Introducing Auto Awesome Photobombs with David Hasselhoff

Google+ Auto Awesome is all about fun surprises that bring your photos to life. And whether it’s Benedict Cumberbatch at the Oscars or Michelle Obama at the White House, a celebrity photobomb is the ultimate surprise, turning an ordinary photo into something extraordinary.

Now with Auto Awesome Photobombs, you too can get a celebrity photobomb—no red carpet required. We’re starting with surprise appearances by +David Hasselhoff, everyone’s favorite crime-fighting rockstar lifeguard.

Watch your step! The Hoff joins these adventurous hikers at Machu Picchu

The Hoff rides the waves in Big Sur

The Hoff enjoys a breezy afternoon by the San Francisco Bay 

Upload a new self-portrait, or a group photo with friends, and leave some room for The Hoff. He might just make your photo a little more #Hoffsome.

Posted by Erik Murphy-Chutorian, Staff Software Engineer and Avid Photobomber

Another Entry In Smallest Blog Ever

Work

Worked right up to the 7PM wire today, started with the usual 9AM team call. Progressing very well with six hands at three keyboards fixing bugs like some coding orchestra! 

Just some quick eye candy from a small level I created to test that the older stuff still worked with the newer hacks and changes to improve performance and stability.

We're still grappling with the stutter issue, but we have DEFINITELY reproduced it now, and just need to figure out the root cause of it. There are other issues on our growing list for the next timely beta, but the stutter is the only remaining issue from our original plan.

I can also share that I have further improved the animating object system so that EVERYTHING is instance objects unless absolutely necessary which means you can paste down a TONNE of animating vegetables with no surge in memory usage or resource hiccups.  Of course animating all that through the shader would hit performance, but as always when it comes to content, your mileage will definitely vary.

Was another good day of coding, and with a huge testing effort all lined up to receive this beta version, we should ensure get something that works out the box (as far as our 1.006 ambitions go at least) ;)

A Quick Update

Work

All D3DX silent errors now removed from the engine so this should improve stability, certainly on the Ultrabook integrated devices I have been using as my super low end tests (not that they are particularly low end).  Also fixed more issues and made many tweaks, the new grass system works very well, faster and no more stall staggering when new veg is generated ahead of the player.

Next up will be some general testing of the build on a few machines to make sure the installer is up to date with everything done so far.  I will then plummet into the subject of media encryption which we have given a high priority too in order to project the high quality art which is being crafted for Reloaded. Built into the very fabric of the totally new asset store, we hope to make the asset purchase and download system super simple, super quick and super secure.

Anyhoo, back to TGC's holy trinity of Reloaded developers ;)

Transparency Report: Requests for user information up 120 percent over four years

While we’ve always known how important transparency is when it comes to government requests, the events of the past year have underscored just how urgent the issue is. From being the first company to disclose information about National Security Letters to fighting for the ability to publish more about FISA requests, we’ve continually advocated for your right to know.

Today, we’re updating our Transparency Report for the ninth time. This updated Report details the number of government requests we received for user information in criminal investigations during the second half of 2013. Government requests for user information in criminal cases have increased by about 120 percent since we first began publishing these numbers in 2009. Though our number of users has grown throughout the time period, we’re also seeing more and more governments start to exercise their authority to make requests.

We consistently push back against overly broad requests for your personal information, but it’s also important for laws to explicitly protect you from government overreach. That’s why we’re working alongside eight other companies to push for surveillance reform, including more transparency. We’ve all been sharing best practices about how to report the requests we receive, and as a result our Transparency Report now includes governments that made less than 30 requests during a six-month reporting period, in addition to those that made 30+ requests.

Also, people have been asking about how we respond to search warrants in the U.S., so we’ve created an entertaining video to explain in plain language how this process works. We apply the same rigorous standards presented in this video to every request we receive, regardless of type.

You deserve to know when and how governments request user information online, and we’ll keep fighting to make sure that’s the case.

Posted by Richard Salgado, Legal Director, Law Enforcement and Information Security

The Developer Trinity

Work

This is day one of a holy trinity of hard-core developers working on the exact same piece of software, and pretty a-typical in the history of Reloaded. I spent the morning setting everyone up with the latest version and code sharing so we are all now dancing on everyone else's toes, but it should speed up development. Can already report some good fixes, good learning and a better product, and it's only been four hours. Posting my blog early as there is a good chance of a power cut this evening at my end.   You will be pleased to hear the memory gauge is now sensible and starts at zero and only goes up when new stuff is added to the level. It pretty much stays under 25%, no matter what I throw at the level, so that's cool!

Good News For The UK Dev Community

A mementos day for all UK developers, the EU just authorized tax relief for all UK developers who pass some criteria for Britishness.  Here is a good article on the subject:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-03-27-uk-games-tax-relief-tigas-response

Optimized Meeting

Work

Three hours sleep, three hours drive, five hours meeting, three hours drive home and one hour knocking off emails.  Managed to get the meeting wrapped up quickly and in short order, with a view to getting you the next beta as quickly as humanly possible without sacrificing the required testing time. To that end you will be getting shorter blogs from me during the next two weeks and perhaps less posting on the forum, but you can be assured that all the extra minutes will be spent targeting the most critical of issues for the next version.  I am also resetting my body clock to daylight hours for the next two weeks also, which means no more late night coding sessions and an early night tonight. In the spirit of this momentum, welcome to the end of my blog post.

Tuesday Prep Day

Work

Sorry to say there is not much to report, save that I have now prepared all my materials for the two day meeting and everything is ready on my USB stick and Ultrabook. I set off at 6:30AM so that gives me a few hours sleep before I start off back to the real world.

I did continue to knock down my email inbox and organize some other bits and bobs such as an easier piece of grass code for later integration and cleaning up my dev area to give me some breathing room for continued debugging. I am also in the process of upgrading to Visual Studio 2013 as I have learned that the new NVIDIA NSIGHT visual debugging tool is suited to this version and that their improved support for DirectX 9 will be there - fingers crossed.

I did get a nice chat with the guy who basically writes the NSIGHT tool when I was at GDC and I added my vote for the ability to debug shader scripts from within the graphics debugger, so hopefully we might see that!

I also jumped into the forum as well to make sure all answers where forthcoming from the team and also ensured that this blog went out, despite being a little thin on the ground.

Also remember I had a nice long chat with Ravey who has been doing the software CPU occlusion stuff while I was away, and it's looking pretty good with the hierarchical z-buffer rendering 10K polygons under 1ms (without too much optimization at that) and his next stage is to create a mip-chain from that data and then run the occlusion query on the appropriate buffer slice. Once he is there, I can integrate that into the engine and replace the GPU dependent one (you remember, the one that creates that massive stall and halves your frame-rate).

