Through the Google lens: search trends May 23-29

This week we saw searches on everything from surprises on the court to retro reads.

Books in the news
On Wednesday, the beloved author Maya Angelou passed away at the age of 86. More than 2 million searches have taken place this week as people looked for information about her life and work. Popular queries related to the author this week include [maya angelou quotes], [maya angelou poems] and [still i rise].

Take a look, it’s in a book… on the web? More than 30 years after it first premiered, the beloved PBS show “Reading Rainbow” was in the news this week when former host LeVar Burton formed a Kickstarter campaign to fund a Reading Rainbow literacy program. In less than 24 hours, Burton had met his goal of a million dollars.

Sporting surprises
The NBA and NHL playoffs continue to dominate sports fans' minds, but this week in addition to the more expected [rangers], [blackhawks], [heat], [spurs], etc. there were a few less common sporting searches. Rapper 50 Cent threw out a first pitch for the Mets on Tuesday, and it was a little, um, off the mark. People headed to Google to look for video and GIFs of the wild pitch. Some might say 50 Cent may want to stay in da club and off the mound.

Meanwhile in tennis, French Open number-one seed Serena Williams was defeated by a lower-ranked young player, Garbine Muguruza, who grew up idolizing Serena’s game. Finally, anticipation for summer soccer is heating up. Late last week we learned that player Landon Donovan would not be included in the United States’ World Cup roster this year. Searches for Donovan immediately spiked to reach a new high for the last year, with related terms [klinsmann] and [landon donovan twitter] rising as well.

Long weekend festivities
This week marked Memorial Day in the U.S., and many Americans celebrated with [parades] and [fireworks] to honor service members, and also hit up the mall for weekend [sales]. Other celebrations took place this weekend too: amidst a host of college students walking across the dais this weekend, there was one grad who's more known for her prowess in a fictional school. Harry Potter star Emma Watson graduated from Brown University (the Hogwarts of Rhode Island) this weekend, and searches for the actress were even higher than when she presented at the Oscars (woo, education!). But no weekend wrapup would be complete without at least a mention of... yes, Kimye. The long-anticipated and not-so-secret nuptials of Kanye West and [kim kardashian] took place in Europe over the weekend, leading hordes of curious searchers to look for dirt on the dress, the rehearsal dinner and more.

Last but—in my book—certainly not least: comedian Bill Murray showed up unexpectedly at a bachelor party in Charleston, South Carolina, where he gave a toast with some life advice on finding “the one.” Because if anyone knows how hard it can be to find the one, it's Phil Connors.

Posted by Emily Wood, Google Blog Editor, who searched this week for [yamasho] and [bee dance meaning]

Potpourri Of Performance Perks

A mixed bag today, with both key fixes and more performance revelations. Instead of a funny video today, I will blast through the updates we did today. It is Friday after all, and I have tools to pack for my return to the world of interior decorating.  Until next week, here is the task list of done items:

In addition to the new reflection slider modes which switch the resolution control to the SETUP.INI, replacing it with controlling the 'size' of entities that get reflected (88 is a good value in the next update), we have added the extra mode which when the slider is at zero, the water plane is entirely removed from the rendering, providing a few more precious FPS points.  The water generation system which calculates the alpha channel when water is near the shore now skips if the water was not changed since the previous test session. Increased the speed of the Desert terrain choice by converting the textures to use DXT5 compression. Ravey fixed a huge bug which means characters can no longer 'walk through walls', which you will agree removes a significant advantage from the enemy.  Pressing F9 in Standalone Game has now been disabled so you cannot play someones game and cheat by carving out your own path through the level. Gun sounds tweaked for more authentic audio. Adjusted the two-compounds level with better defaults which means you will get a faster level by default, and restored the bloom level so you get a nicer looking scene by default also.

I ran some tests to see if batching would improve performance, and although there are signs that this might work for some older cards and chips, on my machine (9600 GT) my three tests to batch 4500 polygon buildings, 500 poly rocks and 32 poly crates all resulted in zero performance gain. Seems my card was happy with 5 draw calls of 100 polys or 1 draw call of 500 poly?!  We have another theory which would be to build the batch in a dynamic vertex buffer on the fly (after frustum culling) but given the slight performance savings shown in early tests (when you factor in additional VB locks per texture/shader) I decided to look elsewhere for a performance boost.

And I found it.  Seems that my terrain shader is still very heavy on the fragment shader usage, and when I switched it for a single return float4(1,1,1,1) I went from 170 fps to over 550 fps.  I then postulated an idea where I could split the shader usage between the current one at close range and an entirely different one when in the distance. This should yield me upwards of 5-10 fps gain under the 60 fps mark, which would be huge. The same is likely true of the entities as well, so this will be my task on Tuesday. Monday is an all day strategy meeting so no coding from me for the most part.

We also eliminated the huge delay when calculating AI obstacles which means no more EIGHT second delay each time you click Test Level. Fixed a crash caused when painting grass at the extreme limit of the level. When the player re-spawns the player orientation is restored to the correct angle and the gun will be reset if you were in mid-fire when you died.

We're all still on a mission to gain more and more performance before we release another update, and so far we have gone from mid-20's to low-50's so we're only a few hops to the golden 60 fps score we're all after.  More speed to be gained from grass, terrain and entity rendering, faster Test Level preparation as we skip redundant generations and closing the book on some silly bugs still in there and we'll have a pretty strong release to make all your competition entries that little bit faster. I also have a handful of VERY large levels from community members, and will be ensuring the engine can load and handle them before handing back the levels.

Until next week, have a good weekend and try to get outside from time to time. It was nice and sunny today so my hope is the trend will continue over the next two days so I can catch some rays.

Staying safe this hurricane season

Earlier this month, Vivek Maheshwari was heading to the airport after a business trip in Denver when he received a public alert notification on his phone telling him there was a tornado heading his way. Luckily, the storm was still a few miles off, so he was able to find an alternate route to the airport and make it home safely.

Easy and timely access to information can make a huge difference in times of crisis—whether to help people like Vivek get out of harm’s way, or to help those affected after a disaster has occurred. The web can help by providing access to official alerts from government organizations, news reports and on-the-ground updates from social media. The key is making sure that all that information can get to those who are affected—as quickly as possible.

