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  • Hard crash when drawing content for CALayer using quartz

    - by Lukasz
    I am trying to figure out why iOS crash my application in the harsh way (no crash logs, immediate shudown with black screen of death with spinner shown for a while). It happens when I render content for CALayer using Quartz. I suspected the memory issue (happens only when testing on the device), but memory logs, as well as instruments allocation logs looks quite OK. Let me past in the fatal function: - (void)renderTiles{ if (rendering) { //NSLog(@"====== RENDERING TILES SKIP ======="); return; } rendering = YES; CGRect b = tileLayer.bounds; CGSize s = b.size; CGFloat imageScale = [[UIScreen mainScreen] scale]; s.height *= imageScale; s.width *= imageScale; dispatch_async(queue, ^{ NSLog(@""); NSLog(@"====== RENDERING TILES START ======="); NSLog(@"1. Before creating context"); report_memory(); CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB(); NSLog(@"2. After creating color space"); report_memory(); NSLog(@"3. About to create context with size: %@", NSStringFromCGSize(s)); CGContextRef ctx = CGBitmapContextCreate(NULL, s.width, s.height, 8, 0, colorSpace, kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast); NSLog(@"4. After creating context"); report_memory(); CGAffineTransform flipTransform = CGAffineTransformMake(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0, s.height); CGContextConcatCTM(ctx, flipTransform); CGRect tileRect = CGRectMake(0, 0, tileImageScaledSize.width, tileImageScaledSize.height); CGContextDrawTiledImage(ctx, tileRect, tileCGImageScaled); NSLog(@"5. Before creating cgimage from context"); report_memory(); CGImageRef cgImage = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(ctx); NSLog(@"6. After creating cgimage from context"); report_memory(); dispatch_sync(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{ tileLayer.contents = (id)cgImage; }); NSLog(@"7. After asgning tile layer contents = cgimage"); report_memory(); CGColorSpaceRelease(colorSpace); CGContextRelease(ctx); CGImageRelease(cgImage); NSLog(@"8. After releasing image and context context"); report_memory(); NSLog(@"====== RENDERING TILES END ======="); NSLog(@""); rendering = NO; }); } Here are the logs: ====== RENDERING TILES START ======= 1. Before creating context Memory in use (in bytes): 28340224 / 519442432 (5.5%) 2. After creating color space Memory in use (in bytes): 28340224 / 519442432 (5.5%) 3. About to create context with size: {6324, 5208} 4. After creating context Memory in use (in bytes): 28344320 / 651268096 (4.4%) 5. Before creating cgimage from context Memory in use (in bytes): 153649152 / 651333632 (23.6%) 6. After creating cgimage from context Memory in use (in bytes): 153649152 / 783159296 (19.6%) 7. After asgning tile layer contents = cgimage Memory in use (in bytes): 153653248 / 783253504 (19.6%) 8. After releasing image and context context Memory in use (in bytes): 21688320 / 651288576 (3.3%) ====== RENDERING TILES END ======= Application crashes in random places. Sometimes when reaching en of the function and sometime in random step. Which direction should I look for a solution? Is is possible that GDC is causing the problem? Or maybe the context size or some Core Animation underlying references?

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  • XSLT is not the solution you're looking for

    - by Jeff
    I was very relieved to see that Umbraco is ditching XSLT as a rendering mechanism in the forthcoming v5. Thank God for that. After working in this business for a very long time, I can't think of any other technology that has been inappropriately used, time after time, and without any compelling reason.The place I remember seeing it the most was during my time at Insurance.com. We used it, mostly, for two reasons. The first and justifiable reason was that it tweaked data for messaging to the various insurance carriers. While they all shared a "standard" for insurance quoting, they all had their little nuances we had to accommodate, so XSLT made sense. The other thing we used it for was rendering in the interview app. In other words, when we showed you some fancy UI, we'd often ditch the control rendering and straight HTML and use XSLT. I hated it.There just hasn't been a technology hammer that made every problem look like a nail (or however that metaphor goes) the way XSLT has. Imagine my horror the first week at Microsoft, when my team assumed control of the MSDN/TechNet forums, and we saw a mess of XSLT for some parts of it. I don't have to tell you that we ripped that stuff out pretty quickly. I can't even tell you how many performance problems went away as we started to rip it out.XSLT is not your friend. It has a place in the world, but that place is tweaking XML, not rendering UI.

