "roof" 
s/vertices/4/y: -50


The problem is that to edit draw blocks, you have to create a slew 
of things before creating the draw block, then you have to store 
references to all of those things somewhere, everytime you want to 
add a "dynamic" attribute its pretty tedious.

The first-class gel datatype would allow AGG to edit its internals 
directly using binary C code through its accessors.  no need to go 
through rebol funcs and reducing blocks, etc.

The use of  "show a" above could intrinsincally know that it only 
needs to refresh the region that this element affects, just like 
all graphic cards do when evaluating the graphic pipe rendering.

So many things like flash games which become soooo heavy in AGG would 
be real-time and use much less CPU resouces.  in most games only 
a small part of the canvas really changes interactively.

The current design is supposed to allow non-GUI-designer programmers 
to specify layouts. Even if you are both the layout programmer and 
the style designer, the work is supposed to be separated. For that 
matter, a proper layout dialect for the types of apps that the R3 
GUI is made for (not games) should be portable to other device form 
factors, accessible, etc. So if you need to be a theme designer, 
do it in the theme section of the app, not the layout. And if you 
need to be picky about the styles, do it in the style section of 
the app, not the layout.

CPU are not feated with matrix computations because the industry 
decided that matrix area was such a big thing that they needed a 
spécific library and a specific hadware extensivly optimised to perform 
those computations. and so the GPU accellerated enhanced for opengl 
and DirectX is born.... Now in day the industry use most likely the 
DirectX because  well 90% of the personal computers are windows and 
that 100% of them support DX so 100% of the sold PC games are done 
that way... And that allow to cut cost when another company like 
unreal tech for example make a game engine you buy it and you save 
alot of time and monney the only thing you will have to do then is 
to create the specific IHM for your game and all the visual /audio 
content. then your project  time spent is shorted by 2 or 3 years...

anyway you won't play halo 4 on them so what ever what the people 
buys today are games

I would be interested int them for one. I saw the 2008 couple of 
times, but none of the other confs.  I had similar situation with 
bots dl-jing my games multiple times each time. You could put it 
under password protected dir... otherwise the youtube option seems 
the best for me

Implemented pseudo-random numbers in the C library binding. Everybody 
can start writing console games now ;-)