“The Interview” now available on Google Play and YouTube Movies

Last Wednesday Sony began contacting a number of companies, including Google, to ask if we’d be able to make their movie, "The Interview," available online. We'd had a similar thought and were eager to help—though given everything that’s happened, the security implications were very much at the front of our minds.

Of course it was tempting to hope that something else would happen to ensure this movie saw the light of day. But after discussing all the issues, Sony and Google agreed that we could not sit on the sidelines and allow a handful of people to determine the limits of free speech in another country (however silly the content might be).

So starting at 10 a.m. PST in the U.S., you can rent or buy "The Interview" on Google Play and YouTube Movies. It will also be available to Xbox Video customers and via www.seetheinterview.com.

Update 3:44p.m. PST: "The Interview" is now also available in Canada.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Ho Ho Ho! Track Santa around the world with Google’s Santa Tracker

After 23 days of preparation, the elves are finally ready for Santa’s annual journey around the globe. They’ve taught each other how to say "Santa Claus" in Swedish, guided their friends through mazes with code, brushed up on their geography, and learned about organizations making a difference worldwide. It’s been a busy month, but Santa’s sleigh is now ready for lift-off!

The elves brushed up on coding fundamentals with blockly maze games

The elves decorated their trees with ornaments about organizations making a difference

Each stop on Santa’s journey offers more to explore—discover 360-degree imagery, Wikipedia snippets, geography facts, and updates on how far Santa’s current location is from yours (take note—Santa’s path is not a direct one!). Come back and visit google.com/santatracker throughout the night for more surprises, like sleigh selfies or a latitude and longitude game to deliver presents.

Follow Santa on any screen—desktop, phone, tablet, or TV

If you’re on the ho-ho-go, download the Santa Tracker App for Android to keep track of Santa on your phone or tablet. With the Android app, watch Santa’s journey on your TV using Chromecast, or on your wrist with Android Wear (especially handy when wrapping last-minute gifts). And, you can always search for Santa on www.google.com or on Google Maps, and get real-time location updates with Google Now in the Google App.

Santa’s available at the flick of the wrist with Android Wear

Santa’s got a long and exciting night ahead of him before heading back to the North Pole. Grab some eggnog, set out the cookies, and join Google Maps on Google+, Facebook and Twitter to #tracksanta!

Posted by Brendan Kenny, Reindeer Platform Engineer

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM FPS CREATOR RELOADED

Just got this from our irrepressible artist Adam.  It would have been criminal not to share.  I particularly like the Christmas lights wrapped around the rocket launcher, reminding us all that a self-propelled cylinder of death is not just for Christmas, but for life.

And those small red tubes attached to Mr Bad Guy Number Three are not shotgun shells but party poppers - right kids!

ANNOUNCEMENT: V1.009 RELEASED - YAY!

It was an 11th hour release, but we made it (just). For all FPS Creator Reloaded pledgers, V1.009 is now available for download and contains a huge truck of features to keep you busy during the festive holiday.

Here is the forum link to the announcement: http://fpscrforum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=210304&b=1

The change log listing all the improvements: http://fpscreator.thegamecreators.com/changelog1_009.php

If you have any issues, use this thread as it's the one I will be haunting for a few days before Christmas Eve: http://fpscrforum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=210304&b=1

As long as your levels do not contain five hundred trees or five hundred characters, you should get a good stable and performing experience. Some store items and custom media will certainly misbehave, but we are going through them now making corrections as we go.

The plan in 2015 will be to polish this version, remove any rough edges and refine the look and feel.

My thanks to all the internal alpha testers, artists, coders and helpers who made V1.009 possible, and after my brief festive break, I plan to return with a fresh brain and fully charged batteries.

Until then, enjoy your mince pies and mulled wine, and I look forward to bringing you more code in 2015!

Let's celebrate the season of giving

It's the season of giving, and there are a lot of ways to give—by donating, by volunteering, by surprising a stranger with a random act of kindness. And we're joining in to help spread the holiday cheer. This month, Google.org is giving more than $15 million in grants to organizations using technology to address some of the world’s biggest problems. From San Francisco to Western Africa, these organizations are making a direct impact on people around the world, every day.

One of our grants will go to Feeding America. Each year, billions of pounds of surplus food are sent to landfills, while 49 million Americans (including one in five children) go hungry. Our grant will help support their newest food rescue initiative called the Online Marketplace, a program that connects local retail and foodservice businesses who have excess food to those in need. Feeding America serves 3.3 billion meals annually and the Online Marketplace is projected to lead to the recovery of an additional 740 million meals, significantly reducing food waste while giving more families access to food.

Two of our other grantees are working on the front lines to help ensure lives aren't lost to preventable diseases. Nexleaf Analytics works to get life-saving vaccines to children in India and Mozambique by preserving these vaccines before they spoil by installing low-cost refrigerator sensors in clinics. Malaria No More is fighting to save lives by better understanding the spread of malaria using newly available mobile data to map malaria cases and how they are being treated.

To learn more about additional nonprofits we’re supporting through these grants, and to see how you can get involved with their efforts, visit g.co/happyholidays and see our slideshow below:

These are only part of our annual philanthropic efforts. Over the course of the year, we strive to make the world a little bit better through our technology and giving programs, including more than $100 million in grants, $1 billion in technology resources, and 80,000+ volunteer hours donated to causes around the world.

