Andy is a very interesting individual. He recently quit his job at Microsoft, and has decided to live on savings for a year while he tries to break into the gaming industry. Furthermore, if this doesn’t work out, he seems fairly confident that he can get re-hired by Microsoft. He must be good.
I was late to the after-lunch session yet again, due to the a bit of slow restaurant service. When I walked in Andy was knee deep in some stuff that was clearly over my head, and I was barely grasping at some of the concepts. I was relieved only by the fact that when he asked questions, everyone else was silent too.
Most of the presentation was getting down and dirty with HLSL. It was indeed impressive how little HLSL code could be written to insert lights, textures, etc into shader that could then be used to affect a scene. Andy stepped through re-creating the fixed function pipeline functionality of the graphics card (at least I think so, he kept saying things and then appending “…of course” onto the statement, making me feel a bit ignorant). In the end, he made it look rather simple, though I don’t think I could go and do it again on my own.
While the subject was a bit over my head, the presentation was excellent and enjoyable. Off to the Game Dev Panel.
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July 25th, 2005 at 10:00 am
He’s either good or hibbibly optimistic about life
You missed the slide at the beginning that said ’stop me ifg I use a term you don’t understand’. Mind you nobody else stopped me either.
Shaders are tough, thats about the minimum math I can put in and at was a very basic intro. Another reason why the game development area is hard to break into. You need a brain the size of a planet.
July 25th, 2005 at 10:02 am
Its still too early and apparantly a week on the laptop keyboard has made me forget where the buttons are on the natural keyboard. Of course I meant ‘horribly’. (though hibbily seems like such a good word I really need to invent a use for it).
July 25th, 2005 at 9:37 pm
Hey man, I was definitely not trying to knock your talk, and hope that you didn’t feel that way. Just because the subect was over *my* head, doesn’t really detract from the presentation.
I thought that the presentation was done very well, and I can see myself thinking back to it at a point when I understand some of what you were talking about and going “Ohhhh, *THAT* is what he was talking about”.
I certainly don’t wish you would have done it any other way. No sense having a bunch of sessions covering things I understand fully, eh?
P.S. - If I *had* been there for your 1st slide, I may have mentioned that i do not understand the term “ifg”
P.P.S - I think I did in fact tell you that I didnt understand the difference between vertex lighting and per-pixel lighting (though I had herd the terms, I didn’t really grasp what they meant. I see now that they pretty much meant exactly what they said.)
August 3rd, 2005 at 10:48 pm
It takes more than that to offend a Brit