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• Google Rules for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  In the book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis outlines ten "Google Rules" that define how Google acts.  These rules help define how Web 2.0 businesses operate today and into the future.  While there's a chapter in the book on applying these rules to the retail industry, it wasn't very in-depth.  So I've decided to more directly apply the rules to retail, along with some notable examples of success.  The table below shows Jeff's Google Rule, some Industry Examples, and New Retailer Rules that I created. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid black 1.0pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-border-alt:solid black .5pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insideh-themecolor:text1; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insidev-themecolor:text1; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Google Rule Industry Examples New Retailer Rule New Relationship Your worst customer is your friend; you best customer is your partner Newegg.com lets manufacturers respond to customer comments that are critical of the product, and their EggXpert site lets customers help other customers. Listen to what your customers are saying about you.  Convert the critics to fans and the fans to influencers. New Architecture Join a network; be a platform Tesco and BestBuy released APIs for their product catalogs so third-parties could create new applications. Become a destination for information. New Publicness Life is public, so is business Zappos and WholeFoods founders are prolific tweeters/bloggers, sharing their opinions and connecting to customers.  It's not always pretty, but it's genuine. Be transparent.  Share both your successes and failures with your customers. New Society Elegant organization Wet Seal helps their customers assemble outfits and show them off to each other.  Barnes & Noble has a community site that includes a bookclub. Communities of your customers already exist, so help them organize better. New Economy Mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches lululemon found a niche for yoga inspired athletic wear.  Threadless uses crowd-sourcing to design short-runs of T-shirts. Serve small markets with niche products. New Business Reality Decide what business you're in When Lowes realized catering to women brought the men along, their sales increased. Customers want experiences to go with the products they buy. New Attitude Trust the people and listen In 2008 Starbucks launched MyStartbucksIdea to solicit ideas from their customers. Use social networks as additional data points for making better merchandising decisions. New Ethic Be honest and transparent; don't be evil Target is giving away reusable shopping bags for Earth Day.  Kohl's has outfitted 67 stores with solar arrays. Being green earns customers' respect and lowers costs too. New Speed Life is live H&M and Zara keep up with fashion trends. Be prepared to pounce on you customers' fickle interests. New Imperatives Encourage, enable and protect innovation 1-800-Flowers was the first do sales in Facebook and an early adopter of mobile commerce.  The Sears Personal Shopper mobile app finds products based on a photo. Give your staff permission to fail so innovation won't be stifled. Jeff will be a keynote speaker at Crosstalk, our upcoming annual user conference, so I'm looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on retail and the new economy.

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• How TiVo is messing up customer support.

  - by James Fleming

  Ok,  So I've gotten a TiVo and overall, I'm happy, but there have been issues and I suspect I've a defective unit. - Now the nice folks after many service calls were happy to swap it out, and to ensure continuity of service, they sent me a new unit (after a $109 deposit).  That was yesterday. Today, when we go to watch a little TV, and wait for our replacement unit to arrive we find our TiVo service has been suspended. WTF? They have an exchange program, but your unit your waiting to exchange is as dead as a doornail until the replacement arrives. How hard is it to keep the old unit active for an extra week? Here is the exchange w/Tivo below... You are currently number 1 in the queue. We apologize for the delay. We will assign you to an agent as soon as one is available.The average amount of time a customer has to wait is 00:13.  Kaylene (Listening)  Kaylene: Thank you for contacting TiVo! My name is Kaylene. So that I may better assist you, are you an existing customer?  james Fleming: yes I am, but I'm now having second thoughts about being one    Kaylene: Thank you for verifying your information. How may I assist you today James?  james Fleming: I've been having issues w/a tivo box & I'm getting a replacement sent out to me (after paying an additional deposit) and now my current unit is no longer activated  Kaylene: I can help you today!  Kaylene: When we process an exchange we do transfer over the service to the replacement box so it is active and ready to go when you receive it.  james Fleming: which is to say you also make my current box worthless until such time I receive a new box?!?!?  Kaylene: I apologize that your original box was deactivated so we could activate your replacement box.  james Fleming: Why on Earth would I bother to pay in advance for a new box if you were going to kill my existing box.  Kaylene: What features are you needing to use on your current box?  james Fleming: I need to be able to access my netflix subscription (if I'm lucky enough to have it work without rebooting)  Kaylene: Can I have you verify the TiVo Service Number of your TiVo box please?  james Fleming: 7460011906979b4  Kaylene: We have your current box temporary service but not all features are available with temporary service as it is not paid for service.  Kaylene: If you like I can transfer your service back to your current box for now. Then once you receive the new box you will have to call in and have the service transferred back to the new box.  james Fleming: Not paid for? Let's see> one tivo box + 3 year service plan + monthly service + $109 deposit on a second box = what?  Kaylene: Would you like me to transfer your service back to your current box?  james Fleming: Yes - that would be helpful  Kaylene: All you will need to do is contact us again once you receive the new box so we can transfer it back.  Kaylene: I have put your service back on TiVo box 7460011906979b4.  james Fleming: What would also be helpful is your firm informing me to how you'd be cutting service in the interim.  james Fleming: Again - I opted to pay to have a second box delivered BEFORE returning the box I have - thus trying to have a continuity of service..  Kaylene: This is not something we normally do so it is important when you contact us to transfer the service back to the new box when you receive it that you reference this case number: 110622-006089.  Kaylene: I apologize about the inconvenience. You may need  force a few connections for the box to recognize the service again.  james Fleming: If it's not something you normally do than WHY would you have a $109 fee and a term for the service.  james Fleming: I am not mad at you, but your company is not impressing me and I'm blogging about this experience  Kaylene: Again I apologize about the inconvenience but you should be good to go now. Is there anything else I can help you with today?  james Fleming: so I need to go through the re-actviate process or is that somethign you do  Kaylene: When you receive the new TiVo box you need to contact us so we can transfer the service to the new box for you.  james Fleming: sure  Kaylene: Is there anything else I can help you with today James?  james Fleming: Nope - please email this transcript to me  Kaylene: I apologize but we do not have the ability to e-mail you a copy of this transcript. You can view it online at  http://www.tivo.com when you sign into your account or you can copy and paste it now to save it.  Kaylene: Thank you for contacting TiVo today. Your reference number for our conversation is 110622-006089. You can save this for your records, and if necessary, provide this to a later agent to pull up what we discussed. There will be a brief satisfaction survey emailed to you. We would appreciate any feedback on your TiVo Chat Support experience today.  Kaylene: Thank you for using TiVo Chat and have a great day James! Good-bye.  Kaylene has disconnected.

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• Enable Automatic Code First Migrations On SQL Database in Azure Web Sites

  - by Steve Michelotti

  Now that Azure supports .NET Framework 4.5, you can use all the latest and greatest available features. A common scenario is to be able to use Entity Framework Code First Migrations with a SQL Database in Azure. Prior to Code First Migrations, Entity Framework provided database initializers. While convenient for demos and prototypes, database initializers weren’t useful for much beyond that because, if you delete and re-create your entire database when the schema changes, you lose all of your operational data. This is the void that Migrations are meant to fill. For example, if you add a column to your model, Migrations will alter the database to add the column rather than blowing away the entire database and re-creating it from scratch. Azure is becoming increasingly easier to use – especially with features like Azure Web Sites. Being able to use Entity Framework Migrations in Azure makes deployment easier than ever. In this blog post, I’ll walk through enabling Automatic Code First Migrations on Azure. I’ll use the Simple Membership provider for my example. First, we’ll create a new Azure Web site called “migrationstest” including creating a new SQL Database along with it:   Next we’ll go to the web site and download the publish profile:   In the meantime, we’ve created a new MVC 4 website in Visual Studio 2012 using the “Internet Application” template. This template is automatically configured to use the Simple Membership provider. We’ll do our initial Publish to Azure by right-clicking our project and selecting “Publish…”. From the “Publish Web” dialog, we’ll import the publish profile that we downloaded in the previous step:   Once the site is published, we’ll just click the “Register” link from the default site. Since the AccountController is decorated with the [InitializeSimpleMembership] attribute, the initializer will be called and the initial database is created.   We can verify this by connecting to our SQL Database on Azure with SQL Management Studio (after making sure that our local IP address is added to the list of Allowed IP Addresses in Azure): One interesting note is that these tables got created with the default Entity Framework initializer – which is to create the database if it doesn’t already exist. However, our database did already exist! This is because there is a new feature of Entity Framework 5 where Code First will add tables to an existing database as long as the target database doesn’t contain any of the tables from the model. At this point, it’s time to enable Migrations. We’ll open the Package Manger Console and execute the command: PM> Enable-Migrations -EnableAutomaticMigrations This will enable automatic migrations for our project. Because we used the "-EnableAutomaticMigrations” switch, it will create our Configuration class with a constructor that sets the AutomaticMigrationsEnabled property set to true: 1: public Configuration() 2: { 3: AutomaticMigrationsEnabled = true; 4: } We’ll now add our initial migration: PM> Add-Migration Initial This will create a migration class call “Initial” that contains the entire model. But we need to remove all of this code because our database already exists so we are just left with empty Up() and Down() methods. 1: public partial class Initial : DbMigration 2: { 3: public override void Up() 4: { 5: } 6: 7: public override void Down() 8: { 9: } 10: } If we don’t remove this code, we’ll get an exception the first time we attempt to run migrations that tells us: “There is already an object named 'UserProfile' in the database”. This blog post by Julie Lerman fully describes this scenario (i.e., enabling migrations on an existing database). Our next step is to add the Entity Framework initializer that will automatically use Migrations to update the database to the latest version. We will add these 2 lines of code to the Application_Start of the Global.asax: 1: Database.SetInitializer(new MigrateDatabaseToLatestVersion<UsersContext, Configuration>()); 2: new UsersContext().Database.Initialize(false); Note the Initialize() call will force the initializer to run if it has not been run before. At this point, we can publish again to make sure everything is still working as we are expecting. This time we’re going to specify in our publish profile that Code First Migrations should be executed:   Once we have re-published we can once again navigate to the Register page. At this point the database has not been changed but Migrations is now enabled on our SQL Database in Azure. We can now customize our model. Let’s add 2 new properties to the UserProfile class – Email and DateOfBirth: 1: [Table("UserProfile")] 2: public class UserProfile 3: { 4: [Key] 5: [DatabaseGeneratedAttribute(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] 6: public int UserId { get; set; } 7: public string UserName { get; set; } 8: public string Email { get; set; } 9: public DateTime DateOfBirth { get; set; } 10: } At this point all we need to do is simply re-publish. We’ll once again navigate to the Registration page and, because we had Automatic Migrations enabled, the database has been altered (*not* recreated) to add our 2 new columns. We can verify this by once again looking at SQL Management Studio:   Automatic Migrations provide a quick and easy way to keep your database in sync with your model without the worry of having to re-create your entire database and lose data. With Azure Web Sites you can set up automatic deployment with Git or TFS and automate the entire process to make it dead simple.

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• Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It – book review

  - by DigiMortal

      How do our users see the products we are writing for them and how happy they are with our work? Are they able to get their work done without fighting with cool features and crashes or are they just switching off resistance part of their brain to survive our software? Yeah, the overall picture of software usability landscape is not very nice. Okay, it is not even nice. But, fortunately, Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It by David S. Platt explains everything. Why Software Sucks… is book for software users but I consider it as a-must reading also for developers and specially for their managers whose politics often kills all usability topics as soon as they may appear. For managers usability is soft topic that can be manipulated the way it is best in current state of project. Although developers are not UI designers and usability experts they are still very often forced to deal with these topics and this is how usability problems start (of course, also designers are able to produce designs that are stupid and too hard to use for users, but this blog here is about development). I found this book to be very interesting and funny reading. It is not humor book but it explains you all so you remember later very well what you just read. It took me about three evenings to go through this book and I am still enjoying what I found and how author explains our weird young working field to end users. I suggest this book to all developers – while you are demanding your management to hire or outsource usability expert you are at least causing less pain to end users. So, go and buy this book, just like I did. And… they thanks to mr. Platt :) There is one book more I suggest you to read if you are interested in usability - Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug. Editorial review from Amazon Today’s software sucks. There’s no other good way to say it. It’s unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It’s unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it’s hard to use, requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations. It’s no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that’s the case and, more importantly, why it doesn’t have to be that way. And he explains it in plain, jargon-free English that’s a joy to read, using real-world examples with which you’re already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do about this sad state of our software—how you, as an informed consumer, don’t have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out. As you might expect from the book’s title, Dave’s expose is laced with humor—sometimes outrageous, but always dead on. You’ll laugh out loud as you recall incidents with your own software that made you cry. You’ll slap your thigh with the same hand that so often pounded your computer desk and wished it was a bad programmer’s face. But Dave hasn’t written this book just for laughs. He’s written it to give long-overdue voice to your own discovery—that software does, indeed, suck, but it shouldn’t. Table of contents Acknowledgments xiii Introduction Chapter 1: Who’re You Calling a Dummy? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Control versus Ease of Use I Don’t Care How Your Program Works A Bad Feature and a Good One Stopping the Proceedings with Idiocy Testing on Live Animals Where We Are and What You Can Do Chapter 2: Tangled in the Web Where We Came From How It Works Why It Still Sucks Today Client-Centered Design versus Server-Centered Design Where’s My Eye Opener? It’s Obvious—Not! Splash, Flash, and Animation Testing on Live Animals What You Can Do about It Chapter 3: Keep Me Safe The Way It Was Why It Sucks Today What Programmers Need to Know, but Don’t A Human Operation Budgeting for Hassles Users Are Lazy Social Engineering Last Word on Security What You Can Do Chapter 4: Who the Heck Are You? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Incompatible Requirements OK, So Now What? Chapter 5: Who’re You Looking At? Yes, They Know You Why It Sucks More Than Ever Today Users Don’t Know Where the Risks Are What They Know First Milk You with Cookies? Privacy Policy Nonsense Covering Your Tracks The Google Conundrum Solution Chapter 6: Ten Thousand Geeks, Crazed on Jolt Cola See Them in Their Native Habitat All These Geeks Who Speaks, and When, and about What Selling It The Next Generation of Geeks—Passing It On Chapter 7: Who Are These Crazy Bastards Anyway? Homo Logicus Testosterone Poisoning Control and Contentment Making Models Geeks and Jocks Jargon Brains and Constraints Seven Habits of Geeks Chapter 8: Microsoft: Can’t Live With ’Em and Can’t Live Without ’Em They Run the World Me and Them Where We Came From Why It Sucks Today Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t We Love to Hate Them Plus ça Change Growing-Up Pains What You Can Do about It The Last Word Chapter 9: Doing Something About It 1. Buy 2. Tell 3. Ridicule 4. Trust 5. Organize Epilogue About the Author