We're inspired by all the people out there who are working to make a difference—whether it's one of these organizations or simply one person doing a good deed for another. We're glad to do our part spreading some love this holiday season, and look forward to seeing more world-changing work in 2015.

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Director, Google.org

Internet Goes Boom - My Final Proper Blog Of 2014

Sods law that on the day I am probably uploading the final V1.009 for testing, my entire Internet goes down. It started at 2AM this morning and has just come back now at 1:10PM. I am taking the opportunity to start the uploading to the internal team and writing my blog before it switches off again.

As this is the last day of 2014 as far as the TGC business is concerned, but not the last day for me as I oversee the release of V1.009. Nonetheless I thought it a good idea to give you some extra screenshots as an early Christmas present.

I think we all agree cactus do not grow that big, and a blight of a bug which would scale entities to incredible heights has now been fixed, all be it with the introduction of a flag which select artists will need to add to their FPE files. The reason is that if I created an automatic system to correct the scaling, other items in the store would be affected, and default stock media too.  I am happy to put this down to the early growing pains of the store and hopefully the pipeline for recommended geometry will be established as we move forward.

Whilst charging through a LOT of tasks and completing them, one of the fixes was to allow static trees to be correctly culled and lightmapped. The shot above shows a spray of random trees, and the shadows are baked for speed. Also the trunks and the leaves are consolidated to reduce draw calls which further improves performance.

Finally found the Light Ray Bug on my priority list, and fixed it in short order. You can now use this cool slider again, and it will now account for both real time and pre-baked geometry as part of the effect.  I am sure we could have a few more sliders to control the properties of this visual, but for now we will keep it simple until more urgent matters have been settled.

Keep your eye out on the forums for news of the V1.009 release to all FPS Creator Reloaded pledgers.  We are now testing it thoroughly to ensure a stable build and hopefully we can delivery a small downloadable present that will give you some joy over the Christmas holiday.  I wish you all a very happy time over the next two weeks, keep on creating and if there are no more blogs from me this year I will wish you the very best for the year ahead.  Roll on 2015!

A Full Day Of Testing And Tweaks

Short on blog, long on fixes. Anticipating a release REAL soon so spending each minute on mission. Here is a shot of the level I constructed as I tested one of everything with the current build.

As you can see, having a fun time with extreme sliders while I test the very corners of this version.

And here is something a little more playable, using a fence as a staircase by rotating it a little.  The extreme colouring are dynamic lights in MEDIUM shader. More tests and a build to do still, so onwards and upwards!

The Day After the Eight Hours Before

Had planned to clock off at a normal time yesterday, but wanted to get the 'floating character' issue before the build. This was around 7PM. Eight hours later, just after 3AM I had finally located and fixed the floating character issue. It was all due to one entity writing into another entity silently and causing all manner of confusing things.  One of these days I am going to invent something that makes all these different debugging scenarios obsolete. My revenge on every bug I've fixed over the last three decades.

Just going through the motions of fixing critical issues and testing the software to ensure it's not messed up. The V1.009 release is fast approaching and we need something solid. Also applying full ambient occlusion baking to GTTR and ESCAPE levels to get the best visuals for the new build for this evening.

I have my weekly game of Pool this evening so no late night coding stint, but it's perhaps just as well given the last two nights!  This should pave the way for a full day of testing on Thursday to make sure every corner of the software has been verified as release proof.  I will freely admit the version will not handle VERY LARGE levels, and the solution will be some clever managing of in-memory assets but that's a post-V1.009 problem. Right now it's making sure the 'stock, store and some select custom media' plays nicely with the software.

Meeting Day Today & New Civie

It was meeting day today so lots of talking and almost no coding, but as it was more a half-day meeting I did find time to collect together enough materials to delegate the Zombie Pack work and further my search for erroneous Reloaded crashes and freezes.

I also received this in the email today, which is our new civilian character standing alongside his lethal brethren.  I will be dabbling in character rig work over Christmas in preparation for more characters so it's nice to have got another character in the melting pot before the holidays begin.

It's just coming up to 7PM now and I have a few things I would like to get done, but the doggy needs a walkie (and so do I), so time to eat, walk and be merry then return in the evening for more coding calisthenics and perhaps a new build for all and sundry within the internal alpha testing camp.

A Year in Search: the moments that defined 2014

Every year, we reflect on the moments that made us laugh, smile from ear to ear, or stay gripped to our screens in our annual Year in Search. In 2014, we were struck by the death of a beloved comedian, and watched news unfold about a horrific plane crash and a terrifying disease. We were captivated by the beautiful game, and had fun with birds, a bucket of ice, and a frozen princess.

Watch our video to rediscover the events, people and topics that defined 2014:

Wishing the genie goodbye
“You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.” The passing of beloved comedian and actor Robin Williams shook the world, bringing many people online to search for more information and to remember—and putting Williams in the #1 spot on our global trends charts. There was even an uptick in searches related to depression tests and mental health in the days following his death. We revisited his iconic roles in movies like Aladdin and Dead Poets Society and found solace in gifs and memes that captured Williams’ spirit.

