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RDO ETC1 compression examples
I've compressed the kodak test images using the prototype RDO ETC1 compressor I've been working on recently at various settings. You can download a .7z archive containing the RDO compressed .KTX files...
View ArticleAnother little note about the Halo Wars engine
There's still a lot of misunderstanding out there about where the Halo Wars engine technology came from. Starting in very early 2005 the HW team wrote a new engine pretty much from scratch. The Age3...
View ArticleWhy Age3 used low poly skinned meshes
Age3 used CPU skinning of relatively low poly models (even in "high" model mode). To help improve this technical design misstep made by the Age3 team (before I joined the team near the end of...
View Article"The Ballad of the Green Beret"
I heard this playing at the local Pagliacci's recently, and I realized this is one of the tunes my father used to play all the time. He was in Vietnam in I think '68 or '69, totally lost alone in the...
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Visual Studio 2015's Busted Find Dialog
In Visual Studio 2015, Microsoft decided to wreck the Find dialog so it's perma-docked into the upper right-hand corner of the document. The dialog is too small, and the key icons (to enable case...
View ArticleEnd of year realization
I'm basically an artist who "paints" with code, and good debuggers are one of my brushes. Except, each "painting" involves a variable amount of mental and/or physical resources. The Steam Linux project...
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Pic of Matt Pritchard's shipped title award
Pic taken during a late night debugging session. (I have one just like it.) This thing is so well done and high quality.Ensemble Studios (Microsoft) was such a classy outfit. No other company I've...
View ArticleI love ebikes
Here's me ebiking to work at Boss Fight Entertainment in McKinney, TX, on a custom ebike built from parts acquired from ebikes.ca. In this video, I was only running at around 40v 20a, and the rest of...
View ArticleThe "Faster Zombies!" blog post
I'll never forget this post:http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/Gabe Newell himself wrote a lot of this post in front of me. From what I could tell, he seemed flabbergasted and annoyed...
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ETC1 intermediate format progress
I've been working on support for the ETC1 format in Basis. The RDO front end class is done, and I'm writing the first ETC1 encoder+transcoder tonight. ETC1 is different enough from DXT1 that a...
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Basis ETC1 intermediate format support is now round-tripping
We can now encode to our new compressed intermediate format for ETC1, and quickly transcode this compressed data to raw ETC1 bits. (Just like crunch's "CRN" format, but for ETC1.) This required many...
View ArticleBasis ETC1 support progress
The front-end is written, now all of my effort has been on designing an efficient intermediate file format for ETC1 and a decent enough (but an improvable) encoder to go along with it. The idea is to...
View Article"Hybrid" supercompressed texture approach
I think this is (vaguely to roughly - no idea?) similar to the new supercompressed texture algorithm John Brooks is working on, CEO of Blue Shift:Instead of crunch-style top down clusterization (VQ) on...
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Adaptogens
I love herbal adaptogens, especially Rhodiola, and Ashwagandha. Adaptogens are a rare, special breed of herb. Pretty much every game and software developer should at least understand what adaptogens...
View ArticleInteresting looking ETC1/2 encoder
This encoder uses SSIM as an image quality metric at the block level:https://github.com/Playrix/playrix-publicAn article with details (in Russian):https://habrahabr.ru/company/playrix/blog/310484/I'll...
View ArticleVirtual global selector codebooks in Basis
Much of this information will be present in .basis's open source transcoder, so here's a little brain dump of how it works.Selectors in DXT1 and ETC1 are 2-bits each. These values select which block...
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Virtual selector codebook example image
I'm going to post some examples over the next few days. Note these examples are not .basis compressed images, instead they are just ETC1 compressed images where each block's selectors have been...
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Nerd/Brogrammer spectrum
Okay, I've been watching Silicon Valley. This show is so realistic and exaggerated that I find it painful to watch at times (especially the first couple episodes), but it's also funny as hell. It...
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Probiotic yogurt making
Just got back from a wonderful business trip to Portland Maine, visiting ForeFlight. Making more probiotic yogurt tonight because I ate up almost my entire stock on the trip. (It didn't help that we...
View ArticleBasis status
Just a small update. We've put like 99% of our effort into ETC1 and ETC1+DXT1 over the previous 5-6 months. Our ETC1 encoder supports RDO and an intermediate format, and has shipped on...
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