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• Silverlight 5 &ndash; What&rsquo;s New? (Including Screenshots &amp; Code Snippets)

  - by mbcrump

  Silverlight 5 is coming next year (2011) and this blog post will tell you what you need to know before the beta ships. First, let me address people saying that it is dead after PDC 2010. I believe that it’s best to see what the market is doing, not the vendor. Below is a list of companies that are developing Silverlight 4 applications shown during the Silverlight Firestarter. Some of the companies have shipped and some haven’t. It’s just great to see the actual company names that are working on Silverlight instead of “people are developing for Silverlight”. The next thing that I wanted to point out was that HTML5, WPF and Silverlight can co-exist. In case you missed Scott Gutherie’s keynote, they actually had a slide with all three stacked together. This shows Microsoft will be heavily investing in each technology.  Even I, a Silverlight developer, am reading Pro HTML5. Microsoft said that according to the Silverlight Feature Voting site, 21k votes were entered. Microsoft has implemented about 70% of these votes in Silverlight 5. That is an amazing number, and I am crossing my fingers that Microsoft bundles Silverlight with Windows 8. Let’s get started… what’s new in Silverlight 5? I am going to show you some great application and actual code shown during the Firestarter event. Media Hardware Video Decode – Instead of using CPU to decode, we will offload it to GPU. This will allow netbooks, etc to play videos. Trickplay – Variable Speed Playback – Pitch Correction (If you speed up someone talking they won’t sound like a chipmunk). Power Management – Less battery when playing video. Screensavers will no longer kick in if watching a video. If you pause a video then screensaver will kick in. Remote Control Support – This will allow users to control playback functions like Pause, Rewind and Fastforward. IIS Media Services 4 has shipped and now supports Azure. Data Binding Layout Transitions – Just with a few lines of XAML you can create a really rich experience that is not using Storyboards or animations. RelativeSource FindAncestor – Ancestor RelativeSource bindings make it much easier for a DataTemplate to bind to a property on a container control. Custom Markup Extensions – Markup extensions allow code to be run at XAML parse time for both properties and event handlers. This is great for MVVM support. Changing Styles during Runtime By Binding in Style Setters – Changing Styles at runtime used to be a real pain in Silverlight 4, now it’s much easier. Binding in style setters allows bindings to reference other properties. XAML Debugging – Below you can see that we set a breakpoint in XAML. This shows us exactly what is going on with our binding.  WCF & RIA Services WS-Trust Support – Taken from Wikipedia: WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker trust relationships between participants in a secure message exchange. You can reduce network latency by using a background thread for networking. Supports Azure now.  Text and Printing Improved text clarity that enables better text rendering. Multi-column text flow, Character tracking and leading support, and full OpenType font support.  Includes a new Postscript Vector Printing API that provides control over what you print . Pivot functionality baked into Silverlight 5 SDK. Graphics Immediate mode graphics support that will enable you to use the GPU and 3D graphics supports. Take a look at what was shown in the demos below. 1) 3D view of the Earth – not really a real-world application though. A doctor’s portal. This demo really stood out for me as it shows what we can do with the 3D / GPU support. Out of Browser OOB applications can now create and manage childwindows as shown in the screenshot below.  Trusted OOB applications can use P/Invoke to call Win32 APIs and unmanaged libraries.  Enterprise Group Policy Support allow enterprises to lock down or up the sandbox capabilities of Silverlight 5 applications. In this demo, he tore the “notes” off of the application and it appeared in a new window. See the black arrow below. In this demo, he connected a USB Device which fired off a local Win32 application that provided the data off the USB stick to Silverlight. Another demo of a Silverlight 5 application exporting data right into Excel running inside of browser. Testing They demoed Coded UI, which is available now in the Visual Studio Feature Pack 2. This will allow you to create automated testing without writing any code manually. Performance: Microsoft has worked to improve the Silverlight startup time. Silverlight 5 provides 64-bit browser support.  Silverlight 5 also provides IE9 Hardware acceleration.   I am looking forward to Silverlight 5 and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading and I hope you visit again soon.  Subscribe to my feed CodeProject

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• Simple Excel Export with EPPlus

  - by Jesse Taber

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/10/30/simple-excel-export-with-epplus.aspxAnyone I’ve ever met who works with an application that sits in front of a lot of data loves it when they can get that data exported to an Excel file for them to mess around with offline. As both developer and end user of a little website project that I’ve been working on, I found myself wanting to be able to get a bunch of the data that the application was collecting into an Excel file. The great thing about being both an end user and a developer on a project is that you can build the features that you really want! While putting this feature together I came across the fantastic EPPlus library. This library is certainly very well known and popular, but I was so impressed with it that I thought it was worth a quick blog post. This library is extremely powerful; it lets you create and manipulate Excel 2007/2010 spreadsheets in .NET code with a high degree of flexibility. My only gripe with the project is that they are not touting how insanely easy it is to build a basic Excel workbook from a simple data source. If I were running this project the approach I’m about to demonstrate in this post would be front and center on the landing page for the project because it shows how easy it really is to get started and serves as a good way to ease yourself in to some of the more advanced features. The website in question uses RavenDB, which means that we’re dealing with POCOs to model the data throughout all layers of the application. I love working like this so when it came time to figure out how to export some of this data to an Excel spreadsheet I wanted to find a way to take an IEnumerable<T> and just have it dumped to Excel with each item in the collection being modeled as a single row in the Excel worksheet. Consider the following class: public class Employee { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public decimal HourlyRate { get; set; } public DateTime HireDate { get; set; } } Now let’s say we have a collection of these represented as an IEnumerable<Employee> and we want to be able to output it to an Excel file for offline querying/manipulation. As it turns out, this is dead simple to do with EPPlus. Have a look: public void ExportToExcel(IEnumerable<Employee> employees, FileInfo targetFile) { using (var excelFile = new ExcelPackage(targetFile)) { var worksheet = excelFile.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("Sheet1"); worksheet.Cells["A1"].LoadFromCollection(Collection: employees, PrintHeaders: true); excelFile.Save(); } } That’s it. Let’s break down what’s going on here: Create a ExcelPackage to model the workbook (Excel file). Note that the ‘targetFile’ value here is a FileInfo object representing the location on disk where I want the file to be saved. Create a worksheet within the workbook. Get a reference to the top-leftmost cell (addressed as A1) and invoke the ‘LoadFromCollection’ method, passing it our collection of Employee objects. Behind the scenes this is reflecting over the properties of the type provided and pulling out any public members to become columns in the resulting Excel output. The ‘PrintHeaders’ parameter tells EPPlus to grab the name of the property and put it in the first row. Save the Excel file All of the heavy lifting here is being done by the ‘LoadFromCollection’ method, and that’s a good thing. Now, this was really easy to do, but it has some limitations. Using this approach you get a very plain, un-styled Excel worksheet. The column widths are all set to the default. The number format for all cells is ‘General’ (which proves particularly interesting if you have a DateTime property in your data source). I’m a “no frills” guy, so I wasn’t bothered at all by trading off simplicity for style and formatting. That said, EPPlus has tons of samples that you can download that illustrate how to apply styles and formatting to cells and a ton of other advanced features that are way beyond the scope of this post.

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• CQRS - Benefits

  - by Dylan Smith

  Thanks to all the comments and feedback from the last post I think I have a better understanding now of the benefits of CQRS (separate from the benefits of Event Sourcing). I’m going to try and sum it up here, and point out some areas where I could still use some advice: CQRS Benefits Sounds like the primary benefit of CQRS as an architecture is it allows you to create a simpler domain model by sucking out everything related to queries. I can definitely see the benefit to this, in general the domain logic related to commands is the high-value behavior in the software, but the logic required to service the queries would add a lot of low-value “noise” to the domain model that would dilute the high-value (command) behavior – sorting, paging, filtering, pre-fetch paths, etc. Also the most appropriate domain structure for implementing commands might not be the most optimal for implementing queries. To paraphrase Greg, this usually results in a domain model that is mediocre at both, piss-poor at one, or more likely piss-poor at both commands and queries. Not only will you be able to simplify your domain model by pulling out all the query logic, but at least a handful of commands in most systems will probably be “pass-though” type commands with little to no logic that just generate events. If these can be implemented directly in the command-handler and never touch the domain model, this allows you to slim down the domain model even more. Also, if you were to do event sourcing without CQRS, you no longer have a database containing the current state (only the domain model would) which makes it difficult (or impossible) to support ad-hoc querying and/or reporting that is common in most business software. Of course CQRS provides some great scalability benefits, not only scalability but I have to assume that it provides extremely low latency for most operations, especially if you have an asynchronous event bus. I know Greg says that you get a 3x scaling (Commands, Queries, Client) of your ability to perform parallel development, but IMHO, it seems like it only provides 1.5x scaling since even without CQRS you’re going to have your client loosely coupled to your domain - which is still a great benefit to be able to realize. Questions / Concerns If all the queries against an aggregate get pulled out to the Query layer, what if the only commands for that aggregate can be handled in a “pass-through” manner with the command handler directly generating events. Is it possible to have an aggregate that isn’t modeled in the domain model? Are there any issues or downsides to this? I know in the feedback from my previous posts it was suggested that having one domain model handling both commands and queries requires implementing a lot of traversals between objects that wouldn’t be necessary if it was only servicing commands. My question is, do you include traversals in your domain model based on the needs of the code, or based on the conceptual domain model? If none of my Commands require a Customer.Orders traversal, but the conceptual domain includes the concept of a set of orders belonging to a customer – should I model that in my domain model or not? I like the idea of using the Query side of the architecture as a place to put junior devs where the risk of them screwing something up has minimal impact. But I’m not sold on the idea that you can actually outsource it. Like I said in one of my comments on my previous post, the code to handle a query and generate DTO’s is going to be dead simple, but the code to process events and apply them to the tables on the query side is going to require a significant amount of domain knowledge to know which events to listen for to update each of the de-normalized tables (and what changes need to be made when each event is processed). I don’t know about everybody else, but having Indian/Russian/whatever outsourced developers have to do anything that requires significant domain knowledge has never been successful in my experience. And if you need to spec out for each new query which events to listen to and what to do with each one, well that’s probably going to be just as much work to document as it would be to just implement it. Greg made the point in a comment that doing an aggregate query like “Total Sales By Customer” is going to be inefficient if you use event sourcing but not CQRS. I don’t understand why that would be the case. I imagine in that case you’d simply have a method/property on the Customer object that calculated total sales for that customer by enumerating over the Orders collection. Then the application services layer would generate DTO’s off of the Customers collection that included say the CustomerID, CustomerName, TotalSales, or whatever the case may be. As long as you use a snapshotting implementation, I don’t see why that would be anymore inefficient in a DDD+Event Sourcing implementation than in a typical DDD implementation. Like I mentioned in my last post I still have some questions about query logic that haven’t been answered yet, but before I start asking those I want to make sure I have a strong grasp on what benefits CQRS provides.  My main concern with the query logic was that I know I could just toss it all into the query side, but I was concerned that I would be losing the benefits of using CQRS in the first place if I did that.  I want to elaborate more on this though with some example situations in an upcoming post.