All the world’s a stage
Nothing brings people together like sports, and 2014 had one of the biggest athletic events in recent memory. The World Cup in Brazil had its fair share of unforgettable moments and had everyone glued to their TVs and mobile devices all summer. From Luis Suarez’s bite heard around the world, to Tim Howard's superman performance vs. Belgium, to Germany’s incredible run to their fourth title, the competition certainly lived up to its reputation and topped the charts.

While sports brought people together, so did a good cause. This year, awareness for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, reached an all-time high around the world due to the viral ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. As celebrities and everyday people alike braved a bucket of ice cold water for a cause, donations to help find a cure for the illness hit almost $100 million.

Into the unknown
How could a plane just vanish into thin air? In the wake of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, that question propelled the mystery to the global trends charts. As the investigation continued on the ground and online, people stayed hopeful for a happy ending despite the dim odds: searches for “mh370 found” outnumbered searches for “mh370 lost.”

Here’s the full list of our top 10 global trending searches:

You can find more on these top searches and more at google.com/2014

Explore the stories from the year, one chapter at a time
On our Year in Search site, you can take an in-depth look at the stories that made 2014 unforgettable. From the rise of the selfie, to understanding if we search for “how” more than “why,” each chapter shares a glimpse into the people and events that drove this year forward.

We've also made it easier to find the trending topics of the year directly from Google Search. For the first time, a simple search for [google 2014] will give you a peek at what made the top trending lists from around the world. And you can follow more insights from the year with #YearInSearch. So take a moment to appreciate what this year had to offer. It’ll be 2015 before you know it.

Posted by +Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President, Search

Lightmapper Gets Stronger

Creating a robust lightmapper which can handle large worlds is no easy task, and I can report that the bulk of this work is now done. What remains are hundreds of little bits and pieces that either need to be discarded or added to the whole in their correct place. My own tests are good and I can give it pretty much any level and it rarely gets above 600MB of system memory usage for typical levels the size of the Concrete Jungle. Today I have been mainly contending with a crash report that happens on one machine right at the end, after a successful LM process. A very illusive bug that can only be reproduced on one machine so it's a case of sending version after version until the cause is known.

Half way through the day I received this holiday screen shot, which cheered me up and spurred me on.  Notice the lightmapping, a nice touch ;)

Going to walk the dog and then return to make another build. I have already made one for the internal testers, but will continue bouncing versions to find this mystery crash and of course do a few more tasks that I can do before my early night. Big (and final) meeting day on Tuesday but hopefully we will be cutting it to half a day which free up the second half for more testing and coding.  Getting there :)

So Much For Far Cry

I had planned to spend my day chopping up a tree on the beach with a chainsaw, setting up a Mini-Mac with the new AGK 2 Player Service and playing a few solid hours of Far Cry (for research you understand).  My day did not really go to plan. The tree had been washed back into the sea from the previous nights wind and wave storm and my Far Cry evening turned into 'fixing the lightmapper some more' evening. I did however configure the Mini-Mac as required, so we should hopefully be able to offer the AGK Player to all AGK2 users who have an iOS device but don't have a Mac. More news on this from the regular AGK channels as I get told off when I talk about non-Reloaded stuff on a Reloaded blog :)

Could not help playing with static lights again too, so here is a shot I made using a green and red light, plus a white light in front of the building and some subtle sun based lighting.  I think the visual sliders are pretty close to offering a variety of lighting conditions now which should be good for a first release.  Truly running out of ideas for new visual values to add to the ever increasing bag of sliders. As a coder who prefers one good button over a page of them, I am now looking at the slider panel as a possible target for optimization and new layout paradigm (but not for now).

My lightmapping work this Saturday has been focused on a new technique I coded late on Friday which segments the whole world into grids, and lightmaps each section in turn. This way the overall load on the system memory remains low and the more sub-processes keep the progress bar busy and informative. Today was about tightening the scope of work for these sub-passes and ensuring no object was touched that was not absolutely needed. The result is pretty good and even the ESCAPE level does not exceed the 750MB system memory target I had in mind.  The true goal was to make it possible to lightmap LARGE levels such as confined spaces with lots of trees and geometry, covering the entire world, and I have yet to perform these tests as it's now gone 1AM (and it is my weekend off after all).  I can confirm the GTTR and ESCAPE levels lightmap without incident and I have also added a new lightmapping mode which skips the use of transparent textures during the collision object process which means F1 is now an even faster way to lightmap the scene before a more detailed process when you want to see the gaps in fences and holes in nets, e.t.c.

Anyhoo, back to my midnight session. I think a nice plate of beans and an episode of Time Team is in order.  Too late to drink or play games, but I think I can relax into the process of digging up bits of Britain's ancient secrets :)

Through the Google lens: search trends December 6-11

From The Colbert Report to astronomer Annie Jump Cannon, here's a look at this week's search stars.

The presidency is just my day job
Being the President of the United State is no easy task, but Barack Obama may have just faced his toughest test yet...a seat on The Colbert Report. This is the Commander-in-Chief’s third time on the show, but it’s still no cakewalk with every topic up for grabs—including Obama’s less than ideal approval ratings and his graying hair. Obama proved himself up for the challenge, though, kicking Colbert off his segment and making it his own.