That’s one of the things our Crisis Response Team focuses on. Since 2010, we’ve been working to make disaster-related information immediately available and useful in a crisis, through tools like Public Alerts, Crisis Map and Person Finder. And since next week marks the start of hurricane season in the North Atlantic, we thought we’d provide a few tips to help you prepare for potential summer disasters—from tropical storms to wildfires to floods.

Make sure you’ll receive Public Alerts
Google Public Alerts, launched two years ago, is a tool that sends people alerts from authoritative sources like the U.S. National Weather Service or the Japan Meteorological Agency during emergencies. They’re accessible through the Google search app on your mobile devices and Google Chrome on your computer, as well as in search results for related queries and on Google Maps when relevant.

People have used Public Alerts to get to safety before a landslide in Colombia, set up sandbags before a thunderstorm in Utah, and get off the road before an ice storm in Kentucky. To make sure you get the information you need to know when you need it, get Google Now on your Android device, iOS device, or computer.

Public Alerts are now available in seven countries (U.S., Australia, Canada, Colombia, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan) and will continue to roll out to new countries this year.

Install emergency preparedness apps
There are a number of great apps which can help you prepare for or outlast an emergency. For example, a flashlight app can be useful if the power goes out and you don’t have access to a regular flashlight (use a regular flashlight if you can to conserve your phone’s battery). The first-aid and disaster preparedness apps from the Red Cross have a lot of valuable information. And the official FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) app has information on how to stay safe during a disaster, the locations of FEMA disaster recovery stations, and more.

And remember, when bad weather is on the way, keep your phone plugged in and follow this advice to conserve battery life on Android. If you’re using an iOS device, try these tips.

Get helpful gadgets
A waterproof phone case can help protect your phone during floods or heavy rains and a portable solar-powered charger will help keep your phone’s battery alive. It may also be a good idea to invest in a cell phone signal booster which gives you a greater chance of connecting to an operational cell tower.

Of course, tech can only take you so far, so make sure you have the basics (like a disaster supplies kit and a family emergency plan) covered too—Ready.gov is a great resource.

While it’s impossible to predict the weather, we hope these tips help you and your family prepare for the possibility of things going wrong. Stay safe this summer!

Posted by Payal Patel, Google Crisis Response Team

A new learning environment at Mater Dei in Brazil

We launched Google Apps for Education because we believed it would help students learn more collaboratively and help educators spend less time on administration and more time on teaching. It’s been thrilling to see how some schools take “going Google” to the next level and into their own hands—coming up with even more creative ways of incorporating technology in education. Recently we came across one of these schools: Colégio Mater Dei in Brazil.

In 2013, Mater Dei deployed Google Apps for Education as part of a move to incorporate technology into the academic environment. After they started to see early results, they came to Google with a plan: create a space on campus that’s designed from the ground up to be a technology-powered learning center for K-12 students. Last week, that idea became a reality when Mater Dei launched what we’re now calling the Google Learning Space.

Transforming a part of their campus that used to be a traditional library, the school set up a high-performance wireless network in a room full of bright, colorful cushions and chairs where students can brainstorm, meet to discuss projects and talk with their teachers. There are two smart TVs with Chromecast installed, so students can project assignments, presentations and videos easily. There's a library of tablets and Chromebooks that students can use, all featuring Google Play and Google Apps.

High school history students collaborate on tablets in the Google Learning Space

The school’s ultimate goal is to increase collaboration amongst students and encourage them to think more creatively instead of learning by rote memorization. And so far, the results seem to be good—the school is already experimenting with new ways to teach and learn. For example, kindergarten teachers are helping students “visit” countries around the world with Google Earth and the Cultural Institute. Electronics teacher Andre Godoy is using Google Sites and Google Glass to help his students build a formula that can move a robot with a swipe of the finger. And biology teachers have started using the Google Play app Biodigital Human to help bring anatomy to life in 3D; students can add, remove and manipulate each organ of the body using the app, gaining an understanding of various diseases and how treatments are developed. Best of all, students and teachers seem more energized and excited to participate in class.

Grade school students work with interactive biology apps from the Google Play Store

The Google Learning Space is just one example of how bringing technology into the classroom can have a real and immediate impact on both teachers and students. We’re excited to keep working on products that can help kids learn—in Brazil and around the world.

Posted by Milton Larsen Burgese, Google Head of Education, Google Brazil

More Performance More Fun

We've all created performance improvements today!! Dave improved the AI obstacle generation times. Simon improved grass rendering time and I have improved reflection rendering performance too. We all did good.  Short blog today as I am working on static batching and want to keep on it for a while longer.  Here is a YouTube video I found very funny and made me smile, especially given the project we have embarked on:

FIRST PERSON SHOOTERS SUCK!

Until Friday when I hope to report a few more details in perhaps a longer blog for you. Bottom line is we have some good performance boosts for everyone!

Getting to work on diversity at Google

We’ve always been reluctant to publish numbers about the diversity of our workforce at Google. We now realize we were wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues. Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity, and it’s hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts. So, here are our numbers:

There are lots of reasons why technology companies like Google struggle to recruit and retain women and minorities. For example, women earn roughly 18 percent of all computer science degrees in the United States. Blacks and Hispanics each make up under 10 percent of U.S. college grads and each collect fewer than 10 percent of degrees in CS majors. So we’ve invested a lot of time and energy in education.

Among other things, since 2010 we’ve given more than $40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls. And we’ve been working with historically black colleges and universities to elevate coursework and attendance in computer science. For example, this year Google engineer Charles Pratt was in-residence at Howard University, where he revamped the school’s Intro to CS curriculum.

But we’re the first to admit that Google is miles from where we want to be—and that being totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really important part of the solution. To learn more about our work on diversity—for our workforce, for the web and for the tech leaders of the future—visit google.com/diversity.

Posted by Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President, People Operations

Update May 31: We updated the language of this post to correct the number of degrees black and Hispanic students earn in CS majors, which are 8 percent and 6 percent respectively, according to the National Science Foundation.

