Dawn of the Geeks

This image is upsetting at least two people. What’s the problem you ask? Well in the top graphic you see Romney, McCain and Huckabee. In the bottom you see the top three candidates are Romney, McCain and Ron Paul. Huckabee is actually fourth. So why would they not put Ron Paul’s image in the top?

BECAUSE NOBODY CARES WHERE RON PAUL FINISHES!

People are more interested in how Huckabee did because unlike Ron Paul, he’s not a loser that typically gets around 4% of the votes. Huckabee has actually won a state and could win more. Ron Paul is a loser. The only people he beats are the people who aren’t actually trying. The only candidate that actually tried in Nevada was Romney.

There is no Ron Paul Revolution. There is only the Ron Paul Resolution. Of all the candidates he is the only one that I believe would actually destroy our country. He has this very vague idea about how our country has strayed from the constitution. The constitution was intentionally written to be vague because our founding fathers had a vague idea of the perfect nation. Over the past 200+ years the world has changed and our country has changed with it.

Apparently Dr. Paul wants to bring our country back to 1776 and pretend that the world will join us. Our government is acting within the bounds of the constitution. In the few cases it over steps the bounds the Supreme Court dutifully puts it back in check. So I’m failing to see where we are straying.

The biggest whine comes from Habeas Corpus. Maybe if Ron Paul and his idiot followers would actually read the constitution he would find Habeas Corpus, not in the bill of rights or any amendments but mentioned specifically in the main body as being a revokable PRIVILAGE. Not a right. So please, shut up already and go away Ron Paul.

Let the adults run the country and deal with the world and the problems it brings us. Could things be different? Yes. In fact Huckabee also wants to do away with the IRS. That is the only thing Ron Paul has going for him. If you take away Ron Paul’s plan to get rid of the IRS, he has nothing. But where Huckabee comes off not sounding like a looney is in his plan to do it without destroying the country in the process.

I would like to see McCain and Huckabee run together. McCain can stomp skulls around the world where needed and Huckabee can deal with some of the domestic issues. McCain would be president because that gives him the role of commander in chief as needed to defend this country from its mainly Islamic enemies.

Think about it Ron Paul, Commander in Chief, if you want to destroy the military what exactly would your job be as president? What fool sells himself on the idea of leaving America open for invasion just so the citizens can have a few extra dollars in their pockets? I’d rather pay 40% of my income to the government (way more than I actually pay even as a middle class citizen) than be forced to decide between speaking Arabic or Spanish.

Maybe I’m weird.

While I’m working on Ray Casting in Java, others are busy doing research into Real Time Ray Tracing which is coming along nicely apparently. They are now able to render Quake 4 at 90 fps at a high resolution using ray tracing.

This is becomming possible thanks to multi-processor systems. Unlike rasterized graphics (as used in modern graphics cards), raytracing naturally takes advantage of multiple cores. Going from one core to two will virtually double the framerate. That doesn’t happen with raster graphics. It’s possible with Ray Tracing because every pixel is independently rendered.

The Slashdrones are whining that in the sample images everything is shiny and/or plastic looking. Well, yeah, that’s pretty much the default behavior of light that travels in perfect lines and reflects perfectly. There’s no shortage of work done in the ray tracing area that adds in that kind of distortion that creates more realistic looking graphics. With the advent of multi-core processors ray tracing will no doubt take over raster graphics in terms of speed and realism.

Anyone can download OpenGL and/or DirectX and start working cranking out great looking raster graphic based games. OpenRT is an API for Ray Tracing but currently only a non-commercial engine exists. And no game company in their right mind is going to hire a bunch of PhD’s to reinvent the wheel when the gaming community is perfectly content with OpenGL/DirectX.

It’s probably going to be awhile before Ray Tracing based games are on shelves. Current technology is good enough and it’s going to take specialized graphics cards to really get Ray Tracing to the level it needs to be to convince gamers it’s better to the point it worth a chunk of money for a new graphics card that only works for a few games.