Not only does Obama moonlight as a comedian—it turns out he can also code. At a White House event with 30 middle school students, the President kicked off Hour of Code, a program that encourages young people to develop their computer and software programming skills. With a little help from one of the kids, Obama wrote a single line of JavaScript, “moveForward(100),” to move the tutorial’s character 100 pixels to the right, and in the process becoming the first U.S. president to write a computer program.

Winners and losers
Competition on The Voice is heating up; the three finalists were revealed this week. But there’s a twist in the show’s seventh season: to spice things up, its creators introduced a new wildcard spot, bringing the total number of potential finalists to four. Now the nine remaining contestants who didn’t make it to the top three will duke it out for that fourth spot and a shot at singing glory.

While The Voice contestants still have a chance to take home the grand prize, other stars were left out in the cold this week when the Golden Globe nominations included several snubs. Names left off the selection sheet were Angelina Jolie and her upcoming film Unbroken, Christopher Nolan and his much-hyped Interstellar, and Bradley Cooper, who gained 40 pounds to portray Chris Kyle in the biopic film American Sniper. Oh well—there's still the Oscars. Meanwhile, movies Birdman and Boyhood snapped up seven and five nominations, respectively—and the TV category is staying interesting with nods for several Netflix original series, Amazon’s first appearance with Transparent, and two surprise nominations for the CW’s quirky Jane the Virgin.

The sky above
This week, searchers spent a good chunk of their time looking up. The weather was top of mind as the Pineapple Express—no, not the film—hit the San Francisco Bay Area, causing flooding and power outages. The phenomenon gets its name from its origins in the waters near Hawaii, a.k.a. the Pineapple State, where it develops before heading towards the U.S Pacific Coast.

Even for those of us trapped indoors, searchers got a chance to look at the stars...on our homepage at least. Searchers looked for more information about astronomer Annie Jump Cannon after a Google doodle marked her 151st birthday. Cannon—who was deaf for most of her adult life, and often overshadowed by her colleague Edward C. Pickering—was instrumental in the development of the Harvard Classification system, which categorizes stars by their temperature (whether or not they were nominated for a Golden Globe).

Tip of the week
Need to find something in the apps on your Android phone? Now you can ask your Google app for help—even if it’s in another app. Just say “Ok Google” and then “search YouTube for holiday decorating ideas” or “search Tumblr for Taylor Swift” and jump straight to those results within the other app (if you have it installed).

And come back next week for Google's Year in Search—a review of the people, moments, and events that captured the world's attention.

Posted by Jenise Araujo, Communications Associate, who searched for [comedian-in-chief] and [team adam].

A Good But Long Day

By working on the new Concrete Jungle level, I have had to fortune to see what larger levels need to deal with in terms of system memory requirements and overall game speed. Considering where my aging PC system was six months ago, being able to run the level shown below at over 60 fps was nice to see.

As you can see, the lightmapping now extends to all the geometry, and the nice fog intensity provides a good atmospheric effect for what might be a sand swept landscape.  I am happy to imagine the performance gains once I finalize the occluder optimizations, re-introduce the distant quad system and wrangle more magic from the draw order scenario.  For right now my mission is stability which means chasing down any hard crashes.

The one I am tackling right now is the 3.3GB the terrain lightmapper alone can consume, but I am happy to report other gremlins have been fixed including the z flicker and the dreaded real-time vs pre-bake shadow disappearing act. Planning to continue working into the night now, and perhaps stop at midnight to make an internal build for the weekend.  Might also play an hour on Far Cry to conquer some more outposts for fun and profit.  It's likely I will spend some time over the weekend testing the build for stability analysis, but providing I can keep the system memory usage from going nuts, I think we will be good to go.

Lightmapping The New Level

Spent the day testing a new third party level, typical of the kind of games you will be able to make with Reloaded, in order to monitor and trace system memory usage.  Here is a shot taken from across a deep valley, and some nice lightmapped castle wall features. It's not in the game, but you can use F9 to fly over to the castle wall structure and run along the walkways at the top of the walls and into the tower rooms, very cool!

Been a pretty slow day today, with more analysis than actual fixes, but hopefully I can chalk a few off the list before I retire for the evening.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I quite like the idea of letting the above shot speak for my blog post today.  Much nicer than me whittering on!

Android dress code: wear what you want

Deciding what to wear is a really personal thing—it’s one of the ways you show people what you’re about. Wearable technology is no different, so Android Wear offers a wide selection of apps and watches to suit your taste. It’s about expressing who you are, however you want, right on your wrist.

Today there’s even more ways to show your style with Android Wear, including dozens of new watch faces (powered by an official Watch Face API), a full collection of devices on Google Play, and lots of other improvements based on your feedback. So try ‘em on for size, and let us know what you think.

Watch faces for whatever you’re into
Starting today you can download watch faces from Google Play, just like you do with apps. We’ve got dozens of examples to get you started—from the unpredictable Minions in Despicable Me to the X-Ray artistry of Hugh Turvey. And because the new Watch Face API is available to all developers, you can expect even more choices in the weeks and months ahead.

We’ve also updated the Android Wear app on your phone to make browsing, downloading, and switching watch faces really easy. So pick the one you like the best, or pick a new one every day.