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• Gene Hunt Says:

  - by BizTalk Visionary

  "She's as nervous as a very small nun at a penguin shoot"   "He's got fingers in more pies than a leper on a cookery course" "You so much as belch out of line and I'll have your scrotum on a barbed wire plate" "Let's go play slappyface" "your surrounded by armed barstewards" “Right, get out and find this murdering scum right now!” [pause] “Scratch that, we start 9am sharp tomorrow, it's beer-o-clock.” "So then Cartwright, you're such a good Detective.... Go and Detect me a packet of Garibaldies" "You're not the one who is going to have to knit himself a new arsehole after 25 years of aggressive male love in prison" “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “A dream for me is Diana Dors and a bottle of chip fat." “They reckon you've got concussion - but personally, I couldn't give a tart's furry cup if half your brains are falling out. Don't ever waltz into my kingdom playing king of the jungle.” “You great... soft... sissy... girlie... nancy... french... bender... Man-United supporting POOF!!” “Drugs eh? What's the point. They make you forget, make you talk funny, make you see things that aren't there. My old grandma got all of that for free when she had a stroke.” “He's Dead! It's quite serious!” “Fanny in the flat...Nice Work” “SoopaDoopa” “Tits in a Jumper!” “Drop your weapons! You are surrounded by armed bastards!” “It's 1973, almost dinnertime. I'm 'avin 'oops!” “Trust the Gene Genie!” “I wanna hump Britt Ekland...What're we gonna do...!” “Was that 'E' and you don't know the rest?! or you going 'Eeee, I Dunno'” “Good Girl! Prostate probe and no jelly. “ “Give over, it's nothing like Spain!” “I'll come over your houses and stamp on all your toys!” “The Wizard will sort it out. It's cos of the wonderful things he does” “Cartwright can jump up and down on his knackers!” “It's not a windup love, he really thinks like this!” “Women! You can't say two words to them” “I was thinking, maybe, a Berni Inn!” “If I wanted a bollocking for drinking too much...!” “Shhhh...hear that...that's the sound of this case being closed! “Chicken!? In a basket!?” “Seems a large quantity of cocaine...” “You probably thought he kept his cock in his keks!” “The tail-end of Rays demotion speech!” “Stephen Warren is gay!?” “You're a smart boy, use your initiative!” “Don't be such a Jessie!” “I find the idea of a bird brushing her teeth...!” “Never been tempted to the Magic talcum powder?” “Make sure she's got nice tits!” “You're more likely to find an ostrich with a plum up it's arse!” “Drink this lot under the table and have a pint on the way home!” “Never be a female Prime Minister!” “Pub? Pub! pub!.....Pub!” “Thou shalt not suck off rent boys!” “The number for the special clinic is on the notice board!” “If me uncle had tits, would he be me auntie!” “Got your vicars in a twist!” “We Done?!” “Your mates got balls...If they were any bigger he'd need a wheelbarrow!” “The Ending - from 'I want to go home' to the end music.”

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• Atmospheric Scattering

  - by Lawrence Kok

  I'm trying to implement atmospheric scattering based on Sean O`Neil algorithm that was published in GPU Gems 2. But I have some trouble getting the shader to work. My latest attempts resulted in: http://img253.imageshack.us/g/scattering01.png/ I've downloaded sample code of O`Neil from: http://http.download.nvidia.com/developer/GPU_Gems_2/CD/Index.html. Made minor adjustments to the shader 'SkyFromAtmosphere' that would allow it to run in AMD RenderMonkey. In the images it is see-able a form of banding occurs, getting an blueish tone. However it is only applied to one half of the sphere, the other half is completely black. Also the banding appears to occur at Zenith instead of Horizon, and for a reason I managed to get pac-man shape. I would appreciate it if somebody could show me what I'm doing wrong. Vertex Shader: uniform mat4 matView; uniform vec4 view_position; uniform vec3 v3LightPos; const int nSamples = 3; const float fSamples = 3.0; const vec3 Wavelength = vec3(0.650,0.570,0.475); const vec3 v3InvWavelength = 1.0f / vec3( Wavelength.x * Wavelength.x * Wavelength.x * Wavelength.x, Wavelength.y * Wavelength.y * Wavelength.y * Wavelength.y, Wavelength.z * Wavelength.z * Wavelength.z * Wavelength.z); const float fInnerRadius = 10; const float fOuterRadius = fInnerRadius * 1.025; const float fInnerRadius2 = fInnerRadius * fInnerRadius; const float fOuterRadius2 = fOuterRadius * fOuterRadius; const float fScale = 1.0 / (fOuterRadius - fInnerRadius); const float fScaleDepth = 0.25; const float fScaleOverScaleDepth = fScale / fScaleDepth; const vec3 v3CameraPos = vec3(0.0, fInnerRadius * 1.015, 0.0); const float fCameraHeight = length(v3CameraPos); const float fCameraHeight2 = fCameraHeight * fCameraHeight; const float fm_ESun = 150.0; const float fm_Kr = 0.0025; const float fm_Km = 0.0010; const float fKrESun = fm_Kr * fm_ESun; const float fKmESun = fm_Km * fm_ESun; const float fKr4PI = fm_Kr * 4 * 3.141592653; const float fKm4PI = fm_Km * 4 * 3.141592653; varying vec3 v3Direction; varying vec4 c0, c1; float scale(float fCos) { float x = 1.0 - fCos; return fScaleDepth * exp(-0.00287 + x*(0.459 + x*(3.83 + x*(-6.80 + x*5.25)))); } void main( void ) { // Get the ray from the camera to the vertex, and its length (which is the far point of the ray passing through the atmosphere) vec3 v3FrontColor = vec3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0); vec3 v3Pos = normalize(gl_Vertex.xyz) * fOuterRadius; vec3 v3Ray = v3CameraPos - v3Pos; float fFar = length(v3Ray); v3Ray = normalize(v3Ray); // Calculate the ray's starting position, then calculate its scattering offset vec3 v3Start = v3CameraPos; float fHeight = length(v3Start); float fDepth = exp(fScaleOverScaleDepth * (fInnerRadius - fCameraHeight)); float fStartAngle = dot(v3Ray, v3Start) / fHeight; float fStartOffset = fDepth*scale(fStartAngle); // Initialize the scattering loop variables float fSampleLength = fFar / fSamples; float fScaledLength = fSampleLength * fScale; vec3 v3SampleRay = v3Ray * fSampleLength; vec3 v3SamplePoint = v3Start + v3SampleRay * 0.5; // Now loop through the sample rays for(int i=0; i<nSamples; i++) { float fHeight = length(v3SamplePoint); float fDepth = exp(fScaleOverScaleDepth * (fInnerRadius - fHeight)); float fLightAngle = dot(normalize(v3LightPos), v3SamplePoint) / fHeight; float fCameraAngle = dot(normalize(v3Ray), v3SamplePoint) / fHeight; float fScatter = (-fStartOffset + fDepth*( scale(fLightAngle) - scale(fCameraAngle)))/* 0.25f*/; vec3 v3Attenuate = exp(-fScatter * (v3InvWavelength * fKr4PI + fKm4PI)); v3FrontColor += v3Attenuate * (fDepth * fScaledLength); v3SamplePoint += v3SampleRay; } // Finally, scale the Mie and Rayleigh colors and set up the varying variables for the pixel shader vec4 newPos = vec4( (gl_Vertex.xyz + view_position.xyz), 1.0); gl_Position = gl_ModelViewProjectionMatrix * vec4(newPos.xyz, 1.0); gl_Position.z = gl_Position.w * 0.99999; c1 = vec4(v3FrontColor * fKmESun, 1.0); c0 = vec4(v3FrontColor * (v3InvWavelength * fKrESun), 1.0); v3Direction = v3CameraPos - v3Pos; } Fragment Shader: uniform vec3 v3LightPos; varying vec3 v3Direction; varying vec4 c0; varying vec4 c1; const float g =-0.90f; const float g2 = g * g; const float Exposure =2; void main(void){ float fCos = dot(normalize(v3LightPos), v3Direction) / length(v3Direction); float fMiePhase = 1.5 * ((1.0 - g2) / (2.0 + g2)) * (1.0 + fCos*fCos) / pow(1.0 + g2 - 2.0*g*fCos, 1.5); gl_FragColor = c0 + fMiePhase * c1; gl_FragColor.a = 1.0; }

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• MVVM Light V4 preview 2 (BL0015) #mvvmlight

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Over the past few weeks, I have worked hard on a few new features for MVVM Light V4. Here is a second early preview (consider this pre-alpha if you wish). The features are unit-tested, but I am now looking for feedback and there might be bugs! Bug correction: Messenger.CleanupList is now thread safe This was an annoying bug that is now corrected: In some circumstances, an exception could be thrown when the Messenger’s recipients list was cleaned up (i.e. the “dead” instances were removed). The method is called now and then and the exception was thrown apparently at random. In fact it was really a multi-threading issue, which is now corrected. Bug correction: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers prevents EventToCommand to work This is a particularly annoying regression bug that was introduced in BL0014. In order to allow MVVM Light to work in XBAPs too, I added the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute to the assemblies. However, we just found out that this causes issues when using EventToCommand. In order to allow EventToCommand to continue working, I reverted to the previous state by removing the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute for now. I will work with my friends at Microsoft to try and find a solution. Stay tuned. Bug correction: XML documentation file is now generated in Release configuration The XML documentation file was not generated for the Release configuration. This was a simple flag in the project file that I had forgotten to set. This is corrected now. Applying EventToCommand to non-FrameworkElements This feature has been requested in order to be able to execute a command when a Storyboard is completed. I implemented this, but unfortunately found out that EventToCommand can only be added to Storyboards in Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4, but not in WPF or in Windows Phone 7. This obviously limits the usefulness of this change, but I decided to publish it anyway, because it is pretty damn useful in Silverlight… Why not in WPF? In WPF, Storyboards added to a resource dictionary are frozen. This is a feature of WPF which allows to optimize certain objects for performance: By freezing them, it is a contract where we say “this object will not be modified anymore, so do your perf optimization on them without worrying too much”. Unfortunately, adding a Trigger (such as EventTrigger) to an object in resources does not work if this object is frozen… and unfortunately, there is no way to tell WPF not to freeze the Storyboard in the resources… so there is no way around that (at least none I can see. In Silverlight, objects are not frozen, so an EventTrigger can be added without problems. Why not in WP7? In Windows Phone 7, there is a totally different issue: Adding a Trigger can only be done to a FrameworkElement, which Storyboard is not. Here I think that we might see a change in a future version of the framework, so maybe this small trick will work in the future. Workaround? Since you cannot use the EventToCommand on a Storyboard in WPF and in WP7, the workaround is pretty obvious: Handle the Completed event in the code behind, and call the Command from there on the ViewModel. This object can be obtained by casting the DataContext to the ViewModel type. This means that the View needs to know about the ViewModel, but I never had issues with that anyway. New class: NotifyPropertyChanged Sometimes when you implement a model object (for example Customer), you would like to have it implement INotifyPropertyChanged, but without having all the frills of a ViewModelBase. A new class named NotifyPropertyChanged allows you to do that. This class is a simple implementation of INotifyPropertyChaned (with all the overloads of RaisePropertyChanged that were implemented in BL0014). In fact, ViewModelBase inherits NotifyPropertyChanged. ViewModelBase does not implement IDisposable anymore The IDisposable interface and the Dispose method had been marked obsolete in the ViewModelBase class already in V3. Now they have been removed. Note: By this, I do not mean that IDisposable is a bad interface, or that it shouldn’t be used on viewmodels. In the contrary, I know that this interface is very useful in certain circumstances. However, I think that having it by default on every instance of ViewModelBase was sending a wrong message. This interface has a strong meaning in .NET: After Dispose has been executed, the instance should not be used anymore, and should be ready for garbage collection. What I really wanted to have on ViewModelBase was rather a simple cleanup method, something that can be executed now and then during runtime. This is fulfilled by the ICleanup interface and its Cleanup method. If your ViewModels need IDisposable, you can still use it! You will just have to implement the interface on the class itself, because it is not available on ViewModelBase anymore. What’s next? I have a couple exciting new features implemented already but that need more testing before they go live… Just stay tuned and by MIX11 (12-14 April 2011), we should see at least a major addition to MVVM Light Toolkit, as well as another smaller feature which is pretty cool nonetheless More about this later! Happy Coding Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• Understanding each other in web development