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  • How can I determine the first visible tile in an isometric perspective?

    - by alekop
    I am trying to render the visible portion of a diamond-shaped isometric map. The "world" coordinate system is a 2D Cartesian system, with the coordinates increasing diagonally (in terms of the view coordinate system) along the axes. The "view" coordinates are simply mouse offsets relative to the upper left corner of the view. My rendering algorithm works by drawing diagonal spans, starting from the upper right corner of the view and moving diagonally to the right and down, advancing to the next row when it reaches the right view edge. When the rendering loop reaches the lower left corner, it stops. There are functions to convert a point from view coordinates to world coordinates and then to map coordinates. Everything works when rendering from tile 0,0, but as the view scrolls around the rendering needs to start from a different tile. I can't figure out how to determine which tile is closest to the upper right corner. At the moment I am simply converting the coordinates of the upper right corner to map coordinates. This works as long as the view origin (upper right corner) is inside the world, but when approaching the edges of the map the starting tile coordinate obviously become invalid. I guess this boils down to asking "how can I find the intersection between the world X axis and the view X axis?"

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  • 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

    - by Alan Smith
    For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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  • 3D engine for an online city/country simulation game (SimCity, Civilization)

    - by Dmitri
    I want to create a browser game, in which the user can control the development of a certain region (like SimCity or Civilization). One part of the task is rendering of the virtual world in a browser (3D or pseudo-3D). The rendering engine should a) work in a browser and b) ideally - be compatible with mobile devices (i. e. the representation of the virtual world should be visible both on desktop computer and mobile devices with the same codebase). Question: Which rendering engines (for SimCity-style games) fulfill aforementioned requirements (open and closed source) ?

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  • What should I worry about when changing OpenGL origin to upper left of screen?

    - by derivative
    For self education, I'm writing a 2D platformer engine in C++ using SDL / OpenGL. I initially began with pure SDL using the tutorials on sdltutorials.com and lazyfoo.net, but I'm now rendering in an OpenGL context (specifically immediate mode but I'm learning about VAOs/VBOs) and using SDL for interface, audio, etc. SDL uses a coordinate system with the origin in the upper left of the screen and the positive y-axis pointing down. It's easy to set up my orthographic projection in OpenGL to mirror this. I know that texture coordinates are a right-hand system with values from 0 to 1 -- flipping the texture vertically before rendering (well, flip the file before loading) yields textures that render correctly... which is fine if I'm drawing the entire texture, but ultimately I'll be using tilesets and can imagine problems. What should I be concerned about in terms of rendering when I do this? If anybody has any advice or they've done this themselves and can point out future pitfalls, that would be great, but really any thoughts would be appreciated.

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  • DRIconf in Ubuntu 64x plus ATI GPU or something more?

    - by Balask
    I've been trying to get Call of Duty 2 to work in Wine in Ubuntu. It gives me a black screen. So I tried the fix suggested by the wine apphq and downloaded DRIconf. Funny thing is that it can't find my direct rendering device. "Could not detect any configurable direct-rendering capable devices. DRIconf will be started in expert mode" When I enter into it in Expert Mode is just errors out anyway. fglrxinfo gives me: display: :0 screen: 0 OpenGL vendor string: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 Series OpenGL version string: 3.3.11627 Compatibility Profile Context That shows me my driver is installed correctl,y right? World of Goo which is Linux native and requires direct rendering works like a charm. So I'm wondering, is there some other workaround? Is there a bigger issue? Does me running 64-bit affect it at all?