First Win Goes To Ravey

As part of our renewed quest for even more performance, we have been drawing our plans as you will have read in previous blogs. While I continued researching how the engine scene was being built thanks to NSIGHT and Simon was busy getting confused with his weed and grass issues, Ravey the third technologist in our mighty trio made a tweak to the DarkAI subsystem that did not adversely affect the AI system but virtually eliminated the cost of calling what was the most expensive function to call.  The humble result for me personally is that I went from 25 fps to 37 fps and my AI UPDATE call went from 25% of all cycles to less than 3% (and sometimes 0%).

The frame rate difference might be slight right now, but the smoothness of the game play is very noticeable. Furthermore when I switched off reflections, my frame rate jumped over 60 fps (on a 9600 GT card) which is just where I wanted it to be.  My mission, partly thanks to NSIGHT, will be to target the reflection render system to ensure it only works when it needs to, and not in the scene above where it is quite clear there is no water to reflect anything.

Other discoveries included the conclusion that static batching, large object draw order and occlusion will all play a part in speeding up the level, and for the engine as a whole.  These are planned for later in the week.

In other news, we have fixed the shader issue so HIGH and MEDIUM behave themselves and resemble their HIGHEST and LOWEST counterparts. Water is now fogged properly so it emerges from the mist just like everything else, and we are on the verge of halving the number of grass objects being rendered which will help performance even more.

I continue to haunt the forum this week to ensure I try to answer all our V1.007 concerns, and don't forget there is a Live Interview next week planned which will include some of your worthy questions you have posted last week. It will be on the subject of Indie Developers, but I might sneak some mentions of Reloaded while I am in the spotlight ;)  Great to hear than V1.007 is being received well and we hope to improve on this version without too much delay, so watch this space for more news soon!

Better data centers through machine learning

It’s no secret that we’re obsessed with saving energy. For over a decade we’ve been designing and building data centers that use half the energy of a typical data center, and we’re always looking for ways to reduce our energy use even further. In our pursuit of extreme efficiency, we’ve hit upon a new tool: machine learning. Today we’re releasing a white paper (PDF) on how we’re using neural networks to optimize data center operations and drive our energy use to new lows.

It all started as a 20 percent project, a Google tradition of carving out time for work that falls outside of one’s official job description. Jim Gao, an engineer on our data center team, is well-acquainted with the operational data we gather daily in the course of running our data centers. We calculate PUE, a measure of energy efficiency, every 30 seconds, and we’re constantly tracking things like total IT load (the amount of energy our servers and networking equipment are using at any time), outside air temperature (which affects how our cooling towers work) and the levels at which we set our mechanical and cooling equipment. Being a smart guy—our affectionate nickname for him is “Boy Genius”—Jim realized that we could be doing more with this data. He studied up on machine learning and started building models to predict—and improve—data center performance.

The mechanical plant at our facility in The Dalles, Ore. The data center team is constantly tracking the performance of the heat exchangers and other mechanical equipment pictured here.

What Jim designed works a lot like other examples of machine learning, like speech recognition: a computer analyzes large amounts of data to recognize patterns and “learn” from them. In a dynamic environment like a data center, it can be difficult for humans to see how all of the variables—IT load, outside air temperature, etc.—interact with each other. One thing computers are good at is seeing the underlying story in the data, so Jim took the information we gather in the course of our daily operations and ran it through a model to help make sense of complex interactions that his team—being mere mortals—may not otherwise have noticed.

A simplified version of what the models do: take a bunch of data, find the hidden interactions, then provide recommendations that optimize for energy efficiency.

After some trial and error, Jim’s models are now 99.6 percent accurate in predicting PUE. This means he can use the models to come up with new ways to squeeze more efficiency out of our operations. For example, a couple months ago we had to take some servers offline for a few days—which would normally make that data center less energy efficient. But we were able to use Jim’s models to change our cooling setup temporarily—reducing the impact of the change on our PUE for that time period. Small tweaks like this, on an ongoing basis, add up to significant savings in both energy and money.

The models can predict PUE with 99.6 percent accuracy.

By pushing the boundaries of data center operations, Jim and his team have opened up a new world of opportunities to improve data center performance and reduce energy consumption. He lays out his approach in the white paper, so other data center operators that dabble in machine learning (or who have a resident genius around who wants to figure it out) can give it a try as well.

Posted by Joe Kava, VP, Data Centers

Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

Ever since we started the Google self-driving car project, we’ve been working toward the goal of vehicles that can shoulder the entire burden of driving. Just imagine: You can take a trip downtown at lunchtime without a 20-minute buffer to find parking. Seniors can keep their freedom even if they can’t keep their car keys. And drunk and distracted driving? History.

We’re now exploring what fully self-driving vehicles would look like by building some prototypes; they’ll be designed to operate safely and autonomously without requiring human intervention. They won’t have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal… because they don’t need them. Our software and sensors do all the work. The vehicles will be very basic—we want to learn from them and adapt them as quickly as possible—but they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. And that's an important step toward improving road safety and transforming mobility for millions of people.

It was inspiring to start with a blank sheet of paper and ask, “What should be different about this kind of vehicle?” We started with the most important thing: safety. They have sensors that remove blind spots, and they can detect objects out to a distance of more than two football fields in all directions, which is especially helpful on busy streets with lots of intersections. And we’ve capped the speed of these first vehicles at 25 mph. On the inside, we’ve designed for learning, not luxury, so we’re light on creature comforts, but we’ll have two seats (with seatbelts), a space for passengers’ belongings, buttons to start and stop, and a screen that shows the route—and that’s about it.

A very early version of our prototype vehicle, and an artistic rendering of our vehicle

We’re planning to build about a hundred prototype vehicles, and later this summer, our safety drivers will start testing early versions of these vehicles that have manual controls. If all goes well, we’d like to run a small pilot program here in California in the next couple of years. We’re going to learn a lot from this experience, and if the technology develops as we hope, we’ll work with partners to bring this technology into the world safely.

If you’d like to follow updates about the project and share your thoughts, please join us on our new Google+ page. We’re looking forward to learning more about what passengers want in a vehicle where their number one job is to kick back, relax, and enjoy the ride.