  - by Pete Hotchkin

  During my career I have been lucky enough to work in several different roles within web development with many extremely talented people, from incredible designers who were passionate about the placement of every pixel right through to server administrators and DBAs who were always measuring the improvements they were making to their queries in the smallest possible unit. The problem I always faced was that more often than not I was stuck in the middle trying to mediate between these different functions and enable each side to understand the other’s point of view. The main areas of contention that there have always been between these functional groups in my experience have been at 2 key points: during the build phase and then when there is a problem post-build. During both of these times it is often easier for someone to pass the buck onto someone else than spend the time to understand the other person’s perspective. Below is a quick look at two upcoming tools that will not only speed up the build phase for each function, but  also help when it comes to the issues faced once a site has been pushed live. In my experience a web project goes through several phases of development. The first of these is design, generally handled as Photoshop files which are then passed onto a front-end developer. This is the first point at which heated discussions can arise. One problem I’ve seen several times is that the designer doesn’t fully understand the platform constraints that need to be considered, and as a result has designed something that does not translate very well or is simply not possible. Working at Red Gate, I am lucky enough to be able to meet some amazing people and this happened just the other day when I was introduced to Neil Kinnish and Pete Nelson, the creators of what I believe could be a great asset in this designer-developer relationship, Mixture. Mixture allows the front end developer to quickly prototype a web page with built-in frameworks such as bootstrap. It’s not an IDE however, it just sits there in the background and monitors the project files in the background so every time you save a file from your favorite IDE, it will compile things like LESS, compact your JavaScript and the automatically refresh your test browser so you can see the changes instantly. I think one of the best parts of this however is a single button that pushes the changed files up to the web so the designer can instantly see how far the developer has got and the problem that he is facing at that time without the need to spend time setting up a remote server. I can see this being a real asset to remote teams where there needs to be a compromise between the designer and the front-end developer, or just to allow the designer to see how the build is progressing and suggest small alterations. Once the design has been built into the front end the designer’s job is generally done and there are no other points of contention between the designer and the other functions involved in building these web projects. As the project moves into the stage of integrating it into the back end and deploying it to the production server other functions start to be pulled in and other issues arise such as the back-end developer understanding the frameworks that they are using such as the routes that are in place in an MVC application or the number of database calls that the ORM layer is actually making. There are many tools out there that can actually help with these problems such as mini profiler that gives you a quick snapshot of what is going on directly in the browser. For a slightly more in-depth look at what is happening and to gain a deeper understanding of an application you may be working on though, you may want to consider Glimpse. Created by Nik and Anthony, it is an application that sits at the bottom of your browser (installed via NuGet) which can show you information about how your application is pieced together and how the information on screen is being delivered as it happens. With a wealth of community-built plugins such as one for nHibernate and linq2SQL (full list of plugins on NuGet). It can be customized directly to your own setup to truly delve into the code to see what is happening, and can help to reduce the number of confusing moments about whether it is your code that is going wrong or whether there is something more sinister happening directly on the server. All the tools that I have mentioned in this post help to do one thing above all, and that is to ease the barrier of understanding between the different functions that are involved in building and maintaining a web application. In my experience it is very easy to say “Well, that’s not my problem”, simply because the two functions involved don’t truly understand the other’s point of view. Software should not only be seen as a way to streamline our own working process or as a debugging tool but also a communication aid to improve the entire lifecycle of a web project. Glimpse is actually the project that I am the designer on and I would love to get your feedback if you do decide to try it out or if you would like to share your own experiences of working on web projects please fill in your details at https://www.surveymk.com/s/joinGlimpse  or add a comment below and I will get in touch with you.

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• An issue with tessellation a model with DirectX11

  - by Paul Ske

  I took the hardware tessellation tutorial from Rastertek and implemended texturing instead of color. This is great, so I wanted to implemended the same techique to a model inside my game editor and I noticed it doesn't draw anything. I compared the detailed tessellation from DirectX SDK sample. Inside the shader file - if I replace the HullInputType with PixelInputType it draws. So, I think because when I compiled the shaders inside the program it compiles VertexShader, PixelShader, HullShader then DomainShader. Isn't it suppose to be VertexShader, HullSHader, DomainShader then PixelShader or does it really not matter? I am just curious why wouldn't the model even be drawn when HullInputType but renders fine with PixelInputType. Shader Code: [code] cbuffer ConstantBuffer { float4x4 WVP; float4x4 World; // the rotation matrix float3 lightvec; // the light's vector float4 lightcol; // the light's color float4 ambientcol; // the ambient light's color bool isSelected; } cbuffer cameraBuffer { float3 cameraDirection; float padding; } cbuffer TessellationBuffer { float tessellationAmount; float3 padding2; } struct ConstantOutputType { float edges[3] : SV_TessFactor; float inside : SV_InsideTessFactor; }; Texture2D Texture; Texture2D NormalTexture; SamplerState ss { MinLOD = 5.0f; MipLODBias = 0.0f; }; struct HullOutputType { float3 position : POSITION; float2 texcoord : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; float3 tangent : TANGENT; }; struct HullInputType { float4 position : POSITION; float2 texcoord : TEXCOORD0; float3 normal : NORMAL; float3 tangent : TANGENT; }; struct VertexInputType { float4 position : POSITION; float2 texcoord : TEXCOORD; float3 normal : NORMAL; float3 tangent : TANGENT; uint uVertexID : SV_VERTEXID; }; struct PixelInputType { float4 position : SV_POSITION; float2 texcoord : TEXCOORD0; // texture coordinates float3 normal : NORMAL; float3 tangent : TANGENT; float4 color : COLOR; float3 viewDirection : TEXCOORD1; float4 depthBuffer : TEXTURE0; }; HullInputType VShader(VertexInputType input) { HullInputType output; output.position.w = 1.0f; output.position = mul(input.position,WVP); output.texcoord = input.texcoord; output.normal = input.normal; output.tangent = input.tangent; //output.normal = mul(normal,World); //output.tangent = mul(tangent,World); //output.color = output.color; //output.texcoord = texcoord; // set the texture coordinates, unmodified return output; } ConstantOutputType TexturePatchConstantFunction(InputPatch inputPatch,uint patchID : SV_PrimitiveID) { ConstantOutputType output; output.edges[0] = tessellationAmount; output.edges[1] = tessellationAmount; output.edges[2] = tessellationAmount; output.inside = tessellationAmount; return output; } [domain("tri")] [partitioning("integer")] [outputtopology("triangle_cw")] [outputcontrolpoints(3)] [patchconstantfunc("TexturePatchConstantFunction")] HullOutputType HShader(InputPatch patch, uint pointId : SV_OutputControlPointID, uint patchId : SV_PrimitiveID) { HullOutputType output; // Set the position for this control point as the output position. output.position = patch[pointId].position; // Set the input color as the output color. output.texcoord = patch[pointId].texcoord; output.normal = patch[pointId].normal; output.tangent = patch[pointId].tangent; return output; } [domain("tri")] PixelInputType DShader(ConstantOutputType input, float3 uvwCoord : SV_DomainLocation, const OutputPatch patch) { float3 vertexPosition; float2 uvPosition; float4 worldposition; PixelInputType output; // Interpolate world space position with barycentric coordinates float3 vWorldPos = uvwCoord.x * patch[0].position + uvwCoord.y * patch[1].position + uvwCoord.z * patch[2].position; // Determine the position of the new vertex. vertexPosition = vWorldPos; // Calculate the position of the new vertex against the world, view, and projection matrices. output.position = mul(float4(vertexPosition, 1.0f),WVP); // Send the input color into the pixel shader. output.texcoord = uvwCoord.x * patch[0].position + uvwCoord.y * patch[1].position + uvwCoord.z * patch[2].position; output.normal = uvwCoord.x * patch[0].position + uvwCoord.y * patch[1].position + uvwCoord.z * patch[2].position; output.tangent = uvwCoord.x * patch[0].position + uvwCoord.y * patch[1].position + uvwCoord.z * patch[2].position; //output.depthBuffer = output.position; //output.depthBuffer.w = 1.0f; //worldposition = mul(output.position,WVP); //output.viewDirection = cameraDirection.xyz - worldposition.xyz; //output.viewDirection = normalize(output.viewDirection); return output; } [/code] Somethings are commented out but will be in place when fixed. I'm probably not connecting something correctly.

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• Basic shadow mapping fails on NVIDIA card?

  - by James

  Recently I switched from an AMD Radeon HD 6870 card to an (MSI) NVIDIA GTX 670 for performance reasons. I found however that my implementation of shadow mapping in all my applications failed. In a very simple shadow POC project the problem appears to be that the scene being drawn never results in a draw to the depth map and as a result the entire depth map is just infinity, 1.0 (Reading directly from the depth component after draw (glReadPixels) shows every pixel is infinity (1.0), replacing the depth comparison in the shader with a comparison of the depth from the shadow map with 1.0 shadows the entire scene, and writing random values to the depth map and then not calling glClear(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT) results in a random noisy pattern on the scene elements - from which we can infer that the uploading of the depth texture and comparison within the shader are functioning perfectly.) Since the problem appears almost certainly to be in the depth render, this is the code for that: const int s_res = 1024; GLuint shadowMap_tex; GLuint shadowMap_prog; GLint sm_attr_coord3d; GLint sm_uniform_mvp; GLuint fbo_handle; GLuint renderBuffer; bool isMappingShad = false; //The scene consists of a plane with box above it GLfloat scene[] = { -10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 0.5, 0.0, 10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 1.0, 0.0, 10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 1.0, 0.5, -10.0, 0.0, -10.0, 0.5, 0.0, -10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 0.5, 0.5, 10.0, 0.0, 10.0, 1.0, 0.5, ... }; //Initialize the stuff used by the shadow map generator int initShadowMap() { //Initialize the shadowMap shader program if (create_program("shadow.v.glsl", "shadow.f.glsl", shadowMap_prog) != 1) return -1; const char* attribute_name = "coord3d"; sm_attr_coord3d = glGetAttribLocation(shadowMap_prog, attribute_name); if (sm_attr_coord3d == -1) { fprintf(stderr, "Could not bind attribute %s\n", attribute_name); return 0; } const char* uniform_name = "mvp"; sm_uniform_mvp = glGetUniformLocation(shadowMap_prog, uniform_name); if (sm_uniform_mvp == -1) { fprintf(stderr, "Could not bind uniform %s\n", uniform_name); return 0; } //Create a framebuffer glGenFramebuffers(1, &fbo_handle); glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo_handle); //Create render buffer glGenRenderbuffers(1, &renderBuffer); glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, renderBuffer); //Setup the shadow texture glGenTextures(1, &shadowMap_tex); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, s_res, s_res, 0, GL_DEPTH_COMPONENT, GL_FLOAT, NULL); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE); return 0; } //Delete stuff void dnitShadowMap() { //Delete everything glDeleteFramebuffers(1, &fbo_handle); glDeleteRenderbuffers(1, &renderBuffer); glDeleteTextures(1, &shadowMap_tex); glDeleteProgram(shadowMap_prog); } int loadSMap() { //Bind MVP stuff glm::mat4 view = glm::lookAt(glm::vec3(10.0, 10.0, 5.0), glm::vec3(0.0, 0.0, 0.0), glm::vec3(0.0, 1.0, 0.0)); glm::mat4 projection = glm::ortho<float>(-10,10,-8,8,-10,40); glm::mat4 mvp = projection * view; glm::mat4 biasMatrix( 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 1.0 ); glm::mat4 lsMVP = biasMatrix * mvp; //Upload light source matrix to the main shader programs glUniformMatrix4fv(uniform_ls_mvp, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(lsMVP)); glUseProgram(shadowMap_prog); glUniformMatrix4fv(sm_uniform_mvp, 1, GL_FALSE, glm::value_ptr(mvp)); //Draw to the framebuffer (with depth buffer only draw) glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, fbo_handle); glBindRenderbuffer(GL_RENDERBUFFER, renderBuffer); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex); glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT, GL_TEXTURE_2D, shadowMap_tex, 0); glDrawBuffer(GL_NONE); glReadBuffer(GL_NONE); GLenum result = glCheckFramebufferStatus(GL_FRAMEBUFFER); if (GL_FRAMEBUFFER_COMPLETE != result) { printf("ERROR: Framebuffer is not complete.\n"); return -1; } //Draw shadow scene printf("Creating shadow buffers..\n"); int ticks = SDL_GetTicks(); glClear(GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT); //Wipe the depth buffer glViewport(0, 0, s_res, s_res); isMappingShad = true; //DRAW glEnableVertexAttribArray(sm_attr_coord3d); glVertexAttribPointer(sm_attr_coord3d, 3, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 5*4, scene); glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 14*3); glDisableVertexAttribArray(sm_attr_coord3d); isMappingShad = false; glBindFramebuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, 0); printf("Render Sbuf in %dms (GLerr: %d)\n", SDL_GetTicks() - ticks, glGetError()); return 0; } This is the full code for the POC shadow mapping project (C++) (Requires SDL 1.2, SDL-image 1.2, GLEW (1.5) and GLM development headers.) initShadowMap is called, followed by loadSMap, the scene is drawn from the camera POV and then dnitShadowMap is called. I followed this tutorial originally (Along with another more comprehensive tutorial which has disappeared as this guy re-configured his site but used to be here (404).) I've ensured that the scene is visible (as can be seen within the full project) to the light source (which uses an orthogonal projection matrix.) Shader utilities function fine in non-shadow-mapped projects. I should also note that at no point is the GL error state set. What am I doing wrong here and why did this not cause problems on my AMD card? (System: Ubuntu 12.04, Linux 3.2.0-49-generic, 64 bit, with the nvidia-experimental-310 driver package. All other games are functioning fine so it's most likely not a card/driver issue.)

