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Or single line in what the BASIC interpreters back then would allow you to type. I don't know about the C64 or other computers of the day, but on the Apple // I believe you could at most type about 255 characters before it forced you to start a new line. I don't recall if it just abandoned what you just typed, or just parsed what you typed up to that point. However when you listed the program line, the common "?" shortcut would be expanded to "PRINT", and the rest of the code would be expanded with spaces and such. This effectively pushed the line past the 255 character limit and making it impossible to cursor-trace (eg. when debugging.) It was a common challenge back then to try and write a full program that did something useful/interesting within one or two lines of typeable text.

If you looked through TFB. it talks about various tricks that programmers used to squeeze as much code as possible into one line. While Applesoft only had the "?" shortcut for "PRINT", C64 BASIC allowed you abbreviate even more commands, effectively allowing you to squeeze even more code in the space of the input buffer. (or whatever the proper term.)

Of course much of the above means nothing when the program in question can almost be typed in single line of a 40 column screen, spaces included.

I find the program to be quite elegant. Most people if asked to write this program (in BASIC) would probably first come up with something like:
10 A = INT (RND (1) * 2 )
20 IF A = 0 THEN PRINT "\"; ELSE PRINT "/";
30 GOTO 10

(Applesoft didn't have an ELSE statement, so I'm guessing that's how it was formatted in other BASICs) The program in TFB takes advantage of two things. 1, floating point numbers fed into CHR$ are truncated to integers. 2, the two slash characters used are adjacent graphical characters in Commdore's extended set. The actual slashes that we're familiar with aren't adjacent in ASCII (characters 42 & 97 specifically.)

You could condense the above program by eliminating the assignment, placing the random number generation directly into the comparison, or even further by using "RND(1) > .5" Sticking strictly with ASCII, one could do an alternate version with
10 PRINT MID$("\/", RND (1) * 2, 1); : GOTO 10
(Might have to add "+ 1" to the middle argument, it's been a while)

10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10 however takes advantage of item #2 and comes up with a beautiful solution. A stupidly simple program that produces a seemingly complex visual result.

On the USPTO webpage for this application (here) it says that its status is "Newly filed application, not yet assigned to an examining attorney." Anyone can file any trademark -- I could file one for the term "Microsoft" -- and it would get to this stage.

The key is getting your trademark application approved. The main impediment is from either already registed trademarks that are similar in name or from people that file oppositions. The process of filing an opposition is described on this USTPO page.

As someone who knows a little bit about trademarks I can say that the individual who filed this is really wasting their time -- the only way he could get and keep this trademark is if no one noticed he filed for it.

-ben houston
http://www.exocortex.org/ben

There are quite a few 3d engines out there. The biggest I guess are Crystal Space 3D, Genesis3D, OGRE, Toque (Tribes2), Quake and Quake II. Of course there are others to fill certin niches like Yeti or ExoEngine and libraries like DevLib and G3D for those who want to write their own engine, but don't feel like they need to implement yet another file loader. I'm not sure why 0.7 of Irrlicht was worth mentioning on /. as it is isn't clear what its roll is compared to those other engines.

I was at Siggraph 2004 and attended a round table on "how will you (game developers) feed next generation games". The problem is going from a Playstation1 to Playstation2 many developers found games now took roughly 2 to 3x the man years to create. But profits didn't really go up that much to compensate. This has happened every console generation and will happen again with the up coming generation. PC games don't have clear generations, but the same concept applies.

The main ideas were to reuse content. For example if you're making a Matrix game, get the 3d models from the movie instead of making your own and start from there. Or if you're making a port try to reuse as much as possible. Future games will have a lot of computer generated stuff which is artist guided instead of artist created so that one artist creates a forest instead of creating a bunch of leafs on a single tree.

A big surprise to me was open source wasn't mentioned until somebody asked. A company like id will implement something cool like unified lighting for all objects first, but a year later everybody has their own implementation of it. Every year has something like this that gets the anual lens flare award; colour lighting, ground clutter, normal mapping, rag doll physics, etc. Yawn. Every company spends all this time re-implementing the exact same technology. All developers can read the same papers from Siggraph, Eurographics, or GDC and then discuss them on the same mailing lists so there is plenty of open sharing happening already. So I was surprised to hear none of the guys at the round table thought open source would really be useful to help save them money in the future other than for rather basic things like zlib, lua, etc.