(Both updates are rolling out over the next week, so don’t worry if you don’t see them yet.)

Examples of Android Wear watch faces

A family of watches to choose from
In only a few short months, the Android Wear collection has grown to include six unique watches—the ASUS ZenWatch, the LG G Watch, the LG G Watch R, the Moto 360, the Samsung Gear Live, and the Sony SmartWatch 3. Some are circular, others are square. Some are traditional, others are sporty. And that’s exactly the point. With different shapes and styles, it’s really easy to make your watch your own.

So by all means: wear what you want.

Posted by David Singleton, Director of Engineering, Android Wear

A New Character

While I beaver away battling the Goliath's of lightmapping and system memory management, our artist has been hard at work producing a new character for the engine. I can finally reveal him with his texture suit on, and once we've finalized the skinning we will soon be able to see him running around in the game.

He's also possessed of all the animations needed for each weapon type, and also sports a detachable head for the customizable character work to be done in 2015.  Unlike the solider, we feel this character will allow more customizable options as a generic civilian can be modified a lot with textures, where as the soldier had a lot of bolt-on geometry that would have hindered a custom paint job. More news on this in 2015, but for the immediate use we will be testing him out as a single combined character with a few default weapon poses, and perhaps trialing him out in the multiplayer tests too.

Quite a lot of lightmapping and system memory work to do, and precious little time to do it in, so will get cracking and hopefully have a new build for the eager internal alpha testers for Thursday AM.

#YouTubeRewind 2014: Celebrating what you created, watched and shared

2014 was chock full of YouTube moments that vaulted into pop culture. We got pranked by a spider dog in Poland, learned what it’s like to walk the street for 10 hours as a woman in NYC, and watched total strangers share a first kiss. We laughed, we cried, and yes, we sang along to “Let It Go” roughly a bajillion times.

In celebration of the people, memes and moments that made up an epic year, more than 100 YouTube creators gathered together for our annual Rewind video: a giant, global mashup looking back at the best of 2014 on YouTube. With creators from Japan, Germany, Israel, Mexico, France and beyond, it’s the biggest and most international Rewind video yet.

And here are the top trending videos for 2014, based on views, shares, comments, likes and more. This year, the list represents the amazing variety of creativity brought to YouTube each day, which can include social commentaries, pranks, advertisements, and thrilling moments from traditional media and big names on YouTube. Collectively these 10 videos have hundreds of millions of views from creators, with more than 21 million cumulative subscribers.

1. Mutant Giant Spider Dog (SA Wardega) by SA Wardega
2. Nike Football: Winner Stays. ft. Ronaldo, Neymar Jr., Rooney, Ibrahimović, Iniesta & more by Nike Football
3. FIRST KISS by Tatia PIlieva
4. The Voice IT | Serie 2 | Blind 2 | Suor Cristina Scuccia - #TEAMJ-AX by TheVoiceOf Italy
5. iPhone 6 Plus Bend Test by Unbox Therapy
6. Bars & Melody - Simon Cowell's Golden Buzzer act | Britain's Got Talent 2014 by Britain's Got Talent
7. Budweiser Super Bowl XLVIII Commercial -- "Puppy Love" by Budweiser
8. Devil Baby Attack by DevilsDueNYC
9. Goku vs Superman. Epic Rap Battles of History Season 3. by ERB
10. 10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman by Street HarassmentVideo

When it comes to music, it was a year of powerful female artists, as you can see from our list of top music videos: Women artists took eight of the top 10 spots (Shakira took two!). 2014's top 10 music videos were collectively played billions of times from channels with 55+ million subscribers.

1. Katy Perry - Dark Horse (Official) ft. Juicy J
2. Enrique Iglesias - Bailando (Español) ft. Descemer Bueno, Gente De Zona
3. Shakira - Can't Remember to Forget You ft. Rihanna
4. Shakira - La La La (Brazil 2014) ft. Carlinhos Brown
5. Jason Derulo - "Wiggle" feat. Snoop Dogg (Official HD Music Video)
6. Iggy Azalea - Fancy (Explicit) ft. Charli XCX
7. Sia - Chandelier (Official Video)
8. Taylor Swift - Shake It Off
9. Meghan Trainor - All About That Bass
10. Nicki Minaj - Anaconda
...and check out even more top music videos.

Check out our YouTube Rewind channel for more top videos of the year from around the world, and our YouTube Brand channel to see a mashup of the top branded videos of the year and a list of the top ads on YouTube for the year. You can also visit google.com/2014 next week for Google's annual look at the people, places and events that captured the world's attention.

Posted by Kevin Allocca, Head of Culture & Trends

Lightmapping Leaves The Building

On the advice of a member of the internal team, I decided to move the lightmapper to a separate external application in order to allow larger levels to be lightmapped and avoid any system memory shortfall or fragmentation for long game making sessions.

The result is a much more stable experience all round, and I am just going through the motions of testing to make sure nothing has broken. Also plan to have a new internal build for the testers this evening so I can double check the new way of lightmapping a scene works for all.

Also started to get some art from the new textured civilian character which is looking pretty sharp, and I hope to get an export soon to test the animations (which are fused with the ability to use ALL the weapon styles).  I have also identified some other system memory pockets that might allow some more savings, and getting the ESCAPE level to use less than 800MB of system memory would be a great place to be.