I also learned at GDC that a new 'direct to GPU' evolution will eventually allow us to take results from the GPU memory without any significant stalling so there is still hope for an entirely GPU occluder (but not today for me).  I also learned from the Intel graphics guys that as the video memory is pretty much shared with the system memory in parts, that I could effectively avoid a stall by using that common area for my occlusion texture results for a unique 'integrated' solution to occlusion, but again this is all theory, smoke and mirrors until I roll my sleeves up and see if it works.

For now, I have a week of brainstorming and planning, and then Friday onwards I barricade the door, take the phones off the hook (do they have hooks any more?) and dive into the remaining performance tasks in the direction of a new 'much anticipated' version.

Back From GDC - What A Week!

Work & Play

Landed Monday night, straight to sleep, up Tuesday for a full day of presentations, meetings, setting up demos and then off to the pub for a swift half. Wednesday through Friday included booth appearances, two speaker presentations, meetings and of course a quick tour of the EXPO floor to see what's hot in 2014.

V.R NETWORKING AT THE IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGY 

ALLIANCE MEETING ON TUESDAY (http://www.ita3d.com/)

I think this picture sums up my GDC week very well. One the face of it, it looks like Lee checking out the latest V.R experience, a wires-free peripheral vision virtual reality running Android OS with full calibration-free head tracking all the way from London (amazingly had to fly half way around the world to check out tech from my own backyard).

On closer inspection though, you will see that Lee is drinking a virtual beer. The combination of cool future tech and the perfect beer is very much the take-away from GDC 2014, and I was greatly honored to be part of it.

Made most of my social feeding on Twitter which meant my blog was pretty silent for the week I was away.  Naturally no development was made, but plenty of testing was done on several Ultrabooks plus a snazzy new device which was the size of a box of teabags and contained a full PC with Iris-Pro graphics.  This little brick ran my Reloaded demo at super fast speed, even though it was an integrated graphics device, and I was quick to learn that Intel are now dedicating about 75% of their available silicon on the latest processors to graphics!

For Reloaded this means we are really hitting the mark when it comes to performance, and being best friends with integrated graphics means we are also best friends with low-end graphics cards too!

As much as I enjoyed my time talking shop during the event, I also enjoyed my occasional stroll around the EXPO floor looking at the amazing tech and learning of the incredible announcements. Had a chance to meet some of the guys and gals at PrioVR and try out their body suit, which in my humble opinion is a game changer you can only appreciate by using it.

The announcements from CryTek and Epic are set to once again to transform the ecology of game making solutions, and probably giving Unity developers something to think about too :)  

New hardware devices are coming thick and fast, and I managed to check out three new VR headsets as well. Wanted to try the Sony headset but the cue was a mile long, but by all accounts is as good as the new Rift DK2. I put my order in for DK2 as soon as I got back, and will be watching and waiting for what the Sony VR device does.

I don't want my blog to decent into a GDC report as I am sure you can check out the news from dedicated bloggers. My personal impression was that GDC represented some of the best stuff happening in the games industry right now and it's cool to be part of it.

My own GDC demo could have been better I felt. The visuals needed to be a few notches higher, it had some stability issues on my older Ultrabook and my new voice-control system suffered from the overall 'noise' of a large conference style event. The introduction of effective noise-cancellation technology would to wonders to improve that scenario!  Amazingly I felt the performance was fine during my demo, but I did notice something very strange which meant even though 'mouselook' was silky fast, the 'move player' stepping was very stuttery. I suspected the physics coding was to blame, and will be something to look at when it becomes an issue for the community.

I did return to a nice surprise in the form of a new 'grass system' which eliminates the CPU stall issue and increases overall processing speed. I also got some free shader tweaks as well, and it looks as though I get extra speed with no visual or functional drawbacks. I will be pouring through the code once I have cleared my not insubstantial email mountain.

My attention was given to a forum post which raised issue over the lack of feedback during GDC week, and the lack of a beta to replace the last one which left many users without a stable version.  Hopefully I have addressed the lack of info with this blog and I will be looking at the second point this week. I should get back into the coding swing of things from Tuesday but I have meetings Wednesday and Thursday so expect this to be a slow week for development progress, but I will still blog for you, even if it's a picture of the juicy steak I ate Wednesday night ;)

Get Your Business Online Week starts today

Since getting online, Green Mountain Bee Farm in Fairfax, Vt. experienced a 5x increase in sales, and Christine Fitzpatrick Hair and Makeup in Birmingham, Mich. attracted 50 percent more clients. Getting online can make a big difference for small businesses—and stronger businesses makes for stronger communities. Online businesses are expected to grow 40 percent faster and create twice as many jobs as those that aren't online,* but more than half of America’s small businesses currently don't have a website.

That’s the inspiration behind Get Your Business Online Week, when we come together with local partners to get businesses in our communities online and growing. Starting today, we’ll broadcast free virtual workshops for business owners, available to anyone with an Internet connection. Here’s a glimpse of what you can look forward to:

• Conversations with businesses that have prospered online, like Barkbox, GoldieBlox and Dollar Shave Club
• Step-by-step demos on building a website and getting found on Search and Maps
• Interviews with small business experts like SmallBizLady Melinda Emerson
• Workshops on Google tools for businesses (Google Apps, Google Trends, Google Alerts), online advertising (AdWords), and measuring your success online (Analytics)
• Free help and advice from experts over Helpouts by Google

We’re also teaming up with small business organizations across the country including local chambers of commerce, Small Business Development Centers and SCORE chapters to host live broadcasts of our trainings. You can find a screening closest to you on our website.

We’re excited to welcome small business everywhere to join us for this special week. Even if you don’t own a business, we encourage you to take part by spreading the word and inviting your favorite businesses to sign up.

See you on the web!

Posted by Amber Shapiro, on behalf of the Get Your Business Online team

*Source: BCG Report, "The Connected World: The $4.2 Trillion Opportunity," March 2012

Encouraging the next generation of journalists: Google Journalism Fellowship Winners 2014

The Google Journalism Fellowship connects students interested in using technology to tell stories in new ways to the organizations that are pushing the boundaries of newsgathering and reporting. Over 10 weeks, Fellows work on projects ranging from building interactive news apps to researching stories, finding data and writing code. In this post, one of last year’s Fellows, Jan Lauren Boyles, shares her perspective on the benefits of the program and what this year’s Fellows stand to get out of it. -Ed.

At first, I thought it was just my imagination.

In the middle of my exams for my doctorate at American University last year, I got a call from the Pew Research Center offering me a Google Journalism Fellowship. Low on sleep, my first thought: "Was this offer all just a reverie, rendered by my foggy mind?"

