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This popular game store in Helsinki, Finland might get "only" 1000 copies. I'm sure glad I made a pre-order on mine, as they are very likely going to be drained out of the store by end of the day. The store opens in about 10 hours.

I have a pint of beer that says Diablo 2 becomes the best selling PC game in history, by end of September. I'm obviously biased by the stress test, but any takers on a bet?

Kudos to Blizzard for finishing the game (finally) even if they lost several of the core guys to startups. Lookin' good, too.

Tidbit of semi-useless information; in Japan it's apparently illegal to publish role playing games on weekdays as the number of sickdays become a big issue in the promised land of the otaku.

Jouni
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Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com

The human mind is a powerful neural network processing unit; now imagine a Beowulf cluster of those. :)

Open source development is, by nature, a form of distributed work. It's rare that open source software would be written by only one person, and nobody else would ever contribute, unless of course the project is utterly useless. :)

Programming is a task very well suited for distributed processing; you can have clearly defined tasks (to the point of individual APIs) and overall functionality is usually split into components. Form and function aren't exactly tied together in programming - ugly code can accomplish the task just as well and coding style doesn't necessarily show up at all in the end product.

In game art, however, form and function are generally very close to each other. Suddenly consistency of style has great impact across the project as well as individual imaginations on what the product should look like, regardless of how good the sketches were. It's important to note here that you can't generally plan consistent art by verbal description only, and still your plans are limited to bits and pieces open for artistic interpretation. If you turn it into paint-by-numbers, where's the art?

This isn't to say that distributed art is impossible, just that it's more difficult to find good artists that would effectively contribute to an open source game project. Open source art today seems limited to skins for various UIs and gadgets, and it can be argued that most of them are not art at all.

As for open source games, Nethack is certainly one of the games I have spent a lot of time in my life playing. I've always known I have access to the source, but I've never looked. I could have always uncovered every bit of the game, but I chose not to. Why?

Simple - it's hard to keep enjoyment unspoiled if you see the source. This is why game development feels like actual work and not like playing around - most of the people who make games don't play their creations nearly enough. They would simply not enjoy a game they know everything about, unless they weren't actually defining the gameplay itself.

Here's where it gets interesting: if you manage to separate tool development (engine, content converters, editors, ...) from content development (gameplay, levels, story, ...) you have a solid platform for open source game development. Coders have fun coding, but ALSO playing through the content put together by some artistic and creative minds on the other side of the team. Obviously, the core game engine itself wouldn't have to be freeware or even open source, it could be a commercial product and you just create art, scripts and objects...

... and suddenly, with a small leap, we find ourselves in the game mod development community. It takes a small bit of imagination and a bigger bit of work to close this circle. Who says open source games have no future?

Jouni
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Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com

I would recommend a few more; Gordon Graham's "Internet:// A Philosophical Inquiry" and David Haekken's "Cyborgs@Cyberspace?".

Jouni
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Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com

Boards existed and were in use by a limited group of developers. The board layout was incredibly neat and clean compared to anything else on the market. Bump mapping didn't cost much more in terms of fill rate than multi-pass texturing did, so frame rates were good.

Bitboys may be notorious for not shipping production boards, but they've been very productive for the past years.

I'm sure a product will ship when it's done. :)

Jouni
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Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com

Rejecting as many of those as possible as quickly as possible ... is problem which many bright people have been hammering on for 30 years now.

You mean stuff like SurRender Umbra? Yes, research is being done. :) While this is something of a shameless plug, Umbra is not vaporware, and in fact the component was completed by the end of last week and is ready to ship. It took several man-years to build, so it's not exactly something you write out of a hobby. There's also a fairly in-depth technical overview on the site. From that document, I quote:

• "Umbra uses a combination of several new algorithms to perform the visibility determination as quickly and reliably as possible. The sole target of the library is to produce the tightest possible set of visible objects in the smallest amount of time.

  The library uses a number of techniques and data structure organizations that makes the visibility determination process output sensitive. Output sensitivity means that the time used to solve a problem, i.e. visibility evaluation, is dependent on the size of its output (number of visible objects) rather than its input (number of objects in the scene). "

Another company, Fluid Studios is also taking a shot at the same problem, although they go for eliminating individual triangles instead of models/components.

While this kind of dynamic methods are certainly more expensive to perform at run-time than pre-calculated visible sets, they are not mutually exclusive with those. You can still use portals and cell based visibility as well as static PVS if desired, but what's important that we're finally reaching a point where you don't need to.

It's all about freedom, in the end.

Jouni
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Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com

... a.k.a. Environment Mapped Bump Mapping are not actually found in Matrox G400 but in Pyramid 3D from Tri-Tech and Bitboys, the latter more known for their long-awaited and much discussed Glaze 3D architecture. Matrox did the first hardware adaptation that ended up in the mainstream.

Some years back, in the days of Pyramid 3D (yes, boards existed!) the pixel pipeline of the graphics chip was already programmable in microcode and EMBM was working perfectly in hardware. Slowly, maybe, by today's standards, but visually as attractive as ever. While it's a shame the boards never made it into the public, they still managed to make a significant contribution to PC graphics technology.

Bitboys licensed the EMBM solution to Microsoft to make it a part of the Direct3D standard. Once it was a part of the standard, other vendors such as Matrox were also free to make their implementations of the method.

It's a hack, but it's a good looking hack. Long live good looking hacks! :)

Jouni
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Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com

While I'm a long time Amiga-user and love(d) the system, I can't really get excited about the resurrection of the platform. You can wake up the OS but to make it live you have to create all the applications and content from scratch, and it's been quite a long break for everyone.

However, one of the parties behind this movement, the Tao group I find very interesting indeed.

Platform-independent, binary-portable high performance Java implementation? I'd sign up today.

Jouni
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Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com

that would mean: 1 person per 200 nodes. does not sound that much to me

Not to be a bother, but 200 times 200 is 40,000.

Now that's what I call a Beowulf cluster. :)

Jouni
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Jouni Mannonen : 3D Evangelist @ SurRender3D.com