Posted by Chris Urmson, Director, Self-Driving Car Project

Recharged And Ready (And Reloaded)

Spent a few days up a ladder painting stuff, so now back on the ground and working once more as a lowly programmer. The V1.007 release was launched yesterday over the bank holiday and some early feedback suggests we need to focus once more on performance. In adding AI and some other improvements, we now need to return to the engine and ask for more performance. A lot more performance please.

To that end I have dug out my version of NSIGHT which is a tool which helps me analyse frames of the game to find out what is being drawn and in what order, and my findings are pretty revealing. Lots of very small and distant objects are being rendered, there is no batching system currently active so there are huge amounts of individual draw calls that could be combined, there is some really HEAVY duty work happening for reflection rendering, even when there is no water visible and the amount of rendering taking place seems a LOT too much for what is effectively a cosmetic touch. It should NOT affect the core game play speed and the enjoyment of the main purpose of the level. Finally there are lots of opportunities to extend the occlusion system and hide even more stuff when you look closer at the two-compounds level.  Going to spend the next day or so continuing to play with the features of NSIGHT and learn even more about the current engine performance and workload, and then I will probably launch into doing some geometry batching work around Wednesday. I will also be keeping touch with the feedback forum on V1.007 so I can stat tuned in to what the community are finding in this new version.

We are also starting some work on speeding up the A.I system, starting with some deep drilling investigation of the AI UPDATE command which seems to be causing most of the slowdown. We will also be casting an eye over the grass system as we have identified some possible improvements there!

Before I sign off, here is a cool shot from our Zombie Clown collection, soon to be available from the Reloaded Store. They look pretty calm now, but when you add them in a dark room with the player, armed with nothing but good intentions, get ready for a freight!

It is not recommended you design your competition entry around Zombies from this pack as they will not be ready in time for you to work into your creations. Unless you have your own Zombies and are good at scripting, best to leave these specimens for another compo!

Through the Google lens: search trends May 16-22

This week people searched to learn more about unfamiliar faces and rising stars—on TV, courtside and even on our homepage.

Winner winner, TV dinner
People gave their “w” and “o” keys a workout this week as they turned to search to ask “who won…” in the season finales of reality show competitions “American Idol,” “The Voice” and “Dancing with the Stars.” After Josh Kaufman won "The Voice," many searched to watch some of Kaufman’s past performances on the show, like [stay with me]. Meanwhile on “Dancing with the Stars,” searches for ice dancer [meryl davis] were almost as high this past week as in February, when she won an Olympic medal in Sochi. Fans of Davis looked to find out if she’s dating her “DWTS” partner Maksim Chmerkovskiy: searches for terms like [meryl davis maksim] and [meryl davis boyfriend] have been trending.

Basketball’s surprise star
NBA fans met a fresh face this week at the NBA Draft Lottery. The designated representative of the Milwaukee Bucks was Mallory Edens, the daughter of the team’s new co-owner. And, even though the Bucks slid to the #2 pick (after having the best odds to land #1), it seems Mallory pretty much won the Lottery anyway. And she wasn’t the only one who became an overnight sensation at the NBA’s annual festival of ping pong balls and sealed envelopes: searchers also looked for information about [anjali ranadive], the daughter of the Sacramento Kings’ owner, who was also at the draft.

In other sporting news, the [preakness 2014] raced to the top of the Google charts last weekend with more than 1 million searches, as Kentucky Derby-winning California Chrome won the second of three races on the way to the coveted Triple Crown. Looking ahead to the Belmont Stakes, fans are searching for [california chrome belmont] and [california chrome odds].

Inventions and discoveries
The subjects of not one but two Google doodles were on people’s minds this week. On Monday, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Rubik’s Cube with an interactive, 3D doodle. Presumably after killing a few minutes (or hours) of their workdays trying to solve the vexing puzzle, people searched to learn [how to solve the rubik’s cube] as well as [rubik’s cube record]. Then searchers looked for information on [mary anning], the paleontologist who was depicted uncovering a plesiosaur skeleton on our homepage on Wednesday. It’s fitting that Anning’s birthday celebration happened this week, since dinosaurs were already trending, thanks to the discovery of a new [titanosaur] dinosaur thought to be the biggest ever discovered.

Posted by Emily Wood, Google Blog Editor, who searched this week for [rei compression sack] and [smokestack sf]

Duck Shooting Day

Been another very productive day which has hopefully concluded in a very solid build we can put out to our alpha testers later tonight.  I gave myself the luxury of doing 3 hours testing on this build, and with the fixes which stop the characters jitterbugging, running off for no good reason and generally buzzing about in strange zig-zags, we now have a battle field worthy of an FPS gamer.

Here is the last level I created, to test the new scripting for defensive characters. Placing about ten guys behind sand bags and told them to duck down, the pop up and fire, then duck back down again when they felt it appropriate, then gave them player some sand blocks and some weaponry, and the stage was set. Giving him 5000 health points helped too!

Here are the tweaks done between 9AM and 5PM from the fabulous bejewelled trinity of Reloaded coders:

• Crash with MEMBLOCK on new optimized grass generation
• Slow AI with new DarkAI tweaks
• When you load a HUGE level which WILL crash the SYSTEM MEMORY (DVADER's level), it crashes with a message text 'STATIC' and then load the wrong level back in. Ensure the correct level is loaded (the one just before Test Level was clicked) and make sure the static text message is removed/improved
• Replated to the above, turns out an old level loaded into new engine, then saved, will set animspeed to zero, which in turn creates CLONE OBJECTs for all entities like this as the parent object animspeed is 100, even if the object does not animate at all. CLONE eats memory.
• The CLEAR sky still has a gap seam when scrolling, so close this by creating new alpha channel
• WHen health is recharging, use a yellow atriobe effect on the health panel until charging stops
• Each time Test Level is clicked, the user is waiting upto NINE SECONDS for the veg process. See if we can skip, optimize this if there is no grass/no change in grass as this will immediately improve the test level experience
• Enemies run away less
• Improve magnum and colt fire sounds
• Look at strange running behaviour in Ricks'video at time stamp 5:25 and ensure the character does not run away from player for 20 seconds, and stop it
• Dave to look at why the AI BOT jitters between two positionsraidly as the cus of the visual angle change jitter we see up close AND in distance
• Need to add code to calm this artifact of the AI BOT/VIS OBJ changing angle too rapidly!
• Rick - Can still push into enemy body - new code to prevent player pushing into any character
• Change FLINCH reaction so its BACKWARD for hit from front, and FORWARD when hit from back
• Rick V1.008 - Check that the sniper at VERY CLOSE RANGE can take out characters in ONE SHOT (test!!)
• V1.007 hide the crosshair for the rifle to reflect BAD accuracy
• Prevent player from running within 60 units of ANY character - use character controller velocity
• Played two compounds, then loaded get to river and got the corrupt fpm issue
• Stand in the building with the key and shoot the AI's through the window, sometimes they start to glitch when trying to get to you
• Where were the running enemies going?
• We have in editor properties - view cone angle and always active - tie in entity property values
• When save standalone the sky is not retained