In some ways, it turned out that that call really was the beginning of a dream.

I had applied for the Fellowship because I wanted to work with the brightest minds in media research and broaden my understanding of the intersections between journalism and technology. I was thrilled to work with leading experts at Pew Research to collect and analyze data that examined how social media is transforming the way Americans consume and share news. I also had a chance to learn from Google’s own mapping and data visualization specialists. But I never imagined we’d also shadow an editorial meeting at The Miami Herald, discuss the future of news with Knight Foundation staff, talk directly with news startup leaders and take part in a design sprint at a CIR/Google conference around data and the news.

The 2013 Google Journalism Fellows. The author is third from the right.

Many of the inaugural class of Google Fellows has gone on to carve out careers in the newsrooms of the 21st century. The Fellowship helped me land a full-time position at the Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project as a research associate—a dream job, where I’ll use various research methods—from surveys to content analysis to good ol' reporting—to help examine how news and information functions today. One key project that I’ll work on this year will be a deep examination of the flow of local news in society today.

Now a new class of Google Fellows gets a chance to fulfill their own dreams. These 11 students are people to watch—young scholars, computer scientists and practitioners who will likely create new journalism products and platforms that will change our engagement with news in the digital age.

This year’s organizations and Fellows are:

• Center for Investigative Reporting - Emmanuel Martinez, University of Southern California and Suyeon Son, Northwestern University
• Committee to Protect Journalists - Rachael Levy, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
• Investigative Reporters & Editors - Aram Chung, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
• Nieman Journalism Lab - Liam Andrew, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Pew Research Journalism Project - Alex T. Williams, University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication
• Poynter - Benjamin Mullin, California State University, Chico
• PRI.org - David Conrad, University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication
• ProPublica - Yue Qiu, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
• Sunlight Foundation - Stan Oklobdzija, UC San Diego
• Texas Tribune - Jessica Hamel, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Congratulations to this year’s Fellows! We look forward to the energy you’ll bring to the host organizations this summer—and to watching your dreams become a reality.

Posted by Jan Lauren Boyles, Research Associate at Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project

Staying at the forefront of email security and reliability: HTTPS-only and 99.978 percent availability

Your email is important to you, and making sure it stays safe and always available is important to us. As you go about your day reading, writing and checking messages, there are tons of security measures running behind the scenes to keep your email safe, secure, and there whenever you need it.

Starting today, Gmail will always use an encrypted HTTPS connection when you check or send email. Gmail has supported HTTPS since the day it launched, and in 2010 we made HTTPS the default. Today's change means that no one can listen in on your messages as they go back and forth between you and Gmail’s servers—no matter if you're using public WiFi or logging in from your computer, phone or tablet.

In addition, every single email message you send or receive—100 percent of them—is encrypted while moving internally. This ensures that your messages are safe not only when they move between you and Gmail's servers, but also as they move between Google's data centers—something we made a top priority after last summer’s revelations.

Of course, being able to access your email is just as important as keeping it safe and secure. In 2013, Gmail was available 99.978 percent of the time, which averages to less than two hours of disruption for a user for the entire year. Our engineering experts look after Google's services 24x7 and if a problem ever arises, they're on the case immediately. We keep you informed by posting updates on the Apps Status Dashboard until the issue is fixed, and we always conduct a full analysis on the problem to prevent it from happening again.

Our commitment to the security and reliability of your email is absolute, and we’re constantly working on ways to improve. You can learn about additional ways to keep yourself safe online, like creating strong passwords and enabling 2-step verification, by visiting the Security Center: https://www.google.com/help/security.

Posted by Nicolas Lidzborski, Gmail Security Engineering Lead

Cross-posted from the Official Gmail Blog

Chromecast: now casting in 11 more countries

Superheroes, cliff divers, fearless reporters or pop icons—whatever you like to watch, Chromecast makes it easy to bring it from a phone, tablet or laptop to the biggest screen in your house: the TV. Since announcing Chromecast in the U.S., we’ve grown to include more of your favorite apps and websites. Those numbers will continue to grow, and we want to bring Chromecast to more people around the world. Today Chromecast is available in an additional 11 countries—Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.

In addition to your favorite apps like YouTube, Google Play Movies, Google Play Music and Netflix (where available), we’re working with local content providers to bring even more of the movies and TV shows you love to Chromecast. Apps will start rolling out today, and include BBC iPlayer in the U.K.; France TV Pluzz and SFR TV in France with CANALPLAY coming soon; and Watchever in Germany with Maxdome coming soon. So instead of huddling around your laptop to watch Sherlock solve the next crime or getting caught up on all the workplace drama in Stromberg, you can cast it, sit back, and watch together on the big screen.

Chromecast will keep getting better. We recently opened up Chromecast to developers, and in a few short weeks more than 3,000 developers worldwide have signed up to bring their apps and websites to Chromecast. You’ll soon have more TV shows, movies, videos, sports, music and games to choose from. Stay up-to-date on the latest apps that work with Chromecast at chromecast.com/apps.

So if you’re in one of these 11 countries, look for Chromecast starting today at Amazon, Google Play, Currys PC World, Elkjøp, FNAC, Saturn, Media Markt and other retailers.

Happy casting!

Posted by Mario Queiroz, Vice President of Product Management, Chromecast

Sharing what’s up our sleeve: Android coming to wearables

Most of us are rarely without our smartphones in hand. These powerful supercomputers keep us connected to the world and the people we love. But we're only at the beginning; we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with mobile technology. That’s why we’re so excited about wearables—they understand the context of the world around you, and you can interact with them simply and efficiently, with just a glance or a spoken word.

Android Wear: Information that moves with you 
Today we’re announcing Android Wear, a project that extends Android to wearables. And we’re starting with the most familiar wearable—watches. Going well beyond the mere act of just telling you the time, a range of new devices along with an expansive catalogue of apps will give you:

• Useful information when you need it most. Android Wear shows you info and suggestions you need, right when you need them. The wide variety of Android applications means you’ll receive the latest posts and updates from your favorite social apps, chats from your preferred messaging apps, notifications from shopping, news and photography apps, and more. 
• Straight answers to spoken questions. Just say “Ok Google” to ask questions, like how many calories are in an avocado, what time your flight leaves, and the score of the game. Or say “Ok Google” to get stuff done, like calling a taxi, sending a text, making a restaurant reservation or setting an alarm. 
• The ability to better monitor your health and fitness. Hit your exercise goals with reminders and fitness summaries from Android Wear. Your favorite fitness apps can give you real-time speed, distance and time information on your wrist for your run, cycle or walk. 
• Your key to a multiscreen world. Android Wear lets you access and control other devices from your wrist. Just say “Ok Google” to fire up a music playlist on your phone, or cast your favorite movie to your TV. There’s a lot of possibilities here so we’re eager to see what developers build. 

