Earlier this week I was enjoying the glorious gadget imagery from CES, everything from 3D tv to transparent displays to laptops and tablets, the future really looks sweet.
Games
Wii – a bland year for Nintendo, finally the big behemoth of consoles are turning down in sales, and even though some larger titles may appear like Mario galaxy 2 and other M, I guess we will have to wait for E3 to hear some news.
Also Michael Pachter has predicted that WIIHD will come at the end of the year, it won’t, I seriously think he is overestimating Nintendo’s business sense, they got one or two things right with the Wii mote and Wii fit, but the rest is not that great, ever heard of Wii Speak, well it did kinda get lost a bit there.
So no WiiHD yet,personally I am leaning towards 2013 and a brand new console.
Read more »
You know the drill now add a bit about the last 10 years, there you go.
Games
Wii – so they dropped their price that’s about it besides another Mario game, they really have to step it up, I mean the price drop was only because the ps3 came within $50 at a time from the price of a wii, and the 360 is already down there with their cheapest package (cheap yea, but useless).
Xbox 360 – Well they had a their halo game (ODST) and teased Halo 4, they call it “Halo Reach” but it has the chief in it so it’s halo 4 even though it’s a prequel.
No gears at E3 but dude huge is working on something, and it’s most likely Gears 3.
Biggest news was natal set for release sometime late next year.
PS3 – killzone 2, R&C: a crack in time, uncharted 2, inFamous, all great, a few delays like God of War 3, GT5 and heavy rain and M.A.G. All of them are great.
Ps3 slim and the price drop was the biggest news though, I got the total amount correct but not why and when, although at the time I doubt that even Sony knew.
And yea E3 Was huge for sony, especially with their new motion controllers. Read more »
Hi, here is a little Yule gift for all you GL junkies out there, it’s a short quick and easy tool for taking a screen shot into the tga format, sure it’s uncompressed and doesn’t increment the file name, but it’s pretty slick.
void screenshot (char filename[160],int x, int y)
{
// get the image data
long imageSize = x * y * 3;
unsigned char *data = new unsigned char[imageSize];
glReadPixels(0,0,x,y, GL_BGR,GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE,data);
// split x and y sizes into bytes
int xa= x % 256;
int xb= (x-xa)/256;
int ya= y % 256;
int yb= (y-ya)/256;
//assemble the header
unsigned char header[18]={0,0,2,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,(char)xa,(char)xb,(char)ya,(char)yb,24,0};
// write header and data to file
fstream File(filename, ios::out | ios::binary);
File.write (reinterpret_cast(header), sizeof (char)*18);
File.write (reinterpret_cast(data), sizeof (char)*imageSize);
File.close();
delete[] data;
data=NULL;
}
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Usage: screenshot (“test.tga”,800,600);
Just call the function with the correct window size just before SwapBuffers and it will take a screen shot of everything in the frame buffer, easy.
I recently picked up a copy of Uncharted 2: among thieves, specifically one of those limited edition metal ones that is so popular these days. I really wanted to see if it was as good as promised, and with a meta score of 96 it better be.
But let get back to the beginning, two years ago the developer Naughty Dog released Uncharted: Drakes fortune, one of the greater games of -07, especially for the Playstation 3 which had almost no games available at that time and this was an exclusive. Read more »
Earlier this year both Microsoft and Sony presented what they called the “Future of gaming” class of controllers, but whats really going on here.
To answer that we have to look at their technologies and then derive intent from that.
It’s two seemingly very different control schemes, but are they, one uses a time-of-flight (TOF) camera to sense it’s surroundings and most notably the depth of it, the other one uses a high res camera to sense it’s surroundings that while it can’t measure depth it can track certain objects on the z axis reasonably well, however it is augmented by a glowing ping pong ball on a stick for “sub pixel 3d tracking”, it also has buttons which are useful at times.
Both systems also have an array of microphones which makes it easier to track and filter out voices. Read more »
In our third installment we are looking into replacing all the matrix math previously built into openGL, what I am going to show you replaces most of it almost exactly like openGL used to work, naturally if your doing something a bit more advanced like a game or so, I would suggest that you use your scene graph to generate new matrices.
