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Baltimore, MD
We're pushing .NET technology to its limits. Come watch!
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Promit
March 08, 2019
Fully Featured Custom Build Targets in Visual C++

A few days ago I was setting up a new resource build pipeline for our games, and wanted to integrate the build directly in Visual Studio. The goal was to include a resource manifest file in the project, and have them be fed to my compiler as part of the normal VC project build. Often the starting …

9,179 views
Promit
February 19, 2019
DanceForce V4 DIY DDR Pad Build Thread
V3 build pictured, but the V4 upgrades are all internal to the pad.

If you’re unfamiliar with my DanceForce work or the previous versions, please read the introduction of my V3 build post for the rationale and advantages of this particular approach to a hard pad and what I’m going for. In short, th…

7,838 views
Promit
October 20, 2017
Games Look Bad, Part 1: HDR and Tone Mapping

This is Part 1 of a series examining techniques used in game graphics and how those techniques fail to deliver a visually appealing end result. See Part 0 for a more thorough explanation of the idea behind it.

High dynamic range. First experienced by most consumers in late 2005, with Valve’s Half …

7,927 views
Promit
October 20, 2017
Games Look Bad, Part 0: Explanation and Defense

I’m about to start a series of blog posts called Games Look Bad. Before I start throwing stones from my glass house over here, I wanted to offer an explanation of what I’m doing and a defense of why I’m doing it.

There’s no doubt that we’ve seen a sustained and significant period of improvement in…

2,387 views
Promit
May 11, 2017
Game Debugging And Tweaking Via MIDI Controller

Today, we’re going to talk about how to configure a MIDI controller to act as a debugging aid for a game – or any software development project.

Why a MIDI controller? Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

Why would you want to do this? It’s very common to have a set of internal variables t…

3,172 views
Promit
November 19, 2015
Bandit's Shark Showdown - Can Video Games Help Stroke Victims?
It's been a long time since I've posted, but with good reason. For the last couple months, I've been busy building our newest game: Bandit's Shark Showdown! Released as a launch title for Apple TV and now out on iOS, the game represents the latest generation of our animation/physics tech, and will …
5,168 views
Promit
November 05, 2014
Sony A77 Mark II: EVF Lag and Blackout Test

I’m planning to review this camera properly at some point, but for the time being, I wanted to do a simple test of what the parameters of EVF lag and blackout are.

Let’s talk about lag first. What do we mean? The A77 II uses an electronic viewfinder, which means that the viewfinder is a tiny LCD p…

2,159 views
Promit
October 15, 2014
Time Capsule Draft: “Speculating About Xbox Next”

I was digging through my Ventspace post drafts, and I found this writeup that I apparently decided not to post. It was written in March of 2012, a full year and a half before the Xbox One arrived in the market. In retrospect, I’m apparently awesome. On the one hand, I wish I’d posted this up at th…

2,028 views
Promit
October 14, 2014
Quick tip: Retina mode in iOS OpenGL rendering is not all-or-nothing

Some of you are probably working on Retina support and performance for your OpenGL based game for iOS devices. If you’re like us, you’re probably finding that a few of the devices (*cough* iPad 3) don’t quiiite have the GPU horsepower to drive your fancy graphics at retina resolutions. So now you’…

2,658 views
Promit
October 09, 2014
I Am Dolphin – Kinect Prototype

I’d hoped to write up a nice post for this, but unfortunately I haven’t had much time lately. Releasing a game, it turns out, is not at all relaxing. Work doesn’t end when you hit that submit button to Apple.

In the meantime, I happened to put together a video showing a prototype of the game, runn…

2,050 views
Promit
October 09, 2014
I Am Dolphin - Kinect Prototype
I'd hoped to write up a nice post for this, but unfortunately I haven't had much time lately. Releasing a game, it turns out, is not at all relaxing. Work doesn't end when you hit that submit button to Apple.

In the meantime, I happened to put together a video showing a prototype of the game, runnin…
2,396 views
Promit
October 08, 2014
Our New Game: I Am Dolphin
After an incredibly long time of quiet development, our new game, I Am Dolphin, will be available this Thursday, October 9th, on the Apple/iOS App Store. This post will be discussing the background and the game itself; I'm planning to post more technical information about the game and development i…
5,198 views
Promit
October 08, 2014
Our New Game: I Am Dolphin

After an incredibly long time of quiet development, our new game, I Am Dolphin, will be available this Thursday, October 9th, on the Apple/iOS App Store. This post will be discussing the background and the game itself; I’m planning to post more technical information about the game and development …

1,749 views
Promit
September 17, 2014
Game Code Build Times: RAID 0, SSD, or both for the ultimate in speed?

I’ve been in the process of building and testing a new machine using Intel’s new X99 platform. This platform, combined with the new Haswell-E series of CPUs, is the new high end of what Intel is offering in the consumer space. One of the pain points for developers is build time. For our part, we’r…

1,508 views
Promit
May 14, 2013
A Pixel Is NOT A Little Square

It’s good to review the fundamentals sometimes. Written in 1995 and often forgotten: A Pixel Is Not A Little Square.