Developer Preview 
If you’re a developer, there’s a new section on developer.android.com/wear focused on wearables. Starting today, you can download a Developer Preview so you can tailor your existing app notifications for watches powered by Android Wear. Because Android for wearables works with Android's rich notification system, many apps will already work well. Look out for more developer resources and APIs coming soon. We’re also already working with several consumer electronics manufacturers, including Asus, HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung; chip makers Broadcom, Imagination, Intel, Mediatek and Qualcomm; and fashion brands like the Fossil Group to bring you watches powered by Android Wear later this year.

We're always seeking new ways for technology to help people live their lives and this is just another step in that journey. Here’s to getting the most out of the many screens you use every day—whether in your car, in your pocket or, very soon, on your wrist.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Android, Chrome & Apps

A browser that paints the sky

Today, residents of Vancouver, Canada, will notice a new addition to their scenic waterfront: an interactive artwork on one of the largest textile sculptures ever. The piece, entitled Unnumbered Sparks, is a collaboration between artist Janet Echelman and Google Creative Director Aaron Koblin, as part of TED’s 30th annual conference.

Echelman is known for building sculptures that respond to the forces of nature—wind, water and light—and this project is no exception. Made from ultralight fibers, the sculpture soars from the roof of a skyscraper over the water and walkways near the Vancouver Convention Center (site map). As visitors collaborate via mobile devices, they create colors and ripples that move over its surface.

Photo by Ema Peter

What's not obvious to the public is when you look at the sculpture, you're actually looking at a web browser. The interactive lighting is actually one giant Chrome window, stretched across the 300-foot long sculpture with the help of five high-definition projectors. To interact, visitors open a website using Chrome or other modern mobile browser on their smartphone or tablet. After selecting a color, they use their fingers to trace paths along the surface of their device, which are then projected onto the sculpture in real-time as colorful beams of light. The result is a crowd-controlled visual experiment on a giant, floating canvas.

Photo by Ema Peter

Watch this short documentary to get a quick look at the work involved in creating this project:


Art and technology are continuously evolving together, and we hope that this project showcases the opportunity for mobile devices and the web to play a part in that evolution. We all carry devices in our pockets that have the power to connect with people around the world, but rarely do we get a chance to use this incredible power to connect and create with the people standing next to us. With Unnumbered Sparks, we hope to turn strangers into collaborators, working together to create a single piece of art on this amazing canvas.

Posted by Jenny Ramaswamy, Google Creative Lab

Birthday Boy = Lee

Play

You might think I spent the day fine tuning my GDC demo and making sure all the hardware worked as expected. That would be the professional thing to do. Alas, I discovered on waking that it was my birthday, and my presents consisted of Jamerson's and Guinness. What's a guy to do The consummate professional that I am, I spent three hours in the garden raking back the soil for a new lawn and then five hour drinking my presents and watching a marathon viewing of Pawn Stars.

I am now sitting down to the PC and all remaining work at 1:30AM (after midnight) and pondering my next move. I think I can finish up the demo, and then do the tests on the Ultrabook, then copy the latest files to the USB, but whether I can do this before my pre-timed path at 2AM I am not so sure.

The demo might be doomed, but at least I had a great birthday day, and my future includes a nice soak and perhaps an episode of Poirot.  Rest assured, my built-in need to get the job done will see me through ;)

Also, as a teaser, you should get a real sense from this pictorial hint at the secret sauce I have mere hours to integrate, and I can also assure that I did NOT play any part in it's coding. As you may already know, I am 100% performance work right now!

P.S. The hat was purchased over 15 years ago from a cowboy in Florida, and despite it's own personal history, still resembles a hat :)

Last Day Of The Week

Work

Another week, and another round of performance improvements while juggling the issue of keeping the visuals sweet.

I have sacrificed a few FPS, but managed to add a system which renders the details provided by normal maps into the terrain, in addition to adding specular as well. The trick is pretty neat and means it only costs near the camera, and as the terrain pixel gets further away it fades out the high definition normal surface lighting and reverts to a cheaper lighting formula.

The biggest kicker, and I will be striving to add it before I jet off is to separate the static shadows with the dynamic ones (i.e. shadows cast by dynamic moving objects like the character), so that I can cast a higher resolution shadow from the chappy and make him pop more in the scene.  It will definitely be in the next Reloaded beta but I would have liked it to be in this version by now. Ah well.

I wanted to do a few more visual/performance tweaks, but time has run out for this week. It's now 3AM and I really need to add some 'secret sauce' now for the GDC demo next week.  I can only reveal what that sauce will be at the event, but I can blog it in much detail on my return.

The GDC plan has been brewing for weeks now, and at last count my schedule is pretty packed and I hit the ground running on Tuesday AM and don't stop until Friday when the EXPO closes it's doors. If you are doing GDC this year and want to know which parties I am attending, the biggest one will be the YetiZen at the stadium. I will 'not' be attempting to drink my own weight in beer (as that would be fatal) and instead will be doing my part to remain sensible enough to tweet and blog my way through the week.

Thanks to the awesome crew at Intel, I will be on their booth every day of the Expo, doing a little talk on the magic of AGK and Reloaded, joining in several discussions on the next steps in technology and meeting a few guys and gals who might help us push our products during 2014.  I am also attending a session on how to use the NVIDIA NSIGHT tool to deep dive my graphics engine and really squeeze every last analytic morsel out of what is going on. Such knowledge would have lead me to the cost of the shaders months ago! It will be a busy week, and I hope to learn a lot, and then return refreshed to continue the good fight.

One Day Closer To GDC Demo (and your next beta)

Work

Today I have been working through more of my GDC tick-list, which for the most part is about more performance, more predictability and a little common sense. The characters now 'mostly' behave in close quarters combat but the more I work with it, the more I want to press the reset button and start simpler. I think the AI is thinking a little too much right now :)  Performance found in other areas and I have also identified a HUGE drain when MANY characters are animating at the same time. I have posted a Challenge to the Reloaded Forums to see if anyone has a good solution to the problem. It's nor rocket science, but it will be interesting to see what solutions are presented.

It's already past 1 AM and despite a full day of coding, there is still plenty to do from my list and some things that are not even on the list. Right now I am making a small level using the new Veg Plus Pack to create a nice looking scene that runs fast, looks good and presents the main ingredients of what Reloaded can do so far (admittedly it could be more).