It's been a LONG week it feels, but we have produced a playable level that is starting to feel like a 'proper' game, with character who evade, flank, run away when hurt, exhibit some group behavior and strike a balance of difficulty when combating against the player.  It is encouraging that we achieved this with a single enemy weapon, which means when we add more weapon types the game play dynamics will explode into many possibilities!

Going to take the weekend to chill out back in my home town of Wigan, and do some light property renovation to unwind. They say a change is as good as a rest and wallpapering is pretty far removed from coding a 3D engine :)  I wish everyone in the UK a great bank holiday Monday, and for the rest of the planet have a super weekend and if it's hot, remember to celebrate good weather with a beer or three!

NOTE: I had 15 minutes spare so I had a fiddle about with some store content and fog settings, and wanted to share before I REALLY switch off my PC for the week.

One thing I like about Reloaded already is the number of styles you can create with just the graphics slider panel. It would be tempting to go the whole hog and offer more radical style choices like cartoon shading (like in borderlands) or monochrome theme (Sin City).  This way the same game assets would be transformed based on the post process and shader adjustments.  Anyhoo, a thought for another day...

More Fixes, More Pictures

Want to have a look at some state of the art sound recording equipment? This is our ambient sound recording with suitable sound proofing to improve some of the sounds inside Reloaded.  Believe it or not, five pillows does pretty much the same job as a sound studio device costing thousands.  I am keen to learn what you think of our new sounds in V1.007 when it is released real soon to all pledgers.

The latest version is pretty cool now, with all sorts of little goodies like a flashing heartbeat death haze when you are low on health, better flinching of characters when you shoot them, better jump heights, improved rocks and textures, fixed terrain shader to reflect true texture assignments, and added a new detail map layer to retain the look and feel of the pre-fixed version of the shader, some more character choices (same characters but pre-assigned defense and peek logic for quicker level creation) and no longer shows the empty sky bank folders as selectable to avoid a monster crash.

We are almost ready to start on the Zombie animations and scripts next week, but here is a sneak peek if you have not read the latest Reloaded newsletter.  More information can be found there!

For right now, just waiting for one last SVN check in and then I can build, test, installer, upload and then walk and eat and chill.  Been a long week, and it's not over just yet ;)

Bright ideas for an even better Bay Area

Local nonprofit heroes are making a difference in our community, and we want to do more to support them. As part of that mission, we recently launched a Bay Area Impact Challenge with a question: working together, what can we do to make the Bay Area an even better place to live?

Provide training and job opportunities for people with disabilities. Match surplus medical supplies with community clinics. Bring mobile showers and toilets to the homeless. These are just a few of the nearly 1,000 thoughtful and creative proposals we received.

A panel of community advisors—Honorable Aida Alvarez, Secretary Norman Mineta, Chief Teresa Deloach Reed, Reverend Cecil Williams and Barry Zito—joined Googlers to narrow down the pool to the 10 top finalists. Each project was selected for its community impact, ingenuity, scalability and feasibility.

Now we need your help deciding which projects to support. Which one do you think will make the biggest impact in our community? Vote now for the four ideas that inspire you.

Your votes will decide which projects get up and running in a big way—with $500,000 going to each of the top four projects, and $250,000 to the next six. An additional 15 nonprofits that entered the Challenge have already received $100,000 each in support of their work.

Cast your vote by 11:59 p.m. PST on June 2, and join us in celebrating the community spirit that makes the Bay Area a great place to call home.

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Director of Google.org

A Little Challenge For Ya

Usual drill, piles and piles of bug fixes.  More interesting though are some pictures I made, knocking up literally minutes. The power of Reloaded :)

Short blog today as all time was gobbled up with some really annoying bugs that would not fix. Getting the characters to stop 'jiggling' has beat me today, so I will resume on Thursday with renewed vigor!

Here is a challenge for my readers. Check out this shot:

It is a shot of an enclosed cage, made of single fence pieces. Each piece creates a 2D polygon obstacle shape. My challenge is for someone to create some code which can take a list of 2D polygon shapes such as the above, and figure out which ones intersect, and then create a new larger 2D polygon shape that represents the obstacle, and then indicate which of the old polygon shapes I can remove from the list in place of the new larger one. Effectively doing a "CSG addition" on the overlapping obstacles. This will produce a very efficient obstacle map and speed up the AI system.  The key is to eliminate the lines of the polygons inside the final shape so you ONLY get the outline of significance. Any takers?

Tonne Of Tweaks Tuesday

Phew, what a day of tweaks we had today!  Just lots and lots (and lots) of very little fixes that iron out those little creases that can spoil a good thing. I am sure there are twenty times more small tweaks still needed, but it's good to see a lot of 'finished items' in the old spreadsheet.  Before we get into what was fixed, here is a shot I did last night (literally):

As you can see I was very busy testing the UZI, and might have got carried away a little.  Looking forward to adding ragdoll soon so they will stop experiencing the condition Rick has termed 'instant rigamortis'.

