With the recent advances in AI there has been a huge increase in discussion around AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The exact definition of what will qualify as AGI is murky, but it is generally thought of as “capable of doing anything that a human could do”. Of course framing things in such a human centric way opens up a can of worms. For some definition of that it requires that the AI be capable of empathy, love, and the full…
Introduction to the Metaverse Ever since Facebook announced that it would change its name to Meta Platforms and focus on the Metaverse, the word has been plastered everywhere. It has become the new “cyberspace”. But what does it even mean? There appears to be a lot of confusion around this term, so let’s start with what the Metaverse is not. It is not virtual reality. We already have a term for that: “VR”. It is not simply user generated worlds…
I’ve recently updated a few of my games to Unity 2019.1 (at least one from as far back as Unity 5.5), and made some improvements to the web page that they are embedded in – including adding custom loading graphics, and disabling the Unity mobile warning. I thought I would share my experience in this blog post and provide some snippets of code that might help others working with the Unity WebGL exporter. If you want to check out my…
As a programmer and computer graphics enthusiast it is always an exciting time when a new line of graphics cards is announced. This is certainly true about Nvidia’s launch of their new line of RTX branded cards. Much has been written about the launch from the perspective of gamers, and frankly if you just look at today’s games the picture doesn’t look so good. But in this post I’m going to look a bit more at the future and the…
Path tracing is all the rage in the offline rendering space these days. From Cycles to SuperFly (based on the open source Cycles) to Octane, most new rendering engines seem to be using this technology. Sometimes referred to as “unbiased, physically correct rendering” what is path tracing, how is it different to ray tracing and is it the future of high quality offline rendering? I will be looking to answer all of those questions in this blog post for anyone…
For over two weeks now trying to load TVRage.com results in an error message from CloudFlare and a cached copy returned. It looks like the site has gone down, perhaps permanently. This would be bad news, as it was my go-to for information on what shows are running and worse, their API was what I used with my TVShowRenamer app that I created for myself to automatically rename shows to match the format that I use. This is making me…
So when I got my SurfacePro3 a few months back one of the key reasons for getting it over other options was that comes with a pressure-sensitive pen that makes it a great tool for drawing. Having used a Wacom tablet in the past, I was pretty excited by the idea of being able to draw directly on the screen (while you do get used to the tablet after a while there is still always a bit of a weird…
So I recently made use of the brilliant LibNoise library to create some complex noise to use as a heightmap. LibNoise makes it easy to create various noise modules (Perlin, Vornoi, Multifractal, etc…) and transform/combine them in various ways. It’s great except for one thing: visualizing exactly what is happening when you tweak parameters can be hard. For the project I was working on I just blindly tuned things until the final product looked about right. This worked ok, but…
The Personal Computer (PC) is about to go through another radical evolution. We’ve already moved from the typical beige boxes of the late 80’s and the 90’s to a world where most people use a laptop as their primary computer. Of course the desktop has not disappeared; it continues to rule when the absolute bleeding edge in power is required, i.e. for high-end workstations (for example for CGI work or other graphics and multimedia applications) and for gaming (although this…
It is truly appalling to think that we have all the technological tools available to us to create a truly modern energy ecosystem and avert massive ecological disaster looming from climate change, and the only thing lacking is political will. Not only that, but we can achieve this without destroying the economic engines of the industrial world (a common complaint from right-wing conservatives when the subject of climate change is broached). To accomplish this we would need to move away…