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• Having a hard time having consecutive animations for an attack

  - by Kelby Styler

  So I've been trying to figure this out for about 8 hours now...It's driving me nuts because I am pretty sure that it is something dead simple that I am just not understanding. I had everything working fine when I was just cycling through the animation: Idle - Attack - Attack 1 - Attack 2. Just in an infinite loop. The problem now is that I want it to go Attack - check if x time passes if ctrl pressed before x passes move to Attack 1, if not move back to Idle - Then either Attack 1 or Idle depending on how long has passed. I've almost gotten it a few time, but something always happens where it falls apart if I press ctrl too fast or after multiple cycles of the animation. Any help would be appreciated, I'm just at my wits end on this one. I've been looking at this so long that I just don't know where to go anymore. Code is below, here is the controller using UnityEngine; using System.Collections; public class MeleeAttack : MonoBehaviour { public int damage; public bool Attack; public bool Attack1; public bool Attack2; public bool Idle; private Animator animator; private int attnum = 0; private float count = 2f; private float timeLeft; //Gives value to damage output void MAttackDmg () { if (Input.GetKeyDown (KeyCode.RightControl) || Input.GetKeyDown (KeyCode.LeftControl)) { switch (attnum) { case (0): Attack = true; damage = 2; animator.SetBool ("Attack", Attack); attnum++; Idle = false; animator.SetBool ("Idle", Idle); timeLeft = count; break; case (1): Attack1 = true; damage = 2; animator.SetBool ("Attack1", Attack1); attnum++; Idle = false; animator.SetBool ("Idle", Idle); timeLeft = count; break; case (2): Attack2 = true; damage = 2; animator.SetBool ("Attack2", Attack2); attnum = 0; Idle = false; animator.SetBool ("Idle", Idle); timeLeft = count; break; } } if (Input.GetKeyUp (KeyCode.RightControl) || Input.GetKeyUp (KeyCode.LeftControl)) { switch (attnum) { case (0): Debug.Log ("false"); damage = 0; if (timeLeft <= 0f) { Attack2 = false; animator.SetBool ("Attack2", Attack2); Debug.Log ("t1"); Idle = true; animator.SetBool ("Idle", Idle); attnum = 0; timeLeft = count; } break; case (1): Debug.Log ("false1"); damage = 0; if (timeLeft <= 0f) { Debug.Log ("t2"); Attack = false; animator.SetBool ("Attack", Attack); Idle = true; animator.SetBool ("Idle", Idle); attnum = 0; timeLeft = count; } break; case (2): Debug.Log ("false2"); damage = 0; if (timeLeft <= 0f) { Attack1 = false; animator.SetBool ("Attack1", Attack1); Debug.Log ("t3"); Idle = true; animator.SetBool ("Idle", Idle); attnum = 0; timeLeft = count; } break; } } } // Use this for initialization void Awake () { animator = GetComponent<Animator> (); } // Update is called once per frame void Update () { timeLeft -= Time.deltaTime;; MAttackDmg (); } void Start (){ timeLeft = count; } }

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• Streaming desktop with avconv - severe sound issues

  - by Tommy Brunn

  I'm trying to do some live streaming in Ubuntu 12.10, but I'm having some problems with audio. More specifically, the quality is complete garbage and it's at least 10 seconds out of sync with the video. I'm using an excellent guide found here to set up my loopback devices so that I can combine the desktop audio with the microphone input. It seems to work, as I'm able to stream both audio and video to Twitch.tv. But, as I said, the audio quality is terrible. The microphone audio is very, very low, but if I increase it, I get a horrible garbled sound that is absolutely unbearable. Nothing like that is present during VoIP calls or when recording sound alone with the sound recorder, so it's not an issue with the microphone itself. The entire audio stream is also delayed about 10-15 seconds compared to the video stream. I put together an imgur album of my settings. Here is some example output from when I'm streaming: avconv version 0.8.4-6:0.8.4-0ubuntu0.12.10.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the Libav developers built on Nov 6 2012 16:51:11 with gcc 4.7.2 [x11grab @ 0x162fd80] device: :0.0+570,262 -> display: :0.0 x: 570 y: 262 width: 1280 height: 720 [x11grab @ 0x162fd80] shared memory extension found [x11grab @ 0x162fd80] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate Input #0, x11grab, from ':0.0+570,262': Duration: N/A, start: 1353181686.735113, bitrate: 884736 kb/s Stream #0.0: Video: rawvideo, bgra, 1280x720, 884736 kb/s, 30 tbr, 1000k tbn, 30 tbc [alsa @ 0x163fce0] capture with some ALSA plugins, especially dsnoop, may hang. [alsa @ 0x163fce0] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate Input #1, alsa, from 'pulse': Duration: N/A, start: 1353181686.773841, bitrate: N/A Stream #1.0: Audio: pcm_s16le, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 1536 kb/s Incompatible pixel format 'bgra' for codec 'libx264', auto-selecting format 'yuv420p' [buffer @ 0x1641ec0] w:1280 h:720 pixfmt:bgra [scale @ 0x1642480] w:1280 h:720 fmt:bgra -> w:852 h:480 fmt:yuv420p flags:0x4 [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] VBV maxrate unspecified, assuming CBR [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast SSSE3 FastShuffle SSE4.2 [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] profile Main, level 3.1 [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] 264 - core 123 r2189 35cf912 - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2003-2012 - http://www.videolan.org/x264.html - options: cabac=1 ref=2 deblock=1:0:0 analyse=0x1:0x111 me=hex subme=6 psy=1 psy_rd=1.00:0.00 mixed_ref=0 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=1 8x8dct=0 cqm=0 deadzone=21,11 fast_pskip=1 chroma_qp_offset=-2 threads=4 sliced_threads=0 nr=0 decimate=1 interlaced=0 bluray_compat=0 constrained_intra=0 bframes=3 b_pyramid=0 b_adapt=1 b_bias=0 direct=1 weightb=0 open_gop=1 weightp=1 keyint=250 keyint_min=25 scenecut=40 intra_refresh=0 rc_lookahead=30 rc=cbr mbtree=1 bitrate=712 ratetol=1.0 qcomp=0.60 qpmin=0 qpmax=69 qpstep=4 vbv_maxrate=712 vbv_bufsize=512 nal_hrd=none ip_ratio=1.25 aq=1:1.00 Output #0, flv, to 'rtmp://live.justin.tv/app/live_23011330_Pt1plSRM0z5WVNJ0QmCHvTPmpUnfC4': Metadata: encoder : Lavf53.21.0 Stream #0.0: Video: libx264, yuv420p, 852x480, q=-1--1, 712 kb/s, 1k tbn, 30 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: libmp3lame, 44100 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 712 kb/s Stream mapping: Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (rawvideo -> libx264) Stream #1:0 -> #0:1 (pcm_s16le -> libmp3lame) Press ctrl-c to stop encoding frame= 17 fps= 0 q=0.0 size= 0kB time=10000000000.00 bitrate= 0.0kbitframe= 32 fps= 31 q=0.0 size= 0kB time=10000000000.00 bitrate= 0.0kbitframe= 40 fps= 23 q=29.0 size= 44kB time=0.03 bitrate=13786.2kbits/s dup=frame= 47 fps= 21 q=31.0 size= 93kB time=2.73 bitrate= 277.7kbits/s dup=0frame= 62 fps= 23 q=29.0 size= 160kB time=3.23 bitrate= 406.2kbits/s dup=0frame= 77 fps= 24 q=23.0 size= 209kB time=3.71 bitrate= 462.5kbits/s dup=0frame= 92 fps= 25 q=20.0 size= 267kB time=4.91 bitrate= 445.2kbits/s dup=0frame= 107 fps= 25 q=20.0 size= 318kB time=5.41 bitrate= 482.1kbits/s dup=0frame= 123 fps= 26 q=18.0 size= 368kB time=5.96 bitrate= 505.7kbits/s dup=0frame= 139 fps= 26 q=16.0 size= 419kB time=6.48 bitrate= 529.7kbits/s dup=0frame= 155 fps= 27 q=15.0 size= 473kB time=7.00 bitrate= 553.6kbits/s dup=0frame= 170 fps= 27 q=14.0 size= 525kB time=7.52 bitrate= 571.7kbits/s dup=0 frame= 180 fps= 25 q=-1.0 Lsize= 652kB time=7.97 bitrate= 670.0kbits/s dup=0 drop=32 //Here I stop the streaming video:531kB audio:112kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 1.345945% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] frame I:1 Avg QP:30.43 size: 39748 [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] frame P:45 Avg QP:11.37 size: 11110 [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] frame B:134 Avg QP:15.93 size: 27 [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] consecutive B-frames: 0.6% 0.0% 1.7% 97.8% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] mb I I16..4: 7.3% 0.0% 92.7% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] mb P I16..4: 0.1% 0.0% 0.1% P16..4: 49.1% 1.2% 2.1% 0.0% 0.0% skip:47.4% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] mb B I16..4: 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% B16..8: 0.1% 0.0% 0.0% direct: 0.0% skip:99.9% L0:42.5% L1:56.9% BI: 0.6% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] coded y,uvDC,uvAC intra: 82.3% 87.4% 71.9% inter: 7.1% 8.4% 7.0% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] i16 v,h,dc,p: 27% 29% 16% 28% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] i4 v,h,dc,ddl,ddr,vr,hd,vl,hu: 22% 21% 14% 8% 8% 8% 7% 5% 7% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] i8c dc,h,v,p: 47% 22% 20% 11% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] Weighted P-Frames: Y:0.0% UV:0.0% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] ref P L0: 96.4% 3.6% [libx264 @ 0x165ae80] kb/s:474.19 Received signal 2: terminating. Any ideas on how I can resolve this? The video delay is perfectly acceptable, so I wouldn't think that it's a network issue that's causing the delay in the audio. Any help would be appreciated.

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• problem with loading in .FBX meshes in DirectX 10

  - by N0xus

  I'm trying to load in meshes into DirectX 10. I've created a bunch of classes that handle it and allow me to call in a mesh with only a single line of code in my main game class. How ever, when I run the program this is what renders: In the debug output window the following errors keep appearing: D3D10: ERROR: ID3D10Device::DrawIndexed: Input Assembler - Vertex Shader linkage error: Signatures between stages are incompatible. The reason is that Semantic 'TEXCOORD' is defined for mismatched hardware registers between the output stage and input stage. [ EXECUTION ERROR #343: DEVICE_SHADER_LINKAGE_REGISTERINDEX ] D3D10: ERROR: ID3D10Device::DrawIndexed: Input Assembler - Vertex Shader linkage error: Signatures between stages are incompatible. The reason is that the input stage requires Semantic/Index (POSITION,0) as input, but it is not provided by the output stage. [ EXECUTION ERROR #342: DEVICE_SHADER_LINKAGE_SEMANTICNAME_NOT_FOUND ] The thing is, I've no idea how to fix this. The code I'm using does work and I've simply brought all of that code into a new project of mine. There are no build errors and this only appears when the game is running The .fx file is as follows: float4x4 matWorld; float4x4 matView; float4x4 matProjection; struct VS_INPUT { float4 Pos:POSITION; float2 TexCoord:TEXCOORD; }; struct PS_INPUT { float4 Pos:SV_POSITION; float2 TexCoord:TEXCOORD; }; Texture2D diffuseTexture; SamplerState diffuseSampler { Filter = MIN_MAG_MIP_POINT; AddressU = WRAP; AddressV = WRAP; }; // // Vertex Shader // PS_INPUT VS( VS_INPUT input ) { PS_INPUT output=(PS_INPUT)0; float4x4 viewProjection=mul(matView,matProjection); float4x4 worldViewProjection=mul(matWorld,viewProjection); output.Pos=mul(input.Pos,worldViewProjection); output.TexCoord=input.TexCoord; return output; } // // Pixel Shader // float4 PS(PS_INPUT input ) : SV_Target { return diffuseTexture.Sample(diffuseSampler,input.TexCoord); //return float4(1.0f,1.0f,1.0f,1.0f); } RasterizerState NoCulling { FILLMODE=SOLID; CULLMODE=NONE; }; technique10 Render { pass P0 { SetVertexShader( CompileShader( vs_4_0, VS() ) ); SetGeometryShader( NULL ); SetPixelShader( CompileShader( ps_4_0, PS() ) ); SetRasterizerState(NoCulling); } } In my game, the .fx file and model are called and set as follows: Loading in shader file //Set the shader flags - BMD DWORD dwShaderFlags = D3D10_SHADER_ENABLE_STRICTNESS; #if defined( DEBUG ) || defined( _DEBUG ) dwShaderFlags |= D3D10_SHADER_DEBUG; #endif ID3D10Blob * pErrorBuffer=NULL; if( FAILED( D3DX10CreateEffectFromFile( TEXT("TransformedTexture.fx" ), NULL, NULL, "fx_4_0", dwShaderFlags, 0, md3dDevice, NULL, NULL, &m_pEffect, &pErrorBuffer, NULL ) ) ) { char * pErrorStr = ( char* )pErrorBuffer->GetBufferPointer(); //If the creation of the Effect fails then a message box will be shown MessageBoxA( NULL, pErrorStr, "Error", MB_OK ); return false; } //Get the technique called Render from the effect, we need this for rendering later on m_pTechnique=m_pEffect->GetTechniqueByName("Render"); //Number of elements in the layout UINT numElements = TexturedLitVertex::layoutSize; //Get the Pass description, we need this to bind the vertex to the pipeline D3D10_PASS_DESC PassDesc; m_pTechnique->GetPassByIndex( 0 )->GetDesc( &PassDesc ); //Create Input layout to describe the incoming buffer to the input assembler if (FAILED(md3dDevice->CreateInputLayout( TexturedLitVertex::layout, numElements,PassDesc.pIAInputSignature, PassDesc.IAInputSignatureSize, &m_pVertexLayout ) ) ) { return false; } model loading: m_pTestRenderable=new CRenderable(); //m_pTestRenderable->create<TexturedVertex>(md3dDevice,8,6,vertices,indices); m_pModelLoader = new CModelLoader(); m_pTestRenderable = m_pModelLoader->loadModelFromFile( md3dDevice,"armoredrecon.fbx" ); m_pGameObjectTest = new CGameObject(); m_pGameObjectTest->setRenderable( m_pTestRenderable ); // Set primitive topology, how are we going to interpet the vertices in the vertex buffer md3dDevice->IASetPrimitiveTopology( D3D10_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLELIST ); if ( FAILED( D3DX10CreateShaderResourceViewFromFile( md3dDevice, TEXT( "armoredrecon_diff.png" ), NULL, NULL, &m_pTextureShaderResource, NULL ) ) ) { MessageBox( NULL, TEXT( "Can't load Texture" ), TEXT( "Error" ), MB_OK ); return false; } m_pDiffuseTextureVariable = m_pEffect->GetVariableByName( "diffuseTexture" )->AsShaderResource(); m_pDiffuseTextureVariable->SetResource( m_pTextureShaderResource ); Finally, the draw function code: //All drawing will occur between the clear and present m_pViewMatrixVariable->SetMatrix( ( float* )m_matView ); m_pWorldMatrixVariable->SetMatrix( ( float* )m_pGameObjectTest->getWorld() ); //Get the stride(size) of the a vertex, we need this to tell the pipeline the size of one vertex UINT stride = m_pTestRenderable->getStride(); //The offset from start of the buffer to where our vertices are located UINT offset = m_pTestRenderable->getOffset(); ID3D10Buffer * pVB=m_pTestRenderable->getVB(); //Bind the vertex buffer to input assembler stage - md3dDevice->IASetVertexBuffers( 0, 1, &pVB, &stride, &offset ); md3dDevice->IASetIndexBuffer( m_pTestRenderable->getIB(), DXGI_FORMAT_R32_UINT, 0 ); //Get the Description of the technique, we need this in order to loop through each pass in the technique D3D10_TECHNIQUE_DESC techDesc; m_pTechnique->GetDesc( &techDesc ); //Loop through the passes in the technique for( UINT p = 0; p < techDesc.Passes; ++p ) { //Get a pass at current index and apply it m_pTechnique->GetPassByIndex( p )->Apply( 0 ); //Draw call md3dDevice->DrawIndexed(m_pTestRenderable->getNumOfIndices(),0,0); //m_pD3D10Device->Draw(m_pTestRenderable->getNumOfVerts(),0); } Is there anything I've clearly done wrong or are missing? Spent 2 weeks trying to workout what on earth I've done wrong to no avail. Any insight a fresh pair eyes could give on this would be great.