Looking at the sheet of fixes, here is a list dump for you. Keeping my blog short today as not my what you might call spare time for non-coding stuff. Anyhoo, if you ever wanted what your life might be like when you become a coder, here is a typical day:

• Read through forum thread recommended by Rick, and watch video emailed to me reg. A.I & Videos
• Add in rotation and scale commands so community can control their entities
• Fix system so the entity picker will choose the HIGHEST entity over the cursor (items on tables, e.t.c.)
• When using INSIDE edit mode, disable AUTOFLATTEN and also ensure AUTOFLATTEN reset on new selec.
• When in INSIDE edit mode, and raise terrain, keep the buildings where they are so can fill inside with terrain
• Find and fix the error prompt related to the A.I
• Integrate use of CANTAKEWEAPON flag, QUANTITY to pickup, rate of fire, view cone angle, and remove START and DESTROY and SHOOT fields as they are redundant now
• When jump into the water with no health, you do not die and should (quite quickly)
• Add TRANSPARENCY=2 to all FPE of the fence to resolve the semi-transparency issue
• The skyscroll texture effect for ROLFY is wrong (alpha shown at edges compared to V1.006) - see thread
• Waypoints seems to have broken due to the emergency stop while running code, look into it
• When character completely facing away from player, LookAtPlayer() gun point code should switch off/reset
• When die, reset gun point rotation
• ai still shooting backwards or at odd angles at times when running away from me
• Put water in middle of map and then the player over water, but get black screen and drown (no start marker)
• Use the always active flag to ensure characters cannot be frozen at distance
• The shader settings HIGHEST is not being remembered when you leave and come back Test Level
• Remove the line from the sky in  the two compounds level
• "ViewRange" referred to in the AI scripts is hard coded, move it to the entity properties panel
• Idle and twitching anims for AI scripts
• The last soldier near the barrels then make him stood up AI
• Rick: Add 2 check points (one at gate and one where battle starts)
• RIck: Improve sandbag area so enemies can duck better
• Rick: Close off around the gate area so player cannot just run over the hill
• Rick: Blood splat takes too long to fade off (frame or time related?)
• Simon: Make magnum half decent. Its less powerful than the colt!
• Rick corden off the end area so the player cannot scope the enemies without entering a fight
• Community has asked for ROTATION and SCALE commands for LUA commands, so they can make their animating animals and things move, animation and face the direction they are going
• Rick - If you move close up to an enemy you find they are not pointing directly at you. Can this be changed and make them centre in on the player? eg the eyes and gun should look directly at the player, not to the left of the player;
• Levels show the wrong terrain style when loaded. For this to happen you have to add a new terrain pack (eg the new desert pack). Then load a level and you will see it's using the wrong terrain.
• When you press SPACE, you can jump out of the water, the space should not work when in water
• You cannot RUN FAST backwards - IN FACT YOU CANNOT RUN BACKWARDS (SHIFT does nothing)
• Make tweaks to level, including a building with the KEY and some furniture inside the building room

Another internal test is due for Wednesday so hopefully we can get on with much more of the same. Looking (and playing) good now!

Google+ Stories and Movies: memories made easier

A suitcase full of dirty clothes. A sad-looking house plant. And 437 photos and videos on your phone, tablet and camera. This is the typically messy scene after a vacation. And although we can’t do your laundry (thanks but no thanks), or run your errands (well, maybe a few), we’d still like to help. Enter Google+ Stories, which can automatically weave your photos, videos and the places you visited into a beautiful travelogue.

No more sifting through photos for your best shots, racking your brain for the sights you saw, or letting your videos collect virtual dust. We’ll just gift you a story after you get home. This way you can relive your favorite moments, share them with others, and remember why you traveled in the first place.

Stories will be available this week on Android and the web, with iOS coming soon. In the meantime you can browse my story below (click to start), or explore a few others by paraglider Tom de Dorlodot, DJ Steve Aoki and Allrecipes photographer Angela Sackett.

When it’s less about travel, and more about today's events (like a birthday party, or baby’s first steps), Google+ Movies can produce a highlight reel of your photos and videos automatically—including effects, transitions and a soundtrack. Today we’re bringing Movies to Android, iOS and the web, so lots more people will receive these video vignettes.

A movie of my daughter’s first bike ride, created automatically by Google+

To get started with Stories and Movies, simply back up your photos and videos to Google+. And that’s it. Auto Awesome will get to work in the background, and you’ll get notified when a story or movie is ready.

In fact: if your photo library is already online, you may already have stories waiting for you. So look for the new app in Google Play, view the full list of improvements on Google+, and enjoy your walks down memory lane.

Posted by +Anil Sabharwal, Director of Product Management

Great A.I Today

For the first time since we started re-writing the A.I we can report that the fun factor has jumped up markedly. By adding in some new code which allows the characters to pivot their guns by up to 75 degrees in each direction, and removing the delays which allowed the characters to stop, aim and fire, the whole combat areas has got a lot more dangerous!  I can no longer finish the sample level with a single life any more, which means you are no longer running around picking them off.  They are picking you off!

As part of my work to get the gun to point in the right direction, I had to fiddle with the character's spine for a while until I got him just so. During this process my enemy struck some very funny postures.

I am sure there are some games that might make use of these positions, but for the moment we will put them on the 'silly pile' and carry on making a serious combat AI system for the masses.

Going to make an internal build now, and then see if the weather will permit a short walk before feeding time.  If I had a choice of dates to call signature days, then this would be one, entitled; 'The Day The AI Did Not Look Stupid'. I have thus commemorated this day by making the character look stupid ;)

Bringing the Rubik's Cube to the next generation of problem solvers

As a designer, it's always humbling when you encounter a perfect piece of design. Good design attracts our attention with its beauty, doesn’t need a user manual, is universally understood by anyone in the world, and is simple without sacrificing functionality.

In 1974, the world gave us one such piece of perfect design—the Rubik's Cube. Budapest-based educator and inventor Ernő Rubik created the puzzle originally to help his students better understand spatial geometry. Released to the public in the 1980s, it quickly became an international obsession, bigger than hairspray and breakdancing combined. But the Rubik’s Cube is more than just a toy; it’s a puzzle waiting to be solved and a question waiting to be answered. Over the past 40 years, the cube has puzzled, frustrated, and fascinated so many of us, and has helped spark an interest in math and problem solving in millions of kids. That’s part of why so many of us at Google love the cube, and why we're so excited to celebrate its 40th birthday this year.