Hopefully I can bring better screenshots on Wednesday as it should be more a day of testing large levels than the grunt of adding and refining code.  My emphasis will be on stability, not losing my performance gains, having pre-bake and real time shadows for all scenarios and ensuring static and dynamic lights work across the board also. I think these are the principal priorities for V1.009 (amongst the other few hundred features that have been added since V1.008) :)

Four Hundred And Eleven MegaBytes

This week is primarily focused on stability in anticipation of a V1.009 release, and I have returned to more system memory optimizations to ensure the engine does not crash due to insufficient wiggle room.  It took most of the day of painstaking investigation, but I managed to save over 411MB of system memory from squander, which is now available to the rest of the engine for more antics, including lightmapping and larger levels.

I was helped in my quest by a tool called VMMap which does a splendid job of illustrating where ALL the system memory is being spent.  Even things you have no control over are displayed, and from this information I was able to make some good savings.

Once such site of squander was the inclusion of an old DBP DLL called ConvMDL which was once used to load MDL files (from the old Quake days).  This innocuous DLL was eating 125MB of static memory until I excluded it from all further action in this project, along with support for 3DS, MD2 and MD3 :) Other savings (and performance boosts) were found in in the terrain visual and collision systems which together gobbled over 600MB (now more like 300MB). I dare say more savings can be found but right now it's about overall stability, and if the engine can now run on 32 bit machines without having to reset every five minutes then I will be a happy chappy.

I have noticed my 'super terrain texture' generator eating 80MB of system memory which in fact it's job is to produce a GPU video memory texture, so that's something to investigate tomorrow me thinks.  Hopefully as more system memory is rescued, the engine will gain more stability and longer term will allow MUCH larger levels to be created without worrying about the dreaded red screen of death.

It's not all plane sailing though, in making my massive cut backs, my pre-baked terrain shadows have gone walkabout so Tuesday will involve a hunt for these pesky shadows and to put them back!

Through the Google lens: search trends November 28-December 5

The end of the year is almost upon us, but just like the rest of your life, search isn’t slowing down. Here’s a look at what was trending this week on Google:

Signs of the season
Now that the turkey’s been carved, and even the leftovers have been gobbled (pun intended) up in the form of sandwiches and soup, the holiday season is officially underway. People shopped Cyber Monday sales, and others were excited to learn that USPS would be delivering packages seven days a week in some cities.

Plus, holiday movies and songs are trending as people get into the spirit. And even if you didn’t watch Love Actually (for the 14th time) this week, chances are you heard a peep of Mariah Carey’s now-classic “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” which the singer performed live at Rockefeller Center’s tree lighting ceremony on Wednesday. Unfortunately, Mimi missed a few notes, leading searches for her to spike as a result.

Citizens speak out
On Wednesday, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict the police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner, who died in July after being placed in a choke hold. Across the country, people spoke out and demonstrated against the decision, which came just days after nationwide riots and protests about what happened in Ferguson, Mo.

Digital dough
Good news for Thin Mint fans: you no longer have to wait with bated breath for the day your co-worker shows up with an order form, or for that card table stacked with colorful boxes to show up outside your grocery store. Girl Scout Cookies have gone digital. Scouts will have personal cookie webpages where people can place orders online; the idea is that girls will learn more about online marketing and e-commerce while satisfying the sweet teeth of the rest of us. It brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “Internet cookies.”

Astronomical views
If you weren’t at the mall last weekend, then chances are you were on YouTube, watching the new trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The first teaser for the J.J. Abrams-helmed “Episode 7” has racked up tens of millions of views since it came out a week ago and people are saying it could become the most viewed trailer ever. Fans have intensely scrutinized and discussed each one of the trailer’s 88 seconds in detail; and there are already spoofs and recreations galore, including Wes Anderson and LEGO versions. The movie won’t be out until December 2015, so you have plenty of time to build your crossguard lightsaber for the premiere.

But even after two years, there’s no video in the YouTube galaxy that’s quite like “Gangnam Style.” It’s the first video to ever get more than 2 billion views, and this week, its view count crossed 2,147,483,647. That happens to be the highest number that can be represented by a 32-bit integer, and also—until recently—the highest number that the YouTube view counter could display. Luckily, our friends at YouTube saw this one coming: They upgraded the view counter to use a 64-bit integer, capable of representing numbers up to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. Yup, that’s 9 quintillion. Consider this gauntlet thrown.

Tip of the week
Between holiday parties, gift shopping and the end-of-year scramble at work, it’s no wonder some errands start to slip your mind. Let Google help keep track—just say “Ok Google, remind me to pick up ribbon when I’m at Target” or “Ok Google, remind me to chill the champagne when I get home” to get a reminder.

Posted by Emily Wood, Managing Editor, who searched this week for [sweet tooth plural] and [what was the name of the monkey in aladdin]

Picture Blog Day

Been a great week and some very necessary fixes, including some performance gains and cleaner memory code.  I promised screenshots today so here they are:

 Above is the old V1.007 screenshot from the ESCAPE level

 Here is the new V1.009 screenshot tweaked with lower values to match above lighting

Don't worry about the FPS, I am using the HIGHEST terrain shader as the older one used normal maps for MEDIUM but the latest build does not.  As you can see, the HUD weapon is more defined, we now have shadows, the bloom is not as intense and it's a little more colorful.

