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When Scientific Publishing was Withheld
karvind writes "Article in Physical Review Focus reveals the silence practiced by Physical Review during WWII to delay publishing results related to fission, the splitting of an atom's nucleus accompanied by a prodigious release of energy. From the article: Because of fears that Germany would use American research to pursue an atomic weapon, the Physical Review agreed to withhold reports of significant advances. It was not until several months after an atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki, Japan, that Phys. Rev. published the paper announcing the discovery of plutonium, the material used in that bomb. Physicist Abraham Pais later called the journal's silence on the subject 'the most important nonevent in the history of the Physical Review.'"
Welcome
.plan file updates. There were two main factors involved in my not doing updates for a long time - a good chunk of my time and interest was sucked into Armadillo Aerospace, and the fact that the work I had been doing at Id for the last half of Doom 3 development was basically pretty damn boring.
.plan files were appropriate ten years ago, and sort of retro-cute several years ago, but I'll be sensible and use the web.
I get a pretty steady trickle of emails from people hoping for
The Armadillo work has been very rewarding from a learning-lots-of-new-stuff perspective, and I'm still committed to the vehicle development, even post X-Prize, but the work at Id is back to a high level of interest now that we are working on a new game with new technology. I keep running across topics that are interesting to talk about, and the Armadillo updates have been a pretty good way for me to organize my thoughts, so I'm going to give it a more general try here.
I'm not quite sure what the tone is going to be - there will probably be some general interest stuff, but a bunch of things will only be of interest to hardcore graphics geeks.
I have had some hesitation about doing this because there are a hundred times as many people interested in listening to me talk about games / graphics / computers as there are people interested in rocket fabrication, and my mailbox is already rather time consuming to get through.
If you really, really want to email me, add a "[JC]" in the subject header so the mail gets filtered to a mailbox that isn't clogged with spam. I can't respond to most of the email I get, but I do read everything that doesn't immediately scan as spam. Unfortunately, the probability of getting an answer from me doesn't have a lot of correlation with the quality of the question, because what I am doing at the instant I read it is more dominant, and there is even a negative correlation for "deep" questions that I don't want to make an off-the-cuff response to.
Quake 3 Source
I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another large technology licensing deal go through, and it would be poor form to make the source public a few months after a company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for full rights to it. True, being public under the GPL isn't the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but I'm pretty sure there would be some hard feelings.
Previous source code releases were held up until the last commercial license of the technology shipped, but with the evolving nature of game engines today, it is a lot less clear. There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2, and the remaining licensees of Q3 technology intend to continue their internal developments along similar lines, so there probably won't be nearly as sharp a cutoff as before. I am still committed to making as much source public as I can, and I won't wait until the titles from the latest deal have actually shipped, but it is still going to be a little while before I feel comfortable doing the release.
Random Graphics Thoughts
Years ago, when I first heard about the inclusion of derivative instructions in fragment programs, I couldn't think of anything off hand that I wanted them for. As I start working on a new generation of rendering code, uses for them come up a lot more often than I expected.
I can't actually use them in our production code because it is an Nvidia-only feature at the moment, but it is convenient to do experimental code with the nv_fragment_program extension before figuring out various ways to build funny texture mip maps so that the built in texture filtering hardware calculates a value somewhat like the derivative I wanted.
If you are basically just looking for plane information, as you would for modifying things with texture magnification or stretching shadow buffer filter kernels, the derivatives work out pretty well. However, i
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Kind of ironic that this did not end up on the front page for such a slow news day.
comment directly in my journal
Yes this is a rejected story from slashdot.