As everyone knows (right??), there are 519 quintillion permutations for the Rubik’s cube, so May 19 seemed like a fine day to celebrate its 40th anniversary. To kick things off, we’re using some of our favorite web technologies (HTML5 and Three.js among others) to bring the cube to the world in the form of one of our most technically ambitious doodles yet. You can twist and turn it by dragging along its sides, but with full respect to all the speedcubers out there, we’ve included keyboard shortcuts:

Using the same technology that’s behind the doodle, we built Chrome Cube Lab, a series of Chrome Experiments by designers and technologists that reinterpret Rubik’s puzzle with the full power of the web. Create your own music with experiments 808Cube and SynthCube; make a custom, shareable cube of your own photos and GIFs with ImageCube; or send a scrambly message with the Type Cube. You can visit some of these experiments at the Liberty Science Center’s Beyond Rubik’s Cube exhibition, and if you'd like to explore the cube even further, consider borrowing the cube’s source code to build an experiment of your own.

We hope you enjoy getting to know the cube from a few new angles.

Posted by Richard The, Designer and a child of the ‘80s, Creative Lab New York

Through the Google lens: search trends May 9-15

Search is often the first place we turn when something unexpected or unusual happens. This week is no exception, as people looked for news on a celebrity smackdown, an interspecies showdown and everything in between.

When the news is news
A newsroom shuffle at the New York Times put the Grey Lady at the top of headlines around the country. Wednesday, it was announced that Jill Abramson, who served as executive editor since 2011 and was the first woman in that position, would be replaced by Dean Baquet (himself a “first”—no African-American has held the job before now). Searchers scrambled to find information on the story behind the story.

The Finals countdown
Basketball continues to be in the search spotlight as the NBA Finals approach. After a crazy, up-and-down, roller-coaster first round, the second round went more according to plan. Now we’re rewarded with matchups of the top two seeds in each conference finals, leading people to do some searching for the Spurs, Thunder, Heat and Pacers. While those teams are preparing for their next opponent, some teams are already making changes to prepare for next year; the Golden State Warriors announced a new coach, Steve Kerr, a former player with five championships under his belt. Searchers looked for information on [steve kerr rings] and [steve kerr bulls] (he won three of those rings in Chicago), as well as [steve kerr knicks]—rumor has it that Kerr turned down an offer to coach that team.

What a wonderful web
Legions of loyal cat people felt vindicated this week when a video of a family’s “hero cat” saving a four-year-old boy from a dog attack went viral. Not only were there hundreds of thousands of searches for [cat saves boy from dog], but the video now has more than 9 million views on YouTube. I personally vouch that it’s worth your time.

In other viral news, Macaulay Culkin was photographed wearing a T-shirt showing my own favorite famous person Ryan Gosling wearing a T-shirt of Macaulay Culkin back in his “Home Alone” days. People rushed to the web to see the photos, as well as create their own recursive images. As the A.V. Club says: great job, Internet!

Bey it ain’t so
An elevator surveillance video released by TMZ and showing Solange Knowles in a physical altercation with brother-in-law Jay-Z inspired a frenzy of speculation and search activity—and you could say it added one more problem to Jay’s list. Monday’s top trending topic—with more than 5 million searches!—was [tmz], and searches for terms like [solange attacks jay], [jay z fight] and [solange fight] were through the roof. Call it a testament to Bey and Jay’s status as celebrity royalty.

Posted by Emily Wood, Google Blog Editor, who searched this week for [what to see in valdez ak] and [cite news wikipedia]

A Fast Week

It feels like only six days ago since I had this Friday feeling. Just finished uploading BUILD-G to the alpha testers via Rick (should be up there later for the internal testing crew).  This one makes significant strides in improving AI performance, though we obviously still need to keep working on the nuances. A previous build went out but a BIN file error created some early trouble, so hopefully the new one will resolve all.

This is the fat zombie model using the latest shader tweaks and corrected normal calculations. As you can see from the exaggerated specular, the little details are now picked up such as the base relief effect of the missing chunks of skin and the roundness of the flabby nipple.  Naturally the low polygon nature of the model can be detected around the edges but in motion, at night, running after a player who's just run out of ammo, and making horrific noises will certainly fit the bill in any horror game!

Here is the same shader with the existing character model. You can see we have improved the little details such as the folds in the pants, veins in the hand and ripples in the sleeves, plus you might spot the self-shadowing effect which now uses a PCF technique employing 25 texture look-ups per pixel at the closer ranges, so hopefully this increases the visual fidelity for those hero-shot screen grabs.

While internal testing commences in earnest over the weekend I will be spending some time away from the keyboard digging holes in the garden and getting some fresh air in my lungs.  On Monday, fully recharged, we run the final mile to get this version into shape for a public reveal.  I might however spend a few hours here and there playing with the soldier script to see if I can make him more aggressive and menacing. I have permission from Dave to screw up his carefully balanced character logic ;)

Weirdo Lee Does Like Kettles

It's been a day of testing our internal build and it has gone well. We found three show stoppers, all fixed and the latest build (BUILD D) is almost ready for our internal alpha testers.  It creates, loads, saves, plays and edits fine and although I am sure there are still gremlins in there, it's solid and worthy of a wider field test.

Speaking of fields, here is my field of organic Kettles. Don't ask me why I created it, and why I shared it. I just wanted to make lots of kettles.

I've currently been struggling with the issue of why one of the models we are working on for the new Zombie Pack is exhibiting strange tangent and bi-normal vectors. After much ado, it is not the normal map or the base geometry which leaves the generated TN and BN vectors.  Going to go back to school now and learn all about them, and the various methods used to generate from a model that did not start with them, and how an arbitrary normal map can take advantage of them to create gorgeous art!  

One day I will succeed in creating the ultimate Kettle entity, employing state of the art shaders and textures, and most importantly, able to brew a nice cuppa.  Along the way we might augment it a little to make it roll about the landscape shooting steam at passers by.  When we say you can create anything your imagination can conceive, we mean it literally!