There are a few issues I need to solve on Friday such as the low resolution shadow could be a higher, the gun needs some shadowing from the cheap dynamic terrain shadow, the entities could use the same, objects in the distance do not need to animate as much as those in the foreground, some collision issues with the branches of larger trees, maybe add some normals to the terrain shader when in closer range and experiment with some specular without costing performance.  In truth the list is insanely huge, but I need to select the ones that either improve (or don't cost) performance, and make the visuals better.

Not really too much time left. I fly out Monday, and drive to the airport Sunday so I only really have FRI and SAT to do my thing before packing my stuff and ensuring my head is screwed on for the trip.

I visited the forum today and made some feedback posts, and it is my intention (trips permitting) to visit the forum twice a week and respond to everything on the first page so hopefully this will feed some extra information while I keep the next version close to my chest.

OTHER NEWS: We will have an announcement on Day One of GDC, so keep checking the social feeds for this as you may be able to benefit from GDC fever and pick up some freebie goodness.

Save more with Google Drive

Having launched Google Drive just two years ago, we’re excited that so many people are now using it as their go-to place for keeping all their files. Whether it's all the footage of your kids' baseball games, the novel you're working on, or even just your grocery list for the week, we all have files that are too important to lose. Today, thanks to a number of recent infrastructure improvements, we’re able to make it more affordable for you to keep everything safe and easy to reach on any device, from anywhere.

We've lowered the price of our monthly storage plans to $1.99 for 100GB (previously $4.99), $9.99 for 1TB (previously $49.99), and $99.99 for 10TB, with even more storage available if you need it. How big is a terabyte anyway? Well, that’s enough storage for you to take a selfie twice a day for the next 200 years and still have room left over for… shall we say… less important things. Like before, storage continues to work across Drive, Gmail and Google+ Photos. And, of course, the 15GB plan remains free.

You can sign up for one of these new Google Drive plans at www.google.com/settings/storage. If you already pay for storage, you’ll automatically move to a better plan at no additional cost. You can visit the storage purchase page to make a change or review your account, and see the Help Center for more information on these simpler storage options.

Posted by Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management

Great Meeting And Good Work

Work

Had a good meeting on Tuesday (got patted on the back twice, so as you can imagine I was instantly suspicious). The cause for celebration was the fact I have been hammering performance so much it now runs at 60 fps on an integrated graphics chip. Sure, it's a snazzy Intel HD 5000 chip, but it's still a far cry from a dedicated watt gobbling monster most gaming rigs are rammed with. It is the LOWEST shader levels, and I have some visual tweaks to make, but it's a great improvement over previous versions.

I also had a power cut today, all be it my fault as I invited an electrician to look at my antiquated consumer unit and his little box of tricks tripped the whole house.  I was half way through an email too.  The great news is that my PC, Monitor and main Hubs all remained powered, and the UPS device only showed about 25% drain after what must have been 30 minutes. Pretty good! My email was safe!

Today I have done a few things, listed out of context but of some interest. Sped up the reflection render by removing grass from all but the highest setting, stopped start marker texture from disappearing, save level no longer crashes under new DXT5 compression mode, modified simplest water shader technique to use a bluer blue, fixed the jutter and freeze when on water so the player can glide along it smoothly (water antics to follow after performance solved) and some smaller tweaks.

It's just gone midnight and I am tackling the water edge boundaries for AI characters so they can miss the waters edge altogether.  Also investigating using the same technique to block off high hills so enemies cannot traverse over vertical cliffs to reach you.  I am conscious however that I want an early-ish night to get up on Thursday in the AM for some parallel development work on some items for GDC so it's a tricky one.  I will plod on some more and see where it takes me.

On the 25th anniversary of the web, let’s keep it free and open

On the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, we’re pleased to share this guest post from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web. In this post he reflects on the past, present and future of the web—and encourages the rest of us to fight to keep it free and open. -Ed.

Today is the web’s 25th birthday. On March 12, 1989, I distributed a proposal to improve information flows: “a ‘web’ of notes with links between them.”

Though CERN, as a physics lab, couldn’t justify such a general software project, my boss Mike Sendall allowed me to work on it on the side. In 1990, I wrote the first browser and editor. In 1993, after much urging, CERN declared that WWW technology would be available to all, without paying royalties, forever.

The first web server, used by Tim Berners-Lee. Photo via Wikipedia

This decision enabled tens of thousands to start working together to build the web. Now, about 40 percent of us are connected and creating online. The web has generated trillions of dollars of economic value, transformed education and healthcare and activated many new movements for democracy around the world. And we’re just getting started.

How has this happened? By design, the underlying Internet and the WWW are non-hierarchical, decentralized and radically open. The web can be made to work with any type of information, on any device, with any software, in any language. You can link to any piece of information. You don’t need to ask for permission. What you create is limited only by your imagination.

So today is a day to celebrate. But it’s also an occasion to think, discuss—and do. Key decisions on the governance and future of the Internet are looming, and it’s vital for all of us to speak up for the web’s future. How can we ensure that the other 60 percent around the world who are not connected get online fast? How can we make sure that the web supports all languages and cultures, not just the dominant ones? How do we build consensus around open standards to link the coming Internet of Things? Will we allow others to package and restrict our online experience, or will we protect the magic of the open web and the power it gives us to say, discover, and create anything? How can we build systems of checks and balances to hold the groups that can spy on the net accountable to the public? These are some of my questions—what are yours?

On the 25th birthday of the web, I ask you to join in—to help us imagine and build the future standards for the web, and to press for every country to develop a digital bill of rights to advance a free and open web for everyone. Learn more at webat25.org and speak up for the sort of web we really want with #web25.

Posted by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web

Get with the program: open source coding with Google Summer of Code

Tobi Mueller started coding when his grandfather, who works in IT, gave him access to a spare PC. It was a sweet 286 machine which Tobi learned to program with the then-popular teaching language Pascal. He eventually became interested in free and open source software, but it was Google Summer of Code (GSoC) that helped transform Tobi into the free software contributor he is today.

Tobi was a GSoC student in 2007 for GNOME, a free software desktop environment. He’s been a regular contributor to the GNOME community ever since—and in 2012, Tobi was elected to the GNOME Foundation board of directors.

Tobi is one of more than 7,500 students who have participated in Google Summer of Code program over the past nine years. Every summer, GSoC participants work with various organizations in the open source community, building important technical skills and gaining workplace experience. Students aren’t the only ones who benefit; their projects also give back to the open source community. Karen Sandler, GNOME’s executive director, told us how Google Summer of Code “encourages and empowers” new contributors and helps “invigorate projects.”