It sure would be nice to see some engines reach commercial quality to used in some good games instead of getting more and more re-implementations of the foundation, which /. apparently is finds interesting. Once it happens there will be a huge snow ball effect where it picks up a LOT of developer attention. Maybe in five years one of the existing engines will reach a level of maturity that it can start to be really used and then in another ten we'll see it catching on like GNU/Linux is now?

A few of us from Frantic Films Software wrote up summary of SIGGRAPH 2004 for CgChannel this past Thursday. It touches on many of the same topics in a slightly different light -- although not at all on open source in the industry.

I understand that open source is a hard sell for VFX companies. Most specifically while at SIGGRAPH I heard Steve Sullivan from ILM speak (at a discussion panel) about how even though they have had many users of OpenEXR and wide community adoption of the technology they have had very few people from other VFX companies contribute back to its future development. Steve said that ILM pretty much had to write version 2.0 of OpenEXR by themselves. Thus in effect they have had the problem of many people free riding on their large effort.

Thus for us, while we do plan on releasing smaller tools open source (similar to some of my past open source projects: ExoEngine and Exocortex.DSP), ILM's experience with a large costly open source endeavor scares me away from trying this with a larger project -- at least for the time being.

-ben

A few of us from Frantic Films Software wrote up summary of SIGGRAPH 2004 for CgChannel this past Thursday. It touches on many of the same topics in a slightly different light -- although not at all on open source in the industry.

I understand that open source is a hard sell for VFX companies. Most specifically while at SIGGRAPH I heard Steve Sullivan from ILM speak (at a discussion panel) about how even though they have had many users of OpenEXR and wide community adoption of the technology they have had very few people from other VFX companies contribute back to its future development. Steve said that ILM pretty much had to write version 2.0 of OpenEXR by themselves. Thus in effect they have had the problem of many people free riding on their large effort.

Thus for us, while we do plan on releasing smaller tools open source (similar to some of my past open source projects: ExoEngine and Exocortex.DSP), ILM's experience with a large costly open source endeavor scares me away from trying this with a larger project -- at least for the time being.

-ben

We did this because we primarily use Discreet's 3dsmax (with Brazil and V-Ray) and Eyeon's Digital Fusion. We have found that most existing render farm solutions do not support these two packages very well -- thus we decided to develop our own custom solution. We also support After Effects, Alias|Maya, AIR and other RenderMan compliant rendering packages.

Of interest to the general Slashdot crowd may be that this Deadline Render Management Solution is based on the open source (BSD License) Exocortex C# library originally released with this C# 3D Engine. Deadline is built with C# in the hopes that using Mono we will be able to start supporting Linux with minimal extra effort.

I'll be reading all the posts on this Slashdot thread but I would also appreciate any direct feedback on our current beta product. We also found solutions such as Rush and Smedge to be less than user friendly in many respects. Thus we have tried as best as we could to increase a 3D package that is not well supported by most render farm management solutions -- except for Discreet's Backburner (which we found not that that scalable.)

I have been using .NET since September 2001. I wrote an open source 3D engine using C#. It makes use of BSP tree visibility culling, it uses WorldCraft as a level editor, it supports OpenGL and it did support NVIDIA's Cg until they changed their interface. When I released this engine open source back in February 2002 I stated clearly that I thought that .NET would be useful for game development.

ExoEngine - A C#, OpenGL .NET 3D Engine

PS. Some people notice that in the screen shots the engine is only getting about 10fps or less. This is because it was running without 3D hardware accelleration.

My first job in the computer industry was as a developer at Sir-Tech on prototypes for the Wizardry 8 3D Engine. It was part-time during my last year at High school. Would you believe that was back in last 1996 and early 1997?

The guys at Sir-Tech are a good bunch though and I hope that this game comes through for them in holiday sales.

Another great site is Peertal at http://www.peertal.com/ for all sorts of news about peer to peer projects and news.

Ben Housten has a good page with ideas and links at http://www.exocortex.org/p2p/index.html

The Peer to peer working group has their site at http://www.peer-to-peerwg.org/

You may also want to check out the Orielly OpenP2P page at http://www.oreillynet.com/p2p/

And of course, I need to shamelessly plug my open source decentralized searching network, the ALPINE Network

Ben Houston's P2P Idea Page