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• 2D Selective Gaussian Blur

  - by Joshua Thomas

  I am attempting to use Gaussian blur on a 2D platform game, selectively blurring specific types of platforms with different amounts. I am currently just messing around with simple test code, trying to get it to work correctly. What I need to eventually do is create three separate render targets, leave one normal, blur one slightly, and blur the last heavily, then recombine on the screen. Where I am now is I have successfully drawn into a new render target and performed the gaussian blur on it, but when I draw it back to the screen everything is purple aside from the platforms I drew to the target. This is my .fx file: #define RADIUS 7 #define KERNEL_SIZE (RADIUS * 2 + 1) //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // Globals. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- float weights[KERNEL_SIZE]; float2 offsets[KERNEL_SIZE]; //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // Textures. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- texture colorMapTexture; sampler2D colorMap = sampler_state { Texture = <colorMapTexture>; MipFilter = Linear; MinFilter = Linear; MagFilter = Linear; }; //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // Pixel Shaders. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- float4 PS_GaussianBlur(float2 texCoord : TEXCOORD) : COLOR0 { float4 color = float4(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); for (int i = 0; i < KERNEL_SIZE; ++i) color += tex2D(colorMap, texCoord + offsets[i]) * weights[i]; return color; } //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- // Techniques. //----------------------------------------------------------------------------- technique GaussianBlur { pass { PixelShader = compile ps_2_0 PS_GaussianBlur(); } } This is the code I'm using for the gaussian blur: public Texture2D PerformGaussianBlur(Texture2D srcTexture, RenderTarget2D renderTarget1, RenderTarget2D renderTarget2, SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { if (effect == null) throw new InvalidOperationException("GaussianBlur.fx effect not loaded."); Texture2D outputTexture = null; Rectangle srcRect = new Rectangle(0, 0, srcTexture.Width, srcTexture.Height); Rectangle destRect1 = new Rectangle(0, 0, renderTarget1.Width, renderTarget1.Height); Rectangle destRect2 = new Rectangle(0, 0, renderTarget2.Width, renderTarget2.Height); // Perform horizontal Gaussian blur. game.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(renderTarget1); effect.CurrentTechnique = effect.Techniques["GaussianBlur"]; effect.Parameters["weights"].SetValue(kernel); effect.Parameters["colorMapTexture"].SetValue(srcTexture); effect.Parameters["offsets"].SetValue(offsetsHoriz); spriteBatch.Begin(0, BlendState.Opaque, null, null, null, effect); spriteBatch.Draw(srcTexture, destRect1, Color.White); spriteBatch.End(); // Perform vertical Gaussian blur. game.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(renderTarget2); outputTexture = (Texture2D)renderTarget1; effect.Parameters["colorMapTexture"].SetValue(outputTexture); effect.Parameters["offsets"].SetValue(offsetsVert); spriteBatch.Begin(0, BlendState.Opaque, null, null, null, effect); spriteBatch.Draw(outputTexture, destRect2, Color.White); spriteBatch.End(); // Return the Gaussian blurred texture. game.GraphicsDevice.SetRenderTarget(null); outputTexture = (Texture2D)renderTarget2; return outputTexture; } And this is the draw method affected: public void Draw(SpriteBatch spriteBatch) { device.SetRenderTarget(maxBlur); spriteBatch.Begin(); foreach (Brick brick in blueBricks) brick.Draw(spriteBatch); spriteBatch.End(); blue = gBlur.PerformGaussianBlur((Texture2D) maxBlur, helperTarget, maxBlur, spriteBatch); spriteBatch.Begin(); device.SetRenderTarget(null); foreach (Brick brick in redBricks) brick.Draw(spriteBatch); foreach (Brick brick in greenBricks) brick.Draw(spriteBatch); spriteBatch.Draw(blue, new Rectangle(0, 0, blue.Width, blue.Height), Color.White); foreach (Brick brick in purpleBricks) brick.Draw(spriteBatch); spriteBatch.End(); } I'm sorry about the massive brick of text and images(or not....new user, I tried, it said no), but I wanted to get my problem across clearly as I have been searching for an answer to this for quite a while now. As a side note, I have seen the bloom sample. Very well commented, but overly complicated since it deals in 3D; I was unable to take what I needed to learn form it. Thanks for any and all help.

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• CSM DX11 issues

  - by KaiserJohaan

  I got CSM to work in OpenGL, and now Im trying to do the same in directx. I'm using the same math library and all and I'm pretty much using the alghorithm straight off. I am using right-handed, column major matrices from GLM. The light is looking (-1, -1, -1). The problem I have is twofolds; For some reason, the ground floor is causing alot of (false) shadow artifacts, like the vast shadowed area you see. I confirmed this when I disabled the ground for the depth pass, but thats a hack more than anything else The shadows are inverted compared to the shadowmap. If you squint you can see the chairs shadows should be mirrored instead. This is the first cascade shadow map, in range of the alien and the chair: I can't figure out why this is. This is the depth pass: for (uint32_t cascadeIndex = 0; cascadeIndex < NUM_SHADOWMAP_CASCADES; cascadeIndex++) { mShadowmap.BindDepthView(context, cascadeIndex); CameraFrustrum cameraFrustrum = CalculateCameraFrustrum(degreesFOV, aspectRatio, nearDistArr[cascadeIndex], farDistArr[cascadeIndex], cameraViewMatrix); lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex] = CreateDirLightVPMatrix(cameraFrustrum, lightDir); mVertexTransformPass.RenderMeshes(context, renderQueue, meshes, lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex]); lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex] = gBiasMatrix * lightVPMatrices[cascadeIndex]; farDistArr[cascadeIndex] = -farDistArr[cascadeIndex]; } CameraFrustrum CalculateCameraFrustrum(const float fovDegrees, const float aspectRatio, const float minDist, const float maxDist, const Mat4& cameraViewMatrix) { CameraFrustrum ret = { Vec4(1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, -1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, 1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), Vec4(-1.0f, -1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f), }; const Mat4 perspectiveMatrix = PerspectiveMatrixFov(fovDegrees, aspectRatio, minDist, maxDist); const Mat4 invMVP = glm::inverse(perspectiveMatrix * cameraViewMatrix); for (Vec4& corner : ret) { corner = invMVP * corner; corner /= corner.w; } return ret; } Mat4 CreateDirLightVPMatrix(const CameraFrustrum& cameraFrustrum, const Vec3& lightDir) { Mat4 lightViewMatrix = glm::lookAt(Vec3(0.0f), -glm::normalize(lightDir), Vec3(0.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f)); Vec4 transf = lightViewMatrix * cameraFrustrum[0]; float maxZ = transf.z, minZ = transf.z; float maxX = transf.x, minX = transf.x; float maxY = transf.y, minY = transf.y; for (uint32_t i = 1; i < 8; i++) { transf = lightViewMatrix * cameraFrustrum[i]; if (transf.z > maxZ) maxZ = transf.z; if (transf.z < minZ) minZ = transf.z; if (transf.x > maxX) maxX = transf.x; if (transf.x < minX) minX = transf.x; if (transf.y > maxY) maxY = transf.y; if (transf.y < minY) minY = transf.y; } Mat4 viewMatrix(lightViewMatrix); viewMatrix[3][0] = -(minX + maxX) * 0.5f; viewMatrix[3][1] = -(minY + maxY) * 0.5f; viewMatrix[3][2] = -(minZ + maxZ) * 0.5f; viewMatrix[0][3] = 0.0f; viewMatrix[1][3] = 0.0f; viewMatrix[2][3] = 0.0f; viewMatrix[3][3] = 1.0f; Vec3 halfExtents((maxX - minX) * 0.5, (maxY - minY) * 0.5, (maxZ - minZ) * 0.5); return OrthographicMatrix(-halfExtents.x, halfExtents.x, -halfExtents.y, halfExtents.y, halfExtents.z, -halfExtents.z) * viewMatrix; } And this is the pixel shader used for the lighting stage: #define DEPTH_BIAS 0.0005 #define NUM_CASCADES 4 cbuffer DirectionalLightConstants : register(CBUFFER_REGISTER_PIXEL) { float4x4 gSplitVPMatrices[NUM_CASCADES]; float4x4 gCameraViewMatrix; float4 gSplitDistances; float4 gLightColor; float4 gLightDirection; }; Texture2D gPositionTexture : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_POSITION); Texture2D gDiffuseTexture : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_DIFFUSE); Texture2D gNormalTexture : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_NORMAL); Texture2DArray gShadowmap : register(TEXTURE_REGISTER_DEPTH); SamplerComparisonState gShadowmapSampler : register(SAMPLER_REGISTER_DEPTH); float4 ps_main(float4 position : SV_Position) : SV_Target0 { float4 worldPos = gPositionTexture[uint2(position.xy)]; float4 diffuse = gDiffuseTexture[uint2(position.xy)]; float4 normal = gNormalTexture[uint2(position.xy)]; float4 camPos = mul(gCameraViewMatrix, worldPos); uint index = 3; if (camPos.z > gSplitDistances.x) index = 0; else if (camPos.z > gSplitDistances.y) index = 1; else if (camPos.z > gSplitDistances.z) index = 2; float3 projCoords = (float3)mul(gSplitVPMatrices[index], worldPos); float viewDepth = projCoords.z - DEPTH_BIAS; projCoords.z = float(index); float visibilty = gShadowmap.SampleCmpLevelZero(gShadowmapSampler, projCoords, viewDepth); float angleNormal = clamp(dot(normal, gLightDirection), 0, 1); return visibilty * diffuse * angleNormal * gLightColor; } As you can see I am using depth bias and a bias matrix. Any hints on why this behaves so wierdly?

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• Win32 and Win64 programming in C sources?