So if you’re a university student looking to earn real-world experience this summer, we hope you’ll consider coding for a cool open source project with Google Summer of Code. We’re celebrating the 10th year of the program in 2014, and we’d love to see more student applicants than ever before. In 2013 we accepted almost 1,200 students and we’re planning to accept 10 percent more this year.

You can submit proposals on our website starting now through Friday, March 21 at 12:00pm PDT. Get started by reviewing the ideas pages of the 190 open source projects in this year’s program, and decide which projects you’re interested in. There are a limited number of spots, and writing a great project proposal is essential to being selected to the program—so be sure to check out the Student Manual for advice. For ongoing information throughout the application period and beyond, see the Google Open Source blog.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early—you only have until March 21 to apply!

Posted by Carol Smith, Google Open Source team

Ultra Look Day

Work

Tuesday is meeting day, which means Monday is 'preparing everything for meeting day', including a series of demos for the Ultrabook I will be taking to the meet up. On this occasion I am taking my newer Haswell with integrated HD 5000 beastie with me (the same on I will be taking to GDC).

I ran some early tests and the performance is good, but it needs a few extra boosts and some cosmetic tweaks before I can present it in a good light. This is my work for the evening, but not too much as I have to be out the door at 5AM Tuesday for the drive.

Gives me a few more hours, but I can report some very good early statistics from the mobile PC which bodes well for a lot of low-end cards out there :)

Weekend Research

Work

Did a little research over the weekend on the subject of lighting models in relation to performance. There is an argument for implementing something like a cluster deferred lighting renderer which has the potential to reduce the 'lighting/shadow cost' which was the route cause of the present performance issues. Alas such an implementation (done correctly) will require an upgrade to DirectX11 and a new deferred rendering pipeline which combined would take a few months of dedicated coding. That is, nothing else would get done while this work happened, and the kicker would be that some users will not even notice the difference, aside from some frame rate changes and the benefit of adding thousands of lights without a performance hit.  It is a thankless task that has more long-term benefits than short term goodies.

I expect everyone wants performance yesterday so will not be willing to sanction a six month sabbatical while Lee buggers off to re-write the entire graphics engine. To that end, the smart course is to finish the optimization work on the DX9 engine and get it as fast as it needs to go, so that when we do upgrade to DX11, we still have a very good fall-back for those users still using Windows XP and Vista (DX11 won't work on those OS platforms I think). Moreover, DX11.2 only works with Windows 8.2. See the pattern ;)

Anyhoo, the reason for my quick weekend blog is to write down a small idea I had about the shadow system I am working on. Right now the fast entity shader (LOWEST) does not use the dynamic terrain shadow texture due to the relatively low resolution texture and the lack of any meta data in the shadow texture to work out whether to shade entities at higher elevations (i.e. the roof gets a shadow when it should not).

My simple (and fastish) idea is to feed in the texture holding the height map data of the terrain, which will give each XZ coordinate a world space height position. I then write how 'deep' the shadow pixel in the dynamic terrain shadow texture is instead of just black/white. From these two pieces of information, I can work out whether a single world space position of the entity is in or out of the shadow being cast.  I would have to increase the texture size of the dynamic shadow texture to get a better finish, and there is a concern that the extra per-pixel calculations and texture read might create some drag factor in terms of performance, but the theory is sound in my mind. It's not a lot of work and it would mean entities get 'almost' true shadowing, just as terrain and grass currently receives.

I have all day Monday to work on this, plus the other ideas I have, and the big job of getting it all on an Ultrabook as my meeting is over 100 miles away from my main machine. It's a good test however as GDC is even further and this trial run will be very revealing.

Play

And now, I will forget all that stuff and see if I can boot up Thief and continue my pilfering in the dark and rain soaked streets of what looks like London. It's possible they put Big Ben in there for the 'pending' UK tax breaks. It will be interesting to see UK developed titles in the next few years coming out with all manner of Britishness crow-barred in. The next time you play a fast paced zombie-horror blood-splat gore-fest shooter, and have to consume 'cream teas and buttered scones while affecting a cockney accent' to restore your health, you can blame the politicians of Europe! Interesting times!!

Celebrating inspiring women around the world

Picture the women in your life—the women you admire. Your grandma. Your daughter. Toni Morrison. Maria Klawe. Temple Grandin. Malala. Somaly Mam. International Women's Day is an opportunity to celebrate these phenomenal women and all the others around the world—to recognize their impact on society, and to focus on what still needs to be done to achieve gender equality. Today, Google is joining in and showcasing inspiring women of the past and present through a series of events, new content on the Cultural Institute and—of course—a doodle. Join us in celebrating women worldwide!

Celebrating technical women on stage at global Women Techmakers events
To help increase visibility, community and resources for technical women, we’re launching a series of 100+ Women Techmakers events in 52 countries to celebrate and support passionate techmakers around the world. Starting today and throughout March, the event series will feature panel discussions with talented female technology leaders, hands-on career planning workshops, networking opportunities and more. To learn more about the program and find an event near you, visit g.co/womentechmakers.

Shining a light on women in history and their collective impact
The Google Cultural Institute is launching Women in Culture, a new channel featuring exhibits that tell stories of women—some familiar and some lesser-known—and their impact on the world. Starting today, you can browse 18 new exhibits, from both new and existing Cultural Institute partners, including:

• Showcasing Great Women by The National Women’s Hall of Fame
• Makers by WETA (Makers.com: the largest video collection of women’s stories ever)
• Frida Kahlo: ¡Viva la vida! by Museo Dolores Olmedo
• Pioneering Musicians: Women Superstars of the Early Gramophone Era by Archive of Indian Music
• Pathways to Equality by the National Women’s History Museum
• The Struggle for Suffrage by English Heritage
• Profiles for Peace by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security
• This Mad, Wicked Folly: Victorian American Women by the Meserve-Kunhardt Foundation
• World Changing Women by Vital Voices
• The painting Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie’s II contributed by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Since history has so often been biased, leaving out or sidelining contributions from women, the channel is also integrated with the rest of the Cultural Institute collections, making it easier for people to discover even more amazing stories about women throughout history.

A homepage homage
Women have been underrepresented in the history-telling of almost all fields: science, school curricula, business, politics—and, sadly, doodles. In addition to our continued effort for doodle diversity and inclusion, today’s truly International Women’s Day doodle features a host of more than 100 inspiring women from around the world, including the President of Lithuania, a brave Pakistani education activist, the most recorded artist in music history, an ever-curious explorer and dozens more.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Posted by Kyle Ewing, People Operations

End Of A Good Performance Week

Work

As the weekend approaches, I wanted to end early (midnight) today but it's now gone 4AM. Apart from making the vegetation and entity shader follow in the footsteps of the new shadow system, I've spent probably far too much time tweaking the lighting and pixel effects of the LOWEST shaders to get as close to the HIGHEST ones without adding to the performance hit. It's educational, but it's slow work.

