Archive for July, 2005

AGEIA build a device that accelerates physics computations, getting them off the CPU. An absolutely cool idea, I hope a standard will appear quickly (maybe in DirectX? what about DirectPhysics?) and also a software implementation (based on Havok for example), so that it will gain mass acceptance.

Here is the quickest way to disable that annoying dialog displayed in OLE client applications :

	// disable the "server busy" dialog
	AfxOleGetMessageFilter()->EnableBusyDialog(FALSE);
	AfxOleGetMessageFilter()->EnableNotRespondingDialog(FALSE);

For about two days I have been messing with some rendering bugs in the OpenGL engine. First of all, some textures appear white under heavy load – I found the low memory to be the cause. It appears that OpenGL need system RAM to load the textures, and doesn’t like virtual memory very much (at least on nVidia, because on ATI I managed to upload lots of textures to the pagefile also). The other bug is caused by a visible shift in objects’ texture coordinates, that in the beginning occured in memory-full conditions but then appeared when there was plenty of RAM available. Still left to investigate.

Nice link over at Slashdot about iD loosing the first place in the FPS industry. I completely agree with them, and if some time ago iD was the best company I’d have liked to work for, now I really changed my mind. Blizzard is now in the top.

I’m talking about building connections over the web (initiated from the webpage) but not packet-based as XMLRequest-based apps are doing. Real, connection-based web apps are currently being built in Flash, however I’m wondering if they can be built on top of http (actually http was never designed for this). A new kind of web-based apps can be developed then, and real-time collaborative software is what I’m primarily interested in. Another problem is whether to use peer-to-peer design or client-server (this may surely be better, because of firewall issues and such).