  - by Nick Rosencrantz

  I'm learning OpenGL with C and that makes me include the windows.h file in my project. I'd like to look at some more specific windows functions and I wonder if you can cite some good sources for learning the basics of Win32 and Win64 programming in C (or C++). I use MS Visual C++ and I prefer to stick with C even though much of the Windows API seems to be C++. I'd like my program to be portable and using some platform-indepedent graphics library like OpenGL I could make my program portable with some slight changes for window management. Could you direct me with some pointers to books or www links where I can find more info? I've already studied the OpenGL red book and the C programming language, what I'm looking for is the platform-dependent stuff and how to handle that since I run both Linux and Windows where I find the development environment Visual Studio is pretty good but the debugger gdb is not available on windows so it's a trade off which environment i'll choose in the end - Linux with gcc or Windows with MSVC. Here is the program that draws a graphics primitive with some use of windows.h This program is also runnable on Linux without changing the code that actually draws the graphics primitive: #include <windows.h> #include <gl/gl.h> LRESULT CALLBACK WindowProc(HWND, UINT, WPARAM, LPARAM); void EnableOpenGL(HWND hwnd, HDC*, HGLRC*); void DisableOpenGL(HWND, HDC, HGLRC); int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow) { WNDCLASSEX wcex; HWND hwnd; HDC hDC; HGLRC hRC; MSG msg; BOOL bQuit = FALSE; float theta = 0.0f; /* register window class */ wcex.cbSize = sizeof(WNDCLASSEX); wcex.style = CS_OWNDC; wcex.lpfnWndProc = WindowProc; wcex.cbClsExtra = 0; wcex.cbWndExtra = 0; wcex.hInstance = hInstance; wcex.hIcon = LoadIcon(NULL, IDI_APPLICATION); wcex.hCursor = LoadCursor(NULL, IDC_ARROW); wcex.hbrBackground = (HBRUSH)GetStockObject(BLACK_BRUSH); wcex.lpszMenuName = NULL; wcex.lpszClassName = "GLSample"; wcex.hIconSm = LoadIcon(NULL, IDI_APPLICATION);; if (!RegisterClassEx(&wcex)) return 0; /* create main window */ hwnd = CreateWindowEx(0, "GLSample", "OpenGL Sample", WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW, CW_USEDEFAULT, CW_USEDEFAULT, 256, 256, NULL, NULL, hInstance, NULL); ShowWindow(hwnd, nCmdShow); /* enable OpenGL for the window */ EnableOpenGL(hwnd, &hDC, &hRC); /* program main loop */ while (!bQuit) { /* check for messages */ if (PeekMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0, PM_REMOVE)) { /* handle or dispatch messages */ if (msg.message == WM_QUIT) { bQuit = TRUE; } else { TranslateMessage(&msg); DispatchMessage(&msg); } } else { /* OpenGL animation code goes here */ glClearColor(0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); glPushMatrix(); glRotatef(theta, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); glColor3f(1.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f); glVertex2f(0.0f, 1.0f); glColor3f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); glVertex2f(0.87f, -0.5f); glColor3f(0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f); glVertex2f(-0.87f, -0.5f); glEnd(); glPopMatrix(); SwapBuffers(hDC); theta += 1.0f; Sleep (1); } } /* shutdown OpenGL */ DisableOpenGL(hwnd, hDC, hRC); /* destroy the window explicitly */ DestroyWindow(hwnd); return msg.wParam; } LRESULT CALLBACK WindowProc(HWND hwnd, UINT uMsg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam) { switch (uMsg) { case WM_CLOSE: PostQuitMessage(0); break; case WM_DESTROY: return 0; case WM_KEYDOWN: { switch (wParam) { case VK_ESCAPE: PostQuitMessage(0); break; } } break; default: return DefWindowProc(hwnd, uMsg, wParam, lParam); } return 0; } void EnableOpenGL(HWND hwnd, HDC* hDC, HGLRC* hRC) { PIXELFORMATDESCRIPTOR pfd; int iFormat; /* get the device context (DC) */ *hDC = GetDC(hwnd); /* set the pixel format for the DC */ ZeroMemory(&pfd, sizeof(pfd)); pfd.nSize = sizeof(pfd); pfd.nVersion = 1; pfd.dwFlags = PFD_DRAW_TO_WINDOW | PFD_SUPPORT_OPENGL | PFD_DOUBLEBUFFER; pfd.iPixelType = PFD_TYPE_RGBA; pfd.cColorBits = 24; pfd.cDepthBits = 16; pfd.iLayerType = PFD_MAIN_PLANE; iFormat = ChoosePixelFormat(*hDC, &pfd); SetPixelFormat(*hDC, iFormat, &pfd); /* create and enable the render context (RC) */ *hRC = wglCreateContext(*hDC); wglMakeCurrent(*hDC, *hRC); } void DisableOpenGL (HWND hwnd, HDC hDC, HGLRC hRC) { wglMakeCurrent(NULL, NULL); wglDeleteContext(hRC); ReleaseDC(hwnd, hDC); }

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• Your Next IT Job

  - by BuckWoody

  Some data professionals have worked (and plan to work) in the same place for a long time. In organizations large and small, the turnover rate just isn’t that high. This has not been my experience. About every 3-5 years I’ve changed either roles or companies. That might be due to the IT environment or my personality (or a mix of the two), but the point is that I’ve had many roles and worked for many companies large and small throughout my 27+ years in IT. At one point this might have been a detriment – a prospective employer looks at the resume and says “it seems you’ve moved around quite a bit.” But I haven’t found that to be the case all the time –in fact, in some cases the variety of jobs I’ve held has been an asset because I’ve seen what works (and doesn’t) in other environments, which can save time and money. So if you’re in the first camp – great! Stay where you are, and continue doing the work you love. but if you’re in the second, then this post might be useful. If you are planning on making a change, or perhaps you’ve hit a wall at your current location, you might start looking around for a better paying job – and there’s nothing wrong with that. We all try to make our lives better, and for some that involves more money. Money, however, isn’t always the primary motivator. I’ve gone to another job that doesn’t have as many benefits or has the same salary as the current job I’m working to gain more experience, get a better work/life balance and so on. It’s a mix of factors that only you know about. So I thought I would lay out a few advantages and disadvantages in the shops I’ve worked at. This post isn’t aimed at a single employer, but represents a mix of what I’ve experienced, and of course the opinions here are my own. You will most certainly have a different take – if so, please post a response! I also won’t mention a specific industry – I’ve worked everywhere from medical firms, legal offices, retail, billing centers, manufacturing, government, even to NASA. I’m focusing here mostly on size and composition. And I’m making some very broad generalizations here – I am fully aware that a small company might have great benefits and a large company might allow a lot of role flexibility.  your mileage may vary – and again, post those comments! Small Company To me a “small company” means around 100 people or less – sometimes a lot less. These can be really fun, frustrating places to to work. Advantages: a great deal of flexibility, a wide range of roles (often at the same time), a large degree of responsibility, immediate feedback, close relationships with co-workers, work directly with your customer. Disadvantages: Too much responsibility, little work/life balance, immature political structure, few (if any) benefits. If the business is family-owned, they can easily violate work/life boundaries. Medium Size company In my experience the next size company I would work for involves from a few hundred people to around five thousand. Advantages: Good mobility – fairly easy to get promoted, acceptable benefits, more defined responsibilities, better work/life balance, balanced load for expertise, but still the organizational structure is fairly simple to understand. Disadvantages: Pay is not always highest, rapid changes in structure as the organization grows, transient workforce. You may not be given the opportunity to work with another technology if someone already “owns” it. Politics are painful at this level as people try to learn how to do it. Large Company When you get into the tens of thousands of folks employed around the world, you’re in a large company. Advantages: Lots of room to move around – sometimes you can work (as I have) multiple jobs through the years and yet stay at the same company, building time for benefits, very defined roles, trained managers (yes, I know some of them are still awful – trust me – I DO know that), higher-end benefits, long careers possible, discounts at retailers and other “soft” benefits, prestige. For some, a higher level of politics (done professionally) is a good thing. Disadvantages: You could become another faceless name in the crowd, might not allow a great deal of flexibility,  large organizational changes might take away any control you have of your career. I’ve also seen large layoffs happen, and good people get let go while “dead weight” is retained. For some, a higher level of politics is distasteful. So what are your experiences? Share with the group! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Silverlight Cream Monday WP7 App Review # 1

  - by Dave Campbell

  I'm going to try something here... if it seems useful, I'll continue, if it doesn't, I'll stop... so give me feedback! There are *lots* of Apps in the WP7 Marketplace, and heaven help me, but the Marketplace sucks for finding stuff. I won't rehash what's already been said in the blogs, but I agree with one and all. I went out last Saturday to find 2 apps that I knew were released, and couldn't do so on my device. Even in the Zune app, it took quite a while to find them... ok, I'll back off a bit, because I just found out I can do 'Search' now if I know the name... I didn't think that was working before. So my thought is on Monday (like today), I will post a review of 5 apps/games I either use or have played with on my device. These are strictly my opinions, you understand, but hey... it's better than a poke in the eye with an iPhone! A few disclaimers:     Feel free to write me about your app and tell me about it. While it would be very cool to receive a whole bunch of xap files to review, at this point, for technical reasons, I'm unable to side-load my device. Since I plan on only doing this one day a week, and only 5, I may never get caught up, so if you send me some info, be patient. Re: games ... remember I'm old... I'm from the era of Colossal Cave and Zork. Duke-Nukem 2D and Captain Comic were awesome. I don't own an XBOX or any other game system, so take game reviews from my perspective -- who knows, it may be refreshing :) I won't pay for an app or game just to try it. If you expect me to test-drive your app, it's going to have to have a Free Trial. In this Issue:   Jingo! is the first app I bought, just to see what the experience was like. It's very much like a game we used to play in school in the Army in 1971 on paper we passed around. Sort of a cross between hangman and Mastermind, you try to figure out the hidden word in 5 tries. You get really good at 5-letter words after a while. I like this because you have to think, and you're not pressured by a clock Jingo! is by James Furdell and is $1.99 I reviewed René Schulte's Pictures Lab a while back, and have not changed my mind. This is an excellent app for playing with any photo on your device... one you've just taken, one you've synced from your PC, or one you've saved from email. I like this because you can get some cool effects for your photos, and it just works. Pictures Lab is by Schulte Software Development and is $1.99 Since I work as a consultant, and from home, I wanted something I could track my time with. I've test-driven all the contenders I could find so far on the phone, and so far I like ONTRACK! the best. If asked, I have some suggestions, but it's probably just the way I work or think. What I do like is I can tap a project to start/stop/restart a counter, and at the end of the day it shows me how much time I've been working. If there's a way to make an adjustment in case you forget to tap the counter, I don't know how to do it, and that's my biggest complaint. I like this because you can get a daily readout which you can also email as a spreadsheet. The daily results display is very good. ONTRACK! is by Qmino and is $2.99 Remember Item 4 above... I've been playing guitar for 48 years... obviously since before the invention of 'tuners', so I'm not as dependent upon these as some folks are. I've tried some in the past and have always felt I can do just as good by ear (I have perfect relative pitch). So, I gave this app by András Velvárt a dance just to see how it works, and it is surprisingly good. If you're used to one of the stage tuners this may take a little getting used to, but it does the job. The difference with this one is there is no real 'null' point inside which you can think your guitar is in tune. The soundwave stays visible on the device, and if it's moving to the right, your string is flat, if it's moving to the left, your string is sharp. Getting it exact might be tricky, but it is exact! If you need to rely on a tuner, this is a good choice in my opinion, exactly because of the sensitivity.. tune up with this and you're dead-on. Guitar Tuner is by Kinabalu Innovation Limited and is $0.99 Popper 2 is the WP7 version of a wildly popular game by Bill Reiss named Dr. Popper. You can get a trial, or you can now get a free lite version of the game. Popper 2 is a fast-paced bubble breaker game. I find it something fun to play when I just want to buzz out, but maybe the best review is that my daughter didn't want to give my phone back when I showed it to her, and always wants to grab my phone to play 'that game'. A fun distraction with great graphics and a great price Popper 2 is by Blue Rose Systems, LLC and is $1.29 Let me know what you think of the idea of doing reviews, or the layout/whatever, and Stay in the 'Light!   Twitter SilverlightNews | Twitter WynApse | WynApse.com | Tagged Posts | SilverlightCream Join me @ SilverlightCream | Phoenix Silverlight User Group Technorati Tags: Silverlight    Silverlight 3    Silverlight 4    Windows Phone MIX10

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• "Yes, but that's niche."