Here is the before shot with everything set to HIGHEST and using the expensive fragment shaders:

Here is the same shot but using my new LOWEST shaders:

The terrain and grass are rendering shadows, and the entity approximates a shadow effect (but I want to do more here somehow/somewhere). Both are rendering all four cascades and the fifth dynamic terrain shadow texture but the LOWEST has a few more tricks in that I can completely switch off the cascades and only draw to the fifth texture when something moves. I did some tests prior to these shows, and I could get another 40 fps by switching them off without loosing my shadows.

The clock has beaten me (once again), but I have had lots of extra ideas on top of what I have now including the addition of meta data into the dynamic terrain shadow texture (DTST) to store information about the shadow being cast (very similar to deferred rendering but with local render targets). This extra info would allow me to shade entities 'above' the floor surface such as tables and things under canopy. I had it 'mostly' working without this, but the tops of entity roofing got shaded too which was a bit displeasing.

I also thought of reading the maximum texture size allowed on the card and then create the DTST to that size, giving my shadows greater resolution. My GeForce 9600 GT can create textures 8192x8192 large, which will increase my shadow resolution by a factor of four. For terrain and grass it is not too noticeable (but enough), but I really need a higher resolution for the entities!  It may be straying into visuals vs performance though, and there is much to do yet on the performance side (despite the early good results).

I have still to research the static vs dynamic DTST idea to avoid rendering ANY static entities after the initial blast, and using a different texture format for the DTST to reduce the memory it takes (16MB right now, 262MB if I use a 8192x8192 texture). Ouch. With an 8-bit format, this would drop to a more friendly 65MB. AND I want to see how much I can move some of the pixel shader work into the vertex shader to increase calculation efficiency. So many ideas, too little time!

Before I turn-in, I will leave you with a video monologue I made this afternoon as I was attempting to explain the new shadow system. I think it merely serves to confuse everyone, but it's material you might like:

Have a good weekend, and if I get up in time, I might have one too.  I just realized "Thief" (reboot) has been released on Steam and I had it pre-ordered, so I think I will play a few hours of my all time favorite franchise as a little treat for getting some serious performance work done this week.

Long Day - Early Night - I Wish

Work

As I was forced out of bed at an ungodly time (NOON), my eyes are telling me that 1AM is the time to stop working.  I can't burn the candle at both ends like I used to (at least not the candle I'm currently burning).  Progress has been steady all day, but in the last hour it has taken on a slightly sour note. My main task of creating a faster shadow system is fine, but when I promoted the code to the main editor, the engine crashed when you save levels. You could not make this stuff up!  And worse, it's one of those D3D9.DLL crashes that leave zero clue as to the root cause. Friday will certainly involve lots of undo tweaks to see when the crash stops - grrr.

Anyhoo, the boon of the day was to be a new dynamic terrain texture generator using quads and cascade detail, but it would have taken days and there was no guarantee it would give me a substantial increase once the new code and it's performance hit was taken into account.

I decided instead to target something I KNEW would give me a boost, which was eliminating the expensive terrain shader without loosing my shadows. The idea I had was to collect the shadow information in a large dynamic terrain texture image directly from the cascade shadow map information and then use that data at the more extreme distances. It would effectively replace 90% of the expense in the terrain shader with a simple texture read. Everything has gone smoothly for the most part, but getting the shadows to line up with the terrain heights is proving a 3D headache.  Not being able to save my test levels is the icing on the cake of this headache :)

To cheer you up, I can report that the old terrain shader would run at 53 fps with shadows on. The new 'flaky visual' version can run at 131 fps with shadows on. The shadows are more blocky and out of place right now, both to be corrected, but the performance boost is undeniable.  Let me repeat, the shadow slider was not switched off, it's still rendering 4 cascades and I still get 131 :)

The image above shows the system as it was being built. The blue square is the new dynamic terrain shadow texture and the black square inside it is the current largest shadow cascade area in the camera view. The white dots are the shadows cast from the buildings. As you move around the scene, this blue texture is updated with the shadows from the cascade and slowly builds a picture of relevant shadows that the lower-powered shadow renderer uses. Once I have everything straightened up and looking pretty again, I will write something which will populate this dynamic texture at the start of the level so even distant shadows will be rendered (as you would expect).  I have some other ideas about using 'multiple' dynamic textures for higher quality long-term storage of terrain shadows but I want to get everything back together first.

So in conclusion, despite the engine having wires hanging out of it and crashing, I think I am on the coat tails of a serious performance improvement and if I can get the visuals comparable to the expensive per pixel fragment shader version, we'll be laughing.

Strange Frame Rate Fruit

Work

A rather mixed bag today. Once I had dispensed with the first five hours of the day on menial stuff and nonsense, I began the adventure of performance seeking in earnest. My plan was to re-introduce the quad system, but tie it to the individual static objects in the scene, so in addition to their LOD transitions they would have quad's at the furthest range. This was accomplished relatively quickly, but the next part of my evening would be filled with non-quad related musings.

It turns out that after adding the quad system, and as a quick test replacing ALL static objects with their quad equivalents, and ensuring that the quad textures or quad vertex buffers where not being locked, I only gained 4 fps for my trouble on a GeForce 9600 GT using the 'run to the river' level with everything set to Low. That's right, I went from 141 fps with real objects to 145 fps with quad replacers. You could have knocked me down with a feather. My knight in shining quad armor turned out to be a total faker. It was remarkable in that the 141 fps was pushing 134K polygons with 225 draw calls and the 145 fps was pushing 86K polygons and 132 draw calls. I achieved my goal of halving the draw calls but I did not get my reward of more frame rates. I should also mention that I switched off my built-in occlusion system for this test, initially as a way to un-bias my results but in fact when I did remove my performance helping system I went from 66 fps to 141 fps. Sometimes the universe likes to have a huge belly laugh at my expense!

Getting 163 fps on a GeForce 9600 GT - It IS possible but at too High A Price

Undeterred, I decided to abandon logic and look for something that would give me some more performance. Having done everything right by adding occlusion, quad rendering and other object thinning methods and not get a prize in performance, I decided to spend an hour running a battery of daft tests until I saw a big jump in performance.  I finally found one such spike, which happened when I moved the camera to look at the sky but not so far that the terrain and ground objects became invisible. I noticed that the more terrain was rendered, the more frame rate drain occurred.  I then replaced the terrain shader with a single color draw and the frame rate went through the roof.  It seems the single biggest performance killer is my terrain shader, which has the job of painting most of the 100K-200K polygons in a typical scene.