For more information on this insane project, visit Reloaded at: www.fpscreator.com as it occurs to me in all these blogs I don't mention the site at all ;)

Power Play & Zombie Heros

For me it's been a day of two halves, with half of it without power.  The good news is that I now have a switch box next to the consumer unit which when activated will draw power from an outside diesel generator when the main grid decides I've had too much juice. Every day not coding is a crime in of itself, and with such power technology available it made sense that I was prepared for those days.  I have now rescued about 10 days from each year where I can carry on coding regardless.

While I was battling with a toggling power supply, the team set to work making the A.I smarter, faster and more enjoyable.  It was not clear what value getting Simon to create a sample level for the product would yield as we had great content coming from the community and we would have got around to making a small game before too long. What happened however is that for the first time we started looking at the engine as game designers rather than game technology developers.  We played our own level and started to ask some very hard questions about what we had created.  The first internal video review was nothing short of obscene, and as we continued to craft the essence of the game play we noticed a big reduction in rude words and a glimmer of sunshine break through when the enemy character did something unexpected and cool.  I think we all agree we need more sunshine in our AI and sample level, called 'two compound', but we're close to an internal alpha testers release so we can get some early feedback from further afield.  It goes out with some qualifiers, but we will be working on those while the testing takes place.

In other camps, the store and art continues to trickle in. We are maintaining our focus on quality rather than quantity, but once all the systems are in place and tested the trickle of store uploads should in time turn into a flood.  Here is a sneak peek of Mr Boss Zombie which I grabbed last night when I had a serious bout of 'let's improve the shader quality of characters'.

It turned out all characters on HIGHEST shaders where entirely being self-shadowed so always appeared dull. The V1.007 build only self-shadows the parts of the character that fall in shadow, which makes the details pop a lot more and you can now appreciate the normal mapping contribution.

Right now I am playing catch up to recover the few hours I lost this afternoon, which mostly involves answering the email back log that can pile up even in just a few hours, and also to test the build I have uploaded for the internal team and make sure nothing nasty creeped in at the last minute.  This part is pretty critical however as any changes I made need to be skillfully done as not to mess up all that has been tested so far.  Time for some more tea, and then onto my email and testing mountain.

Hop on board—and go almost anywhere—with public transit on Google Maps

More than 70 percent of the world’s population doesn’t own a car¹—a surprising fact for anyone who’s sat for what seems like hours on end in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Millions of people rely on public transit to get around. That’s why, since 2007, we’ve worked to include public transit routes and schedules in Google Maps. In fact, buses, trains, trams and subways included in Google Maps travel 200 million kilometers every day—that’s the equivalent of driving every single road in the world three times!²

Today, Google Maps is helping you get around on public transit even more easily with these additions:

• We’ve added every single transit route in Great Britain to Google Maps—making it easier to get anywhere from Land’s End to John O’Groats.
• On the other side of the globe, Vancouverites looking for sun can now get real-time updates on whether a bus to Kits is faster than one to Third Beach.
• In Chicago, Cubs fans can now zip to and from Wrigley Field, armed with the real-time information they need to hop on a bus and avoid congestion on Lake Shore Drive.
• And finally, just in time for the games, we’ve recently added transit information for every host city in Brazil. Can you say “GOOOAAALLLLL?!”

Our transit data spans six continents, 64 countries and more than 15,000 towns and cities worldwide. And we’re not done yet: Google Maps will continue to improve—serving people the information they need to get around town when and where they need it.

Posted by David Tattersall, Product Manager, Public Transit

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1 This estimate is based on the most recent World Bank data on the number of passenger cars per 1,000 people throughout 100 countries and territories. Passenger cars refer to road motor vehicles, other than two-wheelers, intended for the carriage of passengers and designed to seat no more than nine people (including the driver).
2 CIA World Factbook

Daily Blog Or Blog Videos

One point we discussed at the meeting was the provision for more videos, and specifically for brief videos from my covering some essential aspect of the Reloaded engine in 1-2 minutes only. It could be how to best use occlusion, or how to increase performance on mid-range hardware.  It occurs that you might like to see more videos, and so I am putting it to my readership that you might want to see videos instead of boring blog text, so would you trade daily blogs for the release of blog videos a few times week?  Videos take much longer to prepare, record, edit and finally post, so I need to ensure this obligation consumes no more time than the current status quo.  Feedback welcome!

In Reloaded news, I can report that I have seen some very cool graphics coming in the weeks and months.  Probably secret right now so no posts here, but expect to see previews of them soon through the forum, news bulletins and newsletter.

Also been making more tweaks and fixes to ensure the A.I is good to play, and I have a feeling we will sit on this version until we get it right. It's already looking good, but we still want it better. Going to make another internal build in the next hour and then we will see how much we still need to do before we can start thinking about a release version.

Speak and learn with Spell Up, our latest Chrome Experiment

As a student growing up in France, I was always looking for ways to improve my English, often with a heavy French-to-English dictionary in tow. Since then, technology has opened up a world of new educational opportunities, from simple searches to Google Translate (and our backpacks have gotten a lot lighter). But it can be hard to find time and the means to practice a new language. So when the Web Speech API made it possible to speak to our phones, tablets and computers, I got curious about whether this technology could help people learn a language more easily.

That’s the idea behind Spell Up, a new word game and Chrome Experiment that helps you improve your English using your voice—and a modern browser, of course. It’s like a virtual spelling bee, with a twist.

We worked with game designers and teachers to make Spell Up both fun and educational. The goal of the game is to correctly spell the words you hear and stack them to build the highest word tower you can—letter by letter, word by word. The higher the tower gets, the more difficult the word challenges: You’ll be asked to pronounce words correctly, solve word jumbles and guess mystery words. You can earn bonuses and coins to level up faster.

Spell Up works best in Chrome on your computer and on Android phones and tablets. (It also works on iPhones and iPads, but you’ll need to type rather than talk.) Whether you’re just learning English or you’re already a pro, check it out! And if you’re a teacher, we encourage you to try it out in your classroom.

Posted by Xavier Barrade, Creative Lead and Polyglot, Creative Lab London