  - by Geertjan

  JavaOne 2012 has come to an end though it feels like it hasn't even started yet! What happened, time is a weird thing. Too many things to report on. James Gosling's appearance at the JavaOne community keynote was seen, by everyone (which is quite a lot) of people I talked to, as the highlight of the conference. It was interesting that the software for the Duke's Choice Award winning Liquid Robotics that James Gosling is now part of and came to talk about is a Swing application that uses the WorldWind libraries. It was also interesting that James Gosling pointed out to the conference: "There are things you can't do using HTML." That brings me to the wonderful counter argument to the above, which I spend my time running into a lot: "Yes, but that's niche." It's a killer argument, i.e., it kills all discussions completely in one fell swoop. Kind of when you're talking about someone and then this sentence drops into the conversation: "Yes, but she's got cancer now." Here's one implementation of "Yes, but that's niche": Person A: All applications are moving to the web, tablet, and mobile phone. That's especially true now with HTML5, which is going to wipe away everything everywhere and all applications are going to be browser based. Person B: What about air traffic control applications? Will they run on mobile phones too? And do you see defence applications running in a browser? Don't you agree that there are multiple scenarios imaginable where the Java desktop is the optimal platform for running applications? Person A: Yes, but that's niche. Here's another implementation, though it contradicts the above [despite often being used by the same people], since JavaFX is a Java desktop technology: Person A: Swing is dead. Everyone is going to be using purely JavaFX and nothing else. Person B: Does JavaFX have a docking framework and a module system? Does it have a plugin system?  These are some of the absolutely basic requirements of Java desktop software once you get to high end systems, e.g., banks, defence force, oil/gas services. Those kinds of applications need a web browser and so they love the JavaFX WebView component and they also love the animated JavaFX charting components. But they need so much more than that, i.e., an application framework. Aren't there requirements that JavaFX isn't meeting since it is a UI toolkit, just like Swing is a UI toolkit, and what they have in common is their lack, i.e., natively, of any kind of application framework? Don't people need more than a single window and a monolithic application structure? Person A: Yes, but that's niche. In other words, anything that doesn't fit within the currently dominant philosophy is "niche", for no other reason than that it doesn't fit within the currently dominant philosophy... regardless of the actual needs of real developers. Saying "Yes, but that's niche", kills the discussion completely, because it relegates one side of the conversation to the arcane and irrelevant corners of the universe. You're kind of like Cobol now, as soon as "Yes, but that's niche" is said. What's worst about "Yes, but that's niche" is that it doesn't enter into any discussion about user requirements, i.e., there's so few that need this particular solution that we don't even need to talk about them anymore. Note, of course, that I'm not referring specifically or generically to anyone or anything in particular. Just picking up from conversations I've picked up on as I was scurrying around the Hilton's corridors while looking for the location of my next presentation over the past few days. It does, however, mean that there were people thinking "Yes, but that's niche" while listening to James Gosling pointing out that HTML is not the be-all and end-all of absolutely everything. And so this all leaves me wondering: How many applications must be part of a niche for the niche to no longer be a niche? And what if there are multiple small niches that have the same requirements? Don't all those small niches together form a larger whole, one that should be taken seriously, i.e., a whole that is not a niche?

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• GameplayScreen does not contain a definition for GraphicsDevice

  - by Dave Voyles

  Long story short: I'm trying to intergrate my game with Microsoft's Game State Management. In doing so I've run into some errors, and the latest one is in the title. I'm not able to display my HUD for the reasons listed above. Previously, I had much of my code in my Game.cs class, but the GSM has a bit of it in Game1, and most of what you have drawn for the main screen in your GameplayScreen class, and that is what is causing confusion on my part. I've created an instance of the GameplayScreen class to be used in the HUD class (as you can see below). Before integrating with the GSM however, I created an instance of my Game class, and all worked fine. It seems that I need to define my graphics device somewhere, but I am not sure of where exactly. I've left some code below to help you understand. public class GameStateManagementGame : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { #region Fields GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; ScreenManager screenManager; // Creates a new intance, which is used in the HUD class public static Game Instance; // By preloading any assets used by UI rendering, we avoid framerate glitches // when they suddenly need to be loaded in the middle of a menu transition. static readonly string[] preloadAssets = { "gradient", }; #endregion #region Initialization /// <summary> /// The main game constructor. /// </summary> public GameStateManagementGame() { Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth = 1280; graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight = 720; graphics.IsFullScreen = false; graphics.ApplyChanges(); // Create the screen manager component. screenManager = new ScreenManager(this); Components.Add(screenManager); // Activate the first screens. screenManager.AddScreen(new BackgroundScreen(), null); //screenManager.AddScreen(new MainMenuScreen(), null); screenManager.AddScreen(new PressStartScreen(), null); } namespace Pong { public class HUD { public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Used in the Draw method titleSafeRectangle = new Rectangle (GameplayScreen.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.TitleSafeArea.X, GameplayScreen.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.TitleSafeArea.Y, GameplayScreen.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.TitleSafeArea.Width, GameplayScreen.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.TitleSafeArea.Height); } } } class GameplayScreen : GameScreen { #region Fields ContentManager content; public static GameStates gamestate; private GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; public int screenWidth; public int screenHeight; private Texture2D backgroundTexture; private SpriteBatch spriteBatch; private Menu menu; private SpriteFont arial; private HUD hud; Animation player; // Creates a new intance, which is used in the HUD class public static GameplayScreen Instance; public GameplayScreen() { TransitionOnTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1.5); TransitionOffTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0.5); } protected void Initialize() { lastScored = false; menu = new Menu(); resetTimer = 0; resetTimerInUse = true; ball = new Ball(content, new Vector2(screenWidth, screenHeight)); SetUpMulti(); input = new Input(); hud = new HUD(); // Places the powerup animation inside of the surrounding box // Needs to be cleaned up, instead of using hard pixel values player = new Animation(content.Load<Texture2D>(@"gfx/powerupSpriteSheet"), new Vector2(103, 44), 64, 64, 4, 5); // Used by for the Powerups random = new Random(); vec = new Vector2(100, 50); vec2 = new Vector2(100, 100); promptVec = new Vector2(50, 25); timer = 10000.0f; // Starting value for the cooldown for the powerup timer timerVector = new Vector2(10, 10); //JEP - one time creation of powerup objects playerOnePowerup = new Powerup(); playerOnePowerup.Activated += PowerupActivated; playerOnePowerup.Deactivated += PowerupDeactivated; playerTwoPowerup = new Powerup(); playerTwoPowerup.Activated += PowerupActivated; playerTwoPowerup.Deactivated += PowerupDeactivated; //JEP - moved from events since these only need set once activatedVec = new Vector2(100, 125); deactivatedVec = new Vector2(100, 150); powerupReady = false; }

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• Not getting desired results with SSAO implementation

  - by user1294203

  After having implemented deferred rendering, I tried my luck with a SSAO implementation using this Tutorial. Unfortunately, I'm not getting anything that looks like SSAO, you can see my result below. You can see there is some weird pattern forming and there is no occlusion shading where there needs to be (i.e. in between the objects and on the ground). The shaders I implemented follow: #VS #version 330 core uniform mat4 invProjMatrix; layout(location = 0) in vec3 in_Position; layout(location = 2) in vec2 in_TexCoord; noperspective out vec2 pass_TexCoord; smooth out vec3 viewRay; void main(void){ pass_TexCoord = in_TexCoord; viewRay = (invProjMatrix * vec4(in_Position, 1.0)).xyz; gl_Position = vec4(in_Position, 1.0); } #FS #version 330 core uniform sampler2D DepthMap; uniform sampler2D NormalMap; uniform sampler2D noise; uniform vec2 projAB; uniform ivec3 noiseScale_kernelSize; uniform vec3 kernel[16]; uniform float RADIUS; uniform mat4 projectionMatrix; noperspective in vec2 pass_TexCoord; smooth in vec3 viewRay; layout(location = 0) out float out_AO; vec3 CalcPosition(void){ float depth = texture(DepthMap, pass_TexCoord).r; float linearDepth = projAB.y / (depth - projAB.x); vec3 ray = normalize(viewRay); ray = ray / ray.z; return linearDepth * ray; } mat3 CalcRMatrix(vec3 normal, vec2 texcoord){ ivec2 noiseScale = noiseScale_kernelSize.xy; vec3 rvec = texture(noise, texcoord * noiseScale).xyz; vec3 tangent = normalize(rvec - normal * dot(rvec, normal)); vec3 bitangent = cross(normal, tangent); return mat3(tangent, bitangent, normal); } void main(void){ vec2 TexCoord = pass_TexCoord; vec3 Position = CalcPosition(); vec3 Normal = normalize(texture(NormalMap, TexCoord).xyz); mat3 RotationMatrix = CalcRMatrix(Normal, TexCoord); int kernelSize = noiseScale_kernelSize.z; float occlusion = 0.0; for(int i = 0; i < kernelSize; i++){ // Get sample position vec3 sample = RotationMatrix * kernel[i]; sample = sample * RADIUS + Position; // Project and bias sample position to get its texture coordinates vec4 offset = projectionMatrix * vec4(sample, 1.0); offset.xy /= offset.w; offset.xy = offset.xy * 0.5 + 0.5; // Get sample depth float sample_depth = texture(DepthMap, offset.xy).r; float linearDepth = projAB.y / (sample_depth - projAB.x); if(abs(Position.z - linearDepth ) < RADIUS){ occlusion += (linearDepth <= sample.z) ? 1.0 : 0.0; } } out_AO = 1.0 - (occlusion / kernelSize); } I draw a full screen quad and pass Depth and Normal textures. Normals are in RGBA16F with the alpha channel reserved for the AO factor in the blur pass. I store depth in a non linear Depth buffer (32F) and recover the linear depth using: float linearDepth = projAB.y / (depth - projAB.x); where projAB.y is calculated as: and projAB.x as: These are derived from the glm::perspective(gluperspective) matrix. z_n and z_f are the near and far clip distance. As described in the link I posted on the top, the method creates samples in a hemisphere with higher distribution close to the center. It then uses random vectors from a texture to rotate the hemisphere randomly around the Z direction and finally orients it along the normal at the given pixel. Since the result is noisy, a blur pass follows the SSAO pass. Anyway, my position reconstruction doesn't seem to be wrong since I also tried doing the same but with the position passed from a texture instead of being reconstructed. I also tried playing with the Radius, noise texture size and number of samples and with different kinds of texture formats, with no luck. For some reason when changing the Radius, nothing changes. Does anyone have any suggestions? What could be going wrong?

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• Use your own domain email and tired of SPAM? SPAMfighter FTW

  - by Dave Campbell

  I wouldn't post this if I hadn't tried it... and I paid for it myself, so don't anybody be thinking I'm reviewing something someone sent me! Long ago and far away I got very tired of local ISPs and 2nd phone lines and took the plunge and got hooked up to cable... yeah I know the 2nd phone line concept may be hard for everyone to understand, but that's how it was in 'the old days'. To avoid having to change email addresses all the time, I decided to buy a domain name, get minimal hosting, and use that for all email into the house. That way if I changed providers, all the email addresses wouldn't have to change. Of course, about a dozen domains later, I have LOTS of pop email addresses and even an exchange address to my client's server... times have changed. What also has changed is the fact that we get SPAM... 'back in the day' when I was a beta tester for the first ISP in Phoenix, someone tried sending an ad to all of us, and what he got in return for his trouble was a bunch of core dumps that locked up his email... if you don't know what a core dump is, ask your grandfather. But in today's world, we're all much more civilized than that, and as with many things, the criminals seem to have much more rights than we do, so we get inundated with email offering all sorts of wild schemes that you'd have to be brain-dead to accept, but yet... if people weren't accepting them, they'd stop sending them. I keep hoping that survival of the smartest would weed out the mental midgets that respond and then the jumk email stop, but that hasn't happened yet anymore than finding high-quality hearing aids at the checkout line of Safeway because of all the dimwits playing music too loud inside their car... but that's another whole topic and I digress. So what's the solution for all the spam? And I mean *all*... on that old personal email address, I am now getting over 150 spam messages a day! Yes I know that's why God invented the delete key, but I took it on as a challenge, and it's a matter of principle... why should I switch email addresses, or convert from [email protected] to something else, or have all my email filtered through some service just because some A-Hole somewhere has a site up trying to phish Ma & Pa Kettle (ask your grandfather about that too) out of their retirement money? Well... I got an email from my cousin the other day while I was writing yet another email rule, and there was a banner on the bottom of his email that said he was protected by SPAMfighter. SPAMfighter huh.... so I took a look at their site, and found yet one more of the supposed tools to help us. But... I read that they're a Microsoft Gold Partner... and that doesn't come lightly... so I took a gamble and here's what I found: I installed it, and had to do a couple things: 1) SPAMfighter stuffed the SPAMfighter folder into my client's exchange address... I deleted it, made a new SPAMfighter folder where I wanted it to go, then in the SPAMfighter Clients settings for Outlook, I told it to put all spam there. 2) It didn't seem to be doing anything. There's a ribbon button that you can select "Block", and I did that, wondering if I was 'training' it, but it wasn't picking up duplicates 3) I sent email to support, and wrote a post on the forum (not to self: reply to that post). By the time the folks from the home office responded, it was the next day, and first up, SPAMfighter knocked down everything that came through when Outlook opend... two thumbs up! I disabled my 'garbage collection' rule from Outlook, and told Outlook not to use the junk folder thinking it was interfering. 4) Day 2 seemed to go about like Day 1... but I hung in there. 5) Day 3 is now a whole new day... I had left Outlook open and hadn't looked at the PC since sometime late yesterday afternoon, and when I looked this morning, *every bit* of spam was in the SPAMfighter folder!! I'm a new paying customer After watching SPAMfighter work this morning, I've purchased a 1-year license, and I now can sit and watch as emails come in and disappear from my inbox into the SPAMfighter folder. No more continual tweaking of the rules. I've got SPAMfighter set to 'Very Hard' filtering... personally I'd rather pull the few real emails out of the SPAMfighter folder than pull spam out of the real folders. Yes this is simply another way of using the delete key, but you know what? ... it feels good :) Here's a screenshot of the stats after just about 48 hours of being onboard: Note that all the ones blocked by me were during Day 1 and 2... I've blocked none today, and everything is blocked. Stay in the 'Light!

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