Here you can see a level we are working on to test a larger world with more action, to ensure that our drive for performance never ends and we maintain a course which allows many types of FPS game to be created.  Still more polish in the game play and smaller items, but the level is definitely taking shape nicely!

Currently spent most of the day getting the F9 live terrain editing to work again, as consolidating the terrain physics geometry had the nasty side effect that I could not quickly swap in a new piece of terrain floor, I had to build the whole combination meshes again.  Currently battling with retaining my performance gain with ensuring F9 functionality remains in tact.  This evening I plan to make a build but I have a few issues to resolve before then including the restoration of shadows from trees and other transparent entities, and once the build is done I plan to spent my Friday night with some fun multi-core physics experiments. The single core system current takes about 11% of the overall game spend, which is not too bad I think, and there is always an overhead from adding n-core solutions, but really there is only one way to know for sure, and that's to break out the code and see what works best!

I am also pleased to report that the FPSC legend Mr Blosser has kindly conceded to help with some additional art work, and the first target for us will be the building.

As you can see, he has already started with some improved specular and normal maps, now looking at texture seams and other geometry based concerns.  It will also be the entity to help trial a new OCCLUSIONMESH system which should allow the occluder to process this entire building with just a few polygons for the whole shape.

Probably need to eat at some point today, but I have my second wind now so will crack on and see if I can put on task properly to bed so I can think clearly about the very important weekend build.  Have a great weekend and thanks again for your patience - I hope my blogs are making it at least bearable (and dare I say it, educational) :)

Physics...Hmm

Got through half a day of bug fixes, then as I increased the terrain physics density to solve some related issues, I discovered the physics system taking a little longer to deal with the increased floor meshes that I suspected it should (basically 30% of the game time in a blank level with one dynamic crate).  It got me thinking that something was very wrong in there, and needed a look.

I am current at the stage of running profiles on it all, and also will be looking at activating the Bullet multi-threading stuff as well if it's easy to use, so I must apologize if my blog is a little short, I want to eat and then get right back into this physics question.  If I can find a major BOO-BOO in there, and reduce the workload to more like 2% which is all the physics system needs to do with one player capsule and one box, and THEN see about putting the whole lot on another core so when the physics work does pick-up there is no cost to the main thread and in theory increase overall FPS.

I will try to get some nice screen shots in Friday's blog so you can see what I am looking at, which is hopefully a large pile of fixed tasks and a more solid looking V1.009 for release before the Christmas break :)

Knowing No Bounds

After my five hours of failure with a $250 memory checker, I tried the $700 trial of the tool Bounds Checker became and within a few minutes had some leaks and memory mismatches highlighted in a friendly little report after running my game engine.  I guess my previous experience with the tool helped me know which buttons to press. I have since spent the day eliminating these errors that had been flagged and now the bullet physics module does not leak memory any more (apart from one thingie which I will fix after tonight's build).

I have saw a few new feedback emails coming in from my previous AM build which included amazing flying floating enemies. Something for me to look for on Thursday :)  I think I am very close now to deciding which remaining A tasks need to go into V1.009 and how much time should be spent doing my own testing for stability and reliability in the game of the stock and store media.  I am now happy with the performance and memory handling, and many of the little features we needed are now in to some degree.  I really want to spend the next two days testing and only dealing with those things that stop the train. The littler nags will have to be put on a second list for post-V1.009, this way everyone can enjoy a great experience and not get tripped up by a last minute bout of silliness in the engine.

Pool night tonight, but after some serious Guinness drinking five days ago I am still not in the mood for lots of booze, so hopefully I can return for a few hours of late night testing and tweaking.  I'll show up, beat my enemies with a stick, then leave after a friendly pint.  The best laid plans hey....?

AMD Cards Accepted

After spending a very 'long way around' day getting my dev kit set up on the new machine (which involved updating the Dark Basic Pro IDE to run on Windows 8.1 which in turn meant updating the BCG libraries to 2012), I finally was able to reproduce, find and fix the issue(s) causing problems for AMD users. 

One was a massive vertex buffer memory overrun which explains a few other issues we have been seeing, even for NVIDIA and INTEL users, plus some issues with texture locks during lightmapping and DarkAI using pointers that did not exist. I also have it in my head to spend the evening doing a full audit on the memory handling of the software. 

Back in the day I used to use something called NuMega Bounds Checker which was a little magic box that told you when memory block A stepped on memory block B's toes.  Very useful.  I priced it up earlier today and they want the princely sum of $700 - ouch!  I thus decided to hunt for something a little more in my price range and came up with one from SoftwareVerify called Memory Validator. I have downloaded the trial and will be spending a quiet evening with a glass of red wine, the trail demo of a much more reasonable $299 and the latest build to see if any more hidden memory leaks and overruns are creating havoc on systems I do not have direct access to. 