View the full article

1,308 views
Promit
September 26, 2011
Neuroscience Meets Games
It's been a long time since I've written anything, so I thought I'd drop off a quick update. I was in San Francisco last week for a very interesting and unusual conference: ESCoNS. It's the first meeting of the Entertainment Software and Cognitive Neurotherapy Society. Talk about a mouthful! The at…
3,178 views
Promit
May 28, 2011
Our game Slug Bugs released!
FREE! We've made Slug Bugs free for a limited time. Why wouldn't you try it now?
I've been quiet for a very long time now, and this is why. We've just shipped our new game, Slug Bugs!

It uses our Ghost binaural audio which I've teased several times in the past, and is also wicked fun to play. Please …
2,398 views
Promit
March 13, 2011
Understanding Subversion's Problems
I've used Subversion for a long time, even CVS before that. Recently there's a lot of momentum behind moving away from Subversion to a distributed system, like git or Mercurial. I myself wrote a series of posts on the subject, but I skipped over the reasons WHY you might want to switch away from Su…
2,413 views
Promit
March 01, 2011
I am at GDC
I arrive in SFO for GDC tonight, give me a shout if you'd like to meet!
1,368 views
Promit
October 17, 2010
Evaluation: Git
Late copy of a Ventspace post.

Last time I talked about Mercurial, and was generally disappointed with it. I also evaluated Git, another major distributed version control system (DVCS).

Short Review: Quirky, but a promising winner.

Git, like Mercurial, was spawned as a result of the Linux-BitKeeper f…
1,801 views
Promit
October 07, 2010
Evaluation: Mercurial
Copy of a Ventspace post.

I've been a long time Subversion user, and I'm very comfortable with its quirks and limitations. It's an example of a centralized version control system (CVCS), which is very easy to understand. However, there's been a lot of talk lately about distributed version control sy…
1,653 views
Promit
August 19, 2010
BioReplicant Crowd Simulation
Been burning the oil on this for a couple weeks. What do you think?
">YouTube link
Vimeo link (looks nicer)

Also can't help but notice that YouTube HD's encode quality is awful.
2,160 views
Promit
July 22, 2010
NHibernate Is Pretty Cool
HIt Ventspace to read my latest rants.
My last tech post was heavily negative, so today I'm going to try and be more positive. I've been working with a library called NHibernate, which is itself a port of a Java library called Hibernate. These are very mature, long-standing object relational mapping…
1,310 views
Promit
July 15, 2010
Windows Installer is Terrible
As usual, this was copied from Ventspace.
I find Windows Installer to be truly baffling. It's as close to the heart of Windows as any developer tool gets. It is technology which literally every single Windows user interacts with, frequently. I believe practically every single team at Microsoft works…
2,537 views
Promit
March 05, 2010
Selling Middleware
So a few days ago, we published a video demo of our BioReplicant technology. In particular, we published it without saying much. No explanation of how it works, what problems it solves, or how it could be used. That was a very important and carefully calculated decision. I felt it was critical that…
1,715 views
Promit
March 03, 2010
BioReplicant Keeps Walking
">Click for High Def video.

This is what we've been working on for the last several months at AR Labs.
Forget falls.
Forget tackles.
BioReplicant keeps walking.
info@actionreactionlabs.com for more information.
-----------------------
BioReplicants is a completely reactive procedural animation system f…
1,979 views
Promit
February 23, 2010
How to Serialize Interfaces in .NET
Late copy from Ventspace.
I'm working on some final touches for SlimTune's next version, and one of them involves persisting the launcher settings between application runs. Launching is handled by an interface ILauncher, which can be set to any number of things via a reflected list of inherited typ…
1,716 views
Promit
February 21, 2010
ClickOnce Support in SlimDX
Man, it's been a long time since I wrote about SlimDX. We've released the February 2010 version, so go ahead and grab that if you're so inclined. This version is mostly bug fixes, for both us and Microsoft. DirectX 11 should be much more usable, although we're still working towards stronger D2D and…
1,452 views
Promit
February 17, 2010
Wanted: Socket 939 motherboard
I'm looking for a s939 (AMD) motherboard to put together a mini server system for pretty much all my work (SlimDX, SlimTune, AR Labs). I have all the other pieces, it's just the mobo I'm missing. If someone is willing to send me an old but working one -- preferably micro ATX -- they're not using, t…
1,187 views
Promit
February 11, 2010
SlimTune UI Teasers
This is a combination of a couple Ventspace posts.

Here's a quick teaser of the new UI:

The window hosting the visualizer is missing all of its widgets, but will eventually have a variety of controls along the edges. The revised main SlimTune window is essentially complete. This window is always open…
1,408 views
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