It’s really quite simple though, and as with the previous part we have to do some changes a bit here and there, so I am going to start with the most generalized bit and work my way down, and finally end up with the classic rotating cube.
But first the prerequisites, I am assuming that you started where part 2 left off, we will also need the following functions made to work
glGetUniformLocation
glUniformMatrix4fv
Step 1 – the shader
it’s really not that much but after
add
this will be where we send our new matrix to.
Then later in the code you need to do something like this to use our matrix
You could use and I almost recommend that you use two matrices one for the camera and one for the model transformation, but I leave that task to you.
Please note that the order of the multiplication is important. Read more »
In this part I will show you what you must do to render even the smallest speck of graphical garbage on the screen in the openGL 3.0 API, it’s somewhat simple once you have all the tools.
First you need a good GLSL shader implementation because nothing will render without it, you can use mine if you want but just remember that we are gonna modify it a bit so it can’t be to abstracted.
Next you need to take a look at the VAO tutorial since well be using that too, naturally since we are using VAO well also be using VBO and in this example I have 3 buffers with the vertex, texture and normal coordinates for a cube, you could use anything, but I am using a cube.
We are also going to use 4 new functions so go ahead am make them work as well.
glVertexAttribPointer
glBindAttribLocation
glDisableVertexAttribArray
glEnableVertexAttribArray
Finally remove anything that has to do with matrices, well discuss those in part 3, in fact remove or comment out any deprecated function (you can find them in part 1).
Now then, there are about four steps to this, that is there are 4 things you need to change in your already existing code for things to work, so I will explain them in order. Read more »
As things move forwards towards the opening of thegeekstate.com, it’s time to talk about some of it’s features.
Although I will be mostly me that writes all the cool stuff here, a lot will be community based along the lines of “You suggest, I approve”, thus I hope there will be a lot of content flowing trough this site.
News: Yea interesting news from the world of geekdom, be it science, medical, technical, cultural or just fun.
Articles: just aggregating news is not fun, creating it, molding it, making fun of it, analyzing it and plainly telling you whatever I want, that is what I like.
Everything from openGL tutorials, game design, photography, technology, anything really the sky’s the limit, well the size of my database, but that’s another issue.
Reviews: games, books and technical doodads begs for a review, don’t worry though I will try to add my touch to the whole thing, also I will write oppinion pices as it’s unlikely that I get to test them all.
Video sifting: or whatever you would call it, though this will be more like a favorite geek video of the day, such like this one right here. Read more »
Jack Tretton claims that over 364 new games will be released this year on the various playstation platforms, over 100 of them are PS2 titles
“uncharted 2: among thieves” was demoed, looks good with lots of stuff breaking and lots of dynamic environments, it will definitely be fun to play.
MAG, impressive demo where they showed a 256 player battle in realtime.
Next Kaz Hirai introduced the PSP GO, or “the worst kept secret at this e3″ as he himself called it, it will have 16gb of internal memory plus expandability, it’s 40% lighter a feat possible trough the fact that it lacks a UMD drive and will cost $250 or €250 (with added euroscrew).
Comes October 1 in america.
And because of this all new released are no also digitally available Read more »
A new super mario bros is coming this holiday, no not the 3d crap Nintendo has been producing but rather something that looks a bit like the original super mario bros, but infinitely better graphics and 4 player co-op, looks pretty sweet.
Wii fit plus, is basically just some new software for wii fit, new exercises and games, you can now also choose to focus on a specific area of your body, great but does all of the above count as a specific area, and it’s still pretty flimsy, especially seeing as one of the mini games lets you play something that looks a lot like what mario does, which includes jumping.
Wii Motion plus was also shown but it’s basically the same as last year though it does seem like fun.
Redsteel2 was announced that it will require Wii motion plus. Read more »
Anual predictions, Rants | Peter Wallström | 
January 12, 2010 03:32 | 
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