As the entire day was like this, you can imagine there are no screenshots of cool progress, but I can sneak you a shot of a new character we are developing which will allow you to have more generic people in your future levels:

We're going to drop the mohecan for now, but it might make a re-appearance when you are least expecting it. Don't worry about the shiny mat finish to the guy, he does not have a texture yet and we've decided to reduce his brain size as well ;)

Other cool screenshot that came in today, but I cannot show it, so you will just have to hold your breath for that one, but it IS good (Escape 2 anyone?).

This year the holidays are Made with Code

Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog

Carol-singing, hot chocolate, latkes and ice skating are all things that get us into the spirit of the holidays. But now there’s a new way to deck the halls: with code.

Earlier this year, we introduced a program called Made with Code to inspire millions of girls to try coding, and help them understand the creative things they can do with computer science. Starting today on madewithcode.com, girls can use the introductory programming language Blockly to animate the lights of the state and territory trees that will decorate President’s Park, one of America’s 401 national parks and home to the White House, through the holiday season.

The programmed lights will debut at the 92nd annual National Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony, which will be livestreamed by the White House on Thursday and air on PBS nationally throughout December in partnership with the National Park Foundation and National Park Service. The tradition of the tree lighting ceremony dates back to 1923 when President Calvin Coolidge lit the first fir tree outside the White House, and this is the first year kids from across the country will be in control of the state and territory holiday tree lights!

As the mom of two girls, I know that technology is a pathway for their future success. Still, even as coding becomes more important, less than 1% of high school girls say they’re interested in pursuing computer sciences in college. But I'm also an engineer, so I’ve seen firsthand how exciting CS can be. I fell in love with code early—my dad was an engineer and he encouraged me to enter a programming competition in the seventh grade. I gave it a shot, and I’ve never looked back. Ever since that day, I’ve known that when I program something, I’m creating something totally new for the world.

That’s what Made with Code is about: discovering that creating something new and exciting—whether it’s a holiday tree, a video game or a driverless car—can be accomplished with the power of code.

But it’s also about building an ecosystem of support for girls through parents and teachers, and to show girls other women who are using CS to achieve their dreams. This challenge also kicks off Google’s commitment to CSEdWeek, a week dedicated to inspiring students to get interested in computer science that’s become one of the biggest education initiatives online. Over the coming week, thousands of Googlers will join the hour of code, and announce a few other special projects that we will fund through the holiday season and coming year.

I’m heading to Washington, D.C. this week to be a part of the ceremony, and I’m looking forward to watching the designs from girls across the country lighting up the nation’s capital—and inspiring my daughters and so many others with the power of code.

Posted by Pavni Diwanji, Vice President, Engineering

Race with Rudolph and skydive with Santa in the countdown to December 24

December may mean snow days in Denver, Colo. or beach days in Sydney, Australia, but in Santa’s Village, it means the countdown to Santa’s big night. Starting today, the elves are back on the clock in the North Pole—and throughout the month of December, you can join the elves as they unlock a new project or game each day in preparation for Santa’s annual journey around the world.

The elves have a busy month ahead of them—the reindeers need training and the presents need packing. They’re studying up on Santa’s upcoming stops with candy cane cartography, holiday tradition tests, and even jolly JavaScript courses.

Throughout the holiday celebration, our own developer elves here at Google have also been hard at work getting the sleigh tracking algorithm ready for prime time. They’ve been adding finishing touches to the Santa Tracker App for Android so Santa’s just a tap away on phones, tablets, and TVs. The developer elves have been busy, so check out the chrome extension and keep a watch out for Santa surprises throughout the month.

Whether you’re wearing snow goggles or sunnies this December, come back to
www.google.com/santatracker each day to join in on present parachute practice and reindeer races, or to send a call to friends from Santa. There’s only 23 days to go, so follow Google Maps on Google+, Facebook and Twitter in the countdown to #tracksanta!

Mappy holidays!

Posted by Sandy Russell, Santa Launch Strategist

One More Week

If some of you had been waiting for the V1.009 release to happen in November, you've probably figured out by now that it's not yet available. Due to the quantity and thoroughness of the alpha testers work we've decided to sit on it a while longer to make sure it's solid before we release.  There are still some issues with lightmapping, memory, disappearing objects, little glitches, e.t.c and it is only fair you get a good experience after the long wait. My hope is to get all of these issues resolved this week, and see where we are on Friday, and see if a version we have is worthy of a public build.

The good news is that each time I work on the lightmapper it gets better, which I think you will appreciate when you start using it.  I've also fixed a few more multi-material issues so now the engine can support them a little further (as it seems artists like them).

My plan this evening is to swap in an AMD card and hopefully reproduce an issue that has been reported that MAY relate to card type, but at first glance I don't see how a card swap could affect in-game object visibility. I will know by midnight :)

At the risk of venturing off the Reloaded Reservation (again), I wanted to advertise the newsletter that came out today:

http://www.thegamecreators.com/pages/newsletters/newsletter_issue_142.html

And also a quick reminder that the 33% discount on App Game Kit 2 (AGK2) ends on Tuesday, so if it's part of your wish list you might want to make the purchase now and get started on the path of the code warrior.  For those seeking a higher power, stay tuned for more Reloaded posts about bugs squashed and features improved during the week.   My calender is pretty free of meetings and events so it's code sailing from here on in, and we'll get V1.009 out to you as soon as the alpha testers give us the gentle nod.