I’m working on a PHP script that will clean up a green screened image automatically. There are actually two steps to the process. The first step is to find pixels that have at least a certain value for green and green being above a certain ratio for the total color. In my script for example, green must have a value of at least 64 and must account for at least 40% of the combined values for red, green and blue in order to remove that pixel. That takes care of most of the green in the image. But, in this example source image the green bleeds into the hair. So if the first check doesn’t get rid of the green we check the ratio of green again and if it’s greater than 35% then we tone down the green a bit. This turns the hair from very green where the green screen is showing through to being more consistant with the rest of the hair color.

The next step is to incorporate this script into the bunnies web-site and allow for user adjustments. I’ve tried it out with a number of green screen images found on Google and the results are very good. This script works best with images that don’t have green bleeding onto the subject and subjects that don’t have fine details like blowing hair.

Besides logging into the Bunnies server to download map information, Bunnies 2.0 also improves controls. Rather than getting stuck on a wall when you run into it, you will now slide along walls. There is also some basic math added so you don’t instantly move at top speed or come to a dead stop. Like almost every other game you go from stopped to top speed over a small period of time and come to a stop over a small period of time. Another change is that the beach balls now bounce off of walls a few times before disappearing.

I was going to put those changes into Bunnies 1.0 until I reviewed the code and found that it wouldn’t be a particularly easy change since the socket code has been added and affects some of the classes that also deal with the changes to how objects move. For example the object handler class handles the calls to move the objects and also downloads the object data files from the server. I could go through class by class and just update the methods related to movement but I think I’ll just go ahead and get the Bunnies server up and running and switch to 2.0 this weekend.

I will probably also break the Bunnies download into two parts: the actual source and the resources. The big component not yet handled by the server or the web-site is object management. That may change and as such there may be required code changes but not requires resource changes.

You can find more information about Bunnies and download the latest release at Bunnies.DawnOfTheGeeks.com

Lenders wouldn’t be complaining if the housing market hadn’t tanked. Interest only loans and ARMs served to get people into houses they couldn’t afford, ever. At the end of the introductory rate people were expected to sell the house at which time the lender recieved all the money they had lent out in one lump sum. This resulted in a huge profit with little to no risk from interest payments for 5 years.

In the case of ARMs the lenders assumed the buyer would refinance, sell the home or lose the home to the bank that would then resell the home themselves at a profit. It was a no lose situation two years ago when houses were flying off the market at rediculous prices.

There was no compelling reason to help these people. The whole idea was to get the interest money from the loan payments and the house and then sell the house at a profit in the worst case scenario. But, the housing market tanked. Now the banks are stuck with houses they can’t sell that are worth less than the loan was made out for.

The banks dug their own hole. Every customer did exactly what the lender expected them to do. They just didn’t account for a market where these seized houses couldn’t sell.

For a long time I couldn’t figure out what was causing the floors and ceilings to shift as the player moves around the map. It turns out that the scaler was not being properly scaled based on the screen size ratio. IIRC, the math had the screen height divided by distance and was fixed by dividing the distance by the screen width. This was derived my multiplying the constant by the width/height ratio.

old way:

a5 = (double)s_y / dist;

a5 *= s_x/s_y; //fixes the problem and

gives us the new way

a5 = (double)s_x / dist;

Once that was fixed the next problem was that the walls did not reach the floor or ceiling. The fix for that was simply to scale the walls slightly. The height of the wall is multiplied by a number slightly greater than 1.

height=Math.floor(1.2*DistToProjPlane/dist);

This patch has been applied to the bunnies source code found in the bunnies web-site. There is a branch of bunnies which grabs all the map information by logging into a server which accesses the bunnies database. This makes it possible to not have to download map files for every little change you make. Bunnies 2.0 as it’s called will be replacing Bunnies 1.0 soon.

One of the features that will be coming is an auto sprite mask generator. Nothing says tedious like trying to use a paint program to generate the masks for sprites by removing the background color and then generating a black and white image from the result. The goal is to create a script which will allow you to upload your source images and it will automatically remove the green screen background and generate the matching mask. For people who generate sprites using 3D tools this isn’t much of an issue. I’m a little more old school and use a digital camera with a green screen to generate my sprites from real objects.

I may create a complete tutorial for building and using a green screen as well.