The good news is that I have recruited someone (Dave The Ravey) to help me reduce how much terrain is rendered in the first instance, but now I know the shader is a crucial bottleneck to fast gaming, this is the focus of my performance hunt on Thursday. Unfortunately, I have to take a phone call during daylight hours so have to cut short my development tonight and resume when I wake.  My initial thoughts are that rendering every terrain pixel with my intense terrain shader is just daft, and that if I can render a cascade of terrain textures on the GPU and then feed those textures to the terrain rendering, it will all but eliminate the drain which can take a frame rate from over 300 fps down to 110 fps.  Naturally, whatever I use to build the dynamic terrain texture will cost something, and balance the scale a little, but having experienced almost no drop in performance when rendering LOTS of quad textures, I think I can get away with it.  There are some big holes in this approach however, such as no dynamic shadow information getting to the terrain shader, but I think I can re-channel the shadow to the dynamic terrain texture and get the shadows back.  Using this new technique, I will also be able to introduce 'texture splatting' as a freebie feature, allowing more than four textures per terrain :)  I won't be doing anything on this feature until performance is solved, but it will be a great bonus if this new technique works as I expect it might.

I think you can start to appreciate why some game developers decide to buy a middle-ware engine for $250,000 and skip the whole process of figuring out the best way to do everything :)  I certainly can, but I won't be beaten!!

#40Forward: 40 startup communities rethinking the gender gap

At age 40, my mom quit her job to start an employment agency for people with disabilities. Over the next few years and without a college degree or any formal funding, she grew her business to employ more than 30 people and serve thousands of clients.

Though to me she's one-of-a-kind, it turns out there are other women like my mom out there. According to the National Association of Women Business Owners, women make up 30 percent of U.S. business owners and employ nearly 7.8 million workers. Even though women-owned enterprises operate with far less capital, in the venture-backed tech industry, they produce 12 percent higher returns. That means that not only is supporting women in business the right thing to do, it’s also the smart thing to do.

In an effort to find new ways to advance female entrepreneurs, this week Google for Entrepreneurs is committing $1 million in aggregate to 40 startup-focused organizations, challenging them to increase the representation of women in their respective tech communities. From simply changing the times of events to accommodate busy moms to teaching young girls to see themselves as entrepreneurs, 40 of our partner communities will soon launch new programs and outreach initiatives to encourage women founders. We’re calling this collective effort #40Forward. Here are a few highlights from our global community:

• 1871 in Chicago is launching a new accelerator program for women founded or co-founded companies that’s more flexible and family-friendly, with a customized plan for each startup.
• Gaza Sky Geeks in Gaza is providing rewards for women attending startup events to demonstrate the economic value of them getting involved in tech to their families.
• Startup Grind chapters all over the world are hosting Women Take the Stage fireside chats featuring successful women business leaders in their communities.
• Outbox in Uganda is launching a year-long training to teach young women programming and entrepreneurial skills.
• Astia is increasing female entrepreneurs’ access to capital by creating monthly opportunities for women-led companies to pitch to world-class investors.

Along with our 40 partners, we hope to create more inclusive networks and to move the needle for entrepreneurs like my mom—and young women like me who aspire to be like her. Follow and participate in the conversation throughout the month of March using #40Forward on Google+ and Twitter.

Posted by Bridgette Sexton Beam, Global Entrepreneurship Manager

Crash Alley Tuesday

Work

Managed to delegate some more, reduce my inbox count and get an internal version out the door for more testing and veg video production, but the main headline story is the sequence of inexplicable crashes I have had to wade through. You all know the frustration as developers of not getting to the task you want to start because of a handful of totally mysterious bugs that need fixing first. Well that was my day. Even after 30 years of coding I can still be tripped up by a crash who's cause is the random corruption of some data at some point in time, and the crash event sheds no light on either.

Add a new flag in the meantime called "dividetexturesize=X" which scales down the textures loaded into the engine. I will have it default to 2 so that lower end machines are not choking their GPU video memory with 2048x2048 textures, and those with higher end cards can simply adjust this value to 1 for the highest resolution textures. In the future I might introduce some modes which do not reduce very small textures as they have much less impact on overall video memory usage.

I've just had a bath, and waiting for a Eureka moment on the crash issues, but none came. I have thus decided to approach the problem methodically. I will totally analyse the area of memory that the crash occurs on, and record as much as possible the before, during and after states, and setup monitors of the data around the memory block in case something else changes it.  It's long-winded, but it eliminates the need for intuitive guesswork, and if I can finish off today (by 3AM) with a fix of this most illusive bug, I will be a happy chappy.

My plan (for Wednesday now), is to skip the LOAD OBJECT memory work (which would only yield a small saving overall) and go for the huge performance gain of making all distant objects QUAD buffers, and then extend it to shadows, reflection and light ray cameras. It will reduce draw calls by MORE than half for the same visual, so it's well worth it and early tests show a marked improvement in FPS, even at lower levels.  My run-to-the-river currently runs at 10fps with everything on and 15fps with some conservative reductions. The game plays well at 30-35fps so that will be my initial aim on the GeForce 9600 GT card I am currently using.  I also plan to recruit one of my coders to help me with some terrain work which should vastly reduce the memory and performance footprint too.

Monday Already

Work

Having crunched code over the weekend, it feels odd that Monday is my first day back.  Despite the strange feeling, I set to work obliterating my backlog of emails, sorting out the work for the next two weeks and getting some key issues resolved in the engine.  I have sent code off to Simon to add shadows to the Construction Kit and a new version to Rick so he can make some nice videos about the new Vegetation Pack.

Still the best news is the massive memory savings I made by loading the HUGE textures used by the engine into GPU Video Memory. The consequence is that I can make seriously large levels now and the system memory creeps up very slowly compared to the old version. I have ideas to make even more savings too, but as much as I want to chase that particular tiger down, the elephant in the room (performance) remains the highest on my personal snag list. I will be running a demo of Reloaded on an Ultrabook in exactly two weeks time in the biggest developer conference on the planet, and I don't want egg on my face. Yes I will be saving face, but you will be getting some serious performance boon as a result so I think we both win.

I also got an email asking for clarity on the license terms of media provided in Reloaded, and the legality of releasing it as part of the standalone build. The official TGC EULA for this product allows you to distribute the assets (encrypted or otherwise) providing it remains part of the standalone demo you built. If anyone remembers the culture of sharing FPSC Classic games, same deal. We do specifically exclude the extraction of those assets for use elsewhere, either as part of a library or other game creator, but within the context of using the assets to show off your Reloaded creations you are quite safe.  It's also great to see the maturity of the community to ask such a question as it demonstrates your respect for copyright material and the terms of use applied to digital media.