Proud to Be a Dork
by Eric Preisz · 08/23/2008 (11:47 pm) · 10 comments
Nerdy is in. Really. Even Kattie Holmes, mother of a baby name Suri, wife of Tom Cruise, admits to being a nerd.
I find myself getting excited about nerdy things lately. I know what excites me is nerdy because my newly wed wife gives me that "second thoughts" look. Sorry hun, your cold feet seemed plenty warm in the sands of a Mexican honeymoon.
I don't get it, doesn't she find Intel's Larrabee processor's promise of a programmable raster operations unit exciting? Gosh, I feel like I don't even know her any more.
Here's what's been exciting me lately:
Dorky papers -so I put together a Digg clone that I hope will become a valuable asset to our industry. Please, if you ever come across a good paper, feel free to add it to my new on-line book marking system aptly named, indexbuffer.com (I now own indexbuffer.com and vertexbuffer.com...retirement, here I come.)
Austin GDC - I didn't want to go through the rigamoral of actually proposing a worthwhile discussion like that charming Ben Garney - so I bought one. Check out my talk at GDC about how we(meaning me and Full Sail University) can increase your game's performance.
Book - I hate having free weekends, so I decided to pick up a book contract about video game optimization. Here's something cool: Ben Garney is working on it with me. Here's something cooler: Mike Abrash is looking over it and giving us some great feedback. Here's something not cool: I'm a programmer and therefore every line I write starts with "//".
Mars Game - The officers of the full sail simulation club are working on a game about colonizing mars. We plan on submitting it to the serious game challenge. We have some other opportunities hidden up our sleeves, maybe someday we can let you in on our news.
GPGPU - Seriously, we are at the dawn of GPU type programming. GPUs and CPUs are becoming very similar. Larrabee, AMD purchasing ATI, NVIDIA changing their approach from game developer hardware to "visual computing" (what happened to that last visual computing company SGI anyways?). Doing computations on the GPU is the new black. Here's a video of a modded NVIDIA demo I'm working on that demonstrates using particle systems to simulate fluids on the GPU using CUDA. The next step is to extract a surface from these golden intelligent agents.
I've got some other dorky news that I would like to share with you; however, by sharing, I may upset the happiest lawyers in the world. For now, I'll just leave with the final suggestion that defines my existence as a dork.....
I'm writing a blog at 2:45 in the morning....in only boxer briefs.
I find myself getting excited about nerdy things lately. I know what excites me is nerdy because my newly wed wife gives me that "second thoughts" look. Sorry hun, your cold feet seemed plenty warm in the sands of a Mexican honeymoon.
I don't get it, doesn't she find Intel's Larrabee processor's promise of a programmable raster operations unit exciting? Gosh, I feel like I don't even know her any more.
Here's what's been exciting me lately:
Dorky papers -so I put together a Digg clone that I hope will become a valuable asset to our industry. Please, if you ever come across a good paper, feel free to add it to my new on-line book marking system aptly named, indexbuffer.com (I now own indexbuffer.com and vertexbuffer.com...retirement, here I come.)
Austin GDC - I didn't want to go through the rigamoral of actually proposing a worthwhile discussion like that charming Ben Garney - so I bought one. Check out my talk at GDC about how we(meaning me and Full Sail University) can increase your game's performance.
Book - I hate having free weekends, so I decided to pick up a book contract about video game optimization. Here's something cool: Ben Garney is working on it with me. Here's something cooler: Mike Abrash is looking over it and giving us some great feedback. Here's something not cool: I'm a programmer and therefore every line I write starts with "//".
Mars Game - The officers of the full sail simulation club are working on a game about colonizing mars. We plan on submitting it to the serious game challenge. We have some other opportunities hidden up our sleeves, maybe someday we can let you in on our news.
GPGPU - Seriously, we are at the dawn of GPU type programming. GPUs and CPUs are becoming very similar. Larrabee, AMD purchasing ATI, NVIDIA changing their approach from game developer hardware to "visual computing" (what happened to that last visual computing company SGI anyways?). Doing computations on the GPU is the new black. Here's a video of a modded NVIDIA demo I'm working on that demonstrates using particle systems to simulate fluids on the GPU using CUDA. The next step is to extract a surface from these golden intelligent agents.
I've got some other dorky news that I would like to share with you; however, by sharing, I may upset the happiest lawyers in the world. For now, I'll just leave with the final suggestion that defines my existence as a dork.....
I'm writing a blog at 2:45 in the morning....in only boxer briefs.
About the author
Manager, Programmer, Author, Professor, Small Business Owner, and Marketer.
#2
I'm pretty buzzing about larabee too, it sounds like a real breakthrough tech. I doubt it'll be screaming fast initially, but given time, I think its a real move forward and luckily not just for graphics tech (I'm looking at it for AI tech).
Cool to hear you're having fun too!
08/24/2008 (2:47 am)
Nice post Eric,I'm pretty buzzing about larabee too, it sounds like a real breakthrough tech. I doubt it'll be screaming fast initially, but given time, I think its a real move forward and luckily not just for graphics tech (I'm looking at it for AI tech).
Cool to hear you're having fun too!
#3
08/24/2008 (5:39 am)
I think you could have fit in a few more links! 
#4
08/24/2008 (5:51 am)
ROTFL great blog.
#6
08/24/2008 (6:52 am)
@Dave....hahaha... I'm nothing without my compiler;
#7
08/24/2008 (2:28 pm)
@Phil - a co-worker any myself submitted an abstract to GDC on using the GPU to process neural networks. The idea is that we use the GPU to render a sensor into a 1D array which then become the input into the GPU ANN for decisions on pathing. It's a bit experimental so I doubt it will make the cut, but it never hurts to try.
#8
08/25/2008 (12:58 pm)
You and me both Eric :) 
#9
08/25/2008 (4:14 pm)
I busted out my Commodore 64 and played old games on it last weekend in the garage. Retro-dork! Those games are still good too!
#10
http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=57
08/27/2008 (5:11 pm)
I'm sure you've seen this, but here's a vaguely similar use of the GPU for pathing:http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=57
Torque Owner Chris Mooney
Texel Games
good blog, it gives me the feeling of bright orange - while a thousand ping pong balls fly around an enclosed space.
Thanks for the news, as my soon to be wife says to me when I go off about a game development topic - "I love my nerd."