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  • TextRenderer.DrawText renders Arial differently on XP vs Vista

    - by Michael
    I have a c# application that does text rendering, something on par with a simple wysiwyg text editor. I'm using TextRenderer.DrawText to render the text to the screen and GetTextExtentPoint32 to measure text so I can position different font styles/sizes on the same line. In Vista this all works fine. In XP however, Arial renders differently, certain characters like 'o' and 'b' take up more width than in Vista. GetTextExtentPoint32 seems to be measuring the string as it would in Vista though, with the smaller widths. The end result is that every now and then a run of text will overlap the text preceding it because the preceding text gets measured as smaller than it actually is on the screen. Also, my text rendering code mimics ie's text rendering exactly (for simple formatting and english language only) and ie text rendering seems to be consistent between vista and xp - that's how I noticed the change in size of the different characters. Anyone have any ideas about what's going on? In short, TextRenderer.DrawText and GetTextExtentPoint32 don't match up in xp for Arial. DrawText seems to draw certain characters larger and/or smaller than it does in Vista but GetTextExtentPoint32 seems to be measuring the text as it would in Vista (which seems to match the text rendering in ie on both xp and vista). Hope that makes sense. Note: unfortunately TextRenderer.MeasureString isn't fast or accurate enough to meet my requirements. I tried using it and had to rip it out.

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  • Real-time Java graph / chart library?

    - by Joonas Pulakka
    There was an earlier thread on Java graph or chart library, where JFreeChart was found to be quite good, but, as stated in its FAQ, it's not meant for real-time rendering. Can anyone recommend a comparable library that supports real-time rendering? Just some basic xy-rendering - for instance, getting a voltage signal from data acquisition system and plotting it as it comes (time on x-axis, voltage on y-axis).

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  • iPhone post-processing with a single FBO with Opengl ES 2.0?

    - by Jing
    I am trying to implement post-processing (blur, bloom, etc.) on the iPhone using OpenGL ES 2.0. I am running into some issues. When rendering during my second rendering step, I end up drawing a completely black quad to the screen instead of the scene (it appears that the texture data is missing) so I am wondering if the cause is using a single FBO. Is it incorrect to use a single FBO in the following fashion? For the first pass (regular scene rendering), I attach a texture as COLOR_ATTACHMENT_0 and render to a texture. glFramebufferTexture2D(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, GL_TEXTURE_2D, texturebuffer, 0) For the second pass (post-processing), I attach the color renderbuffer to COLOR_ATTACHMENT_0 glFramebufferRenderbuffer(GL_FRAMEBUFFER, GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0, GL_RENDERBUFFER, colorRenderbuffer) Then use the texture from the first pass for rendering as a quad on the screen.

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  • Best way of storing voxels

    - by opiop65
    This should be a pretty easy question to answer, and I'm not looking for how to store the voxels data wise, I'm looking for the theory. Currently, my voxel engine has no global list of tiles. Each chunk has it's own list, and its hard to do things like collision detection or anything that may use tiles that are outside of its own chunk. I recently worked on procedural terrain with a non voxel engine. Now, I want to start using heightmaps in my voxel engine. But, I have a problem. If each chunk has its own list, then it will be pretty difficult to implement the heightmaps. My real question is, is should I store a global list of voxels independent of the chunks? And then I can just easily perform collision detection and terrain generation. However, it would probably be harder to do things such as frustum culling. So how should I store them?

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  • Rapid prototyping and refactoring

    - by Puckl
    Sometimes when I start a small project (like an android app), I don´t know which approach will work out at the end, and I just go for one approach and give it a try. But if I never used this approach before (for a sort of application I´ve never programmed before) it is like stepping into unknown terrain. I don´t know which libraries to use (maybe I have to try out several libraries) and there are so many unkonwns (like: how to get raw audio data in android) So then my development process goes like this: Write a piece of code to see if the approach has a chance. (The more uncertain the approach is, the uglier the code gets) If it works, refactor a lot until it is beautiful I think it could be a waste of time if I planned my software design in detail at this point, it would be like planning a trip without a map. Is this part of aglie development? How do you deal with unknown terrain in software development?

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  • 3D collision detection with meshes using only raycasting?

    - by Nick
    I'm building a game using WebGL and Three.js, and so far I have a terrain with a guy walking on it. I simply cast a ray downwards to know the terrain height. How can I do this for other 3D objects, like the inside of a house? Is this possible by casting many rays in every direction of the player? If not, I would like to know how I can achieve the simplest collision detection possible for other meshes. Do you have to cast a ray to every triangle in every mesh nearby?

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  • Lighting a Voxel World Realistically

    - by sharethis
    I am new to game development and never implemented a complicated (and realistic) lighting. My game uses a 3d voxel terrain world (like Minecraft). To hold the data I use octrees. My goal is to render a more realistic world scene like in most voxel games. For that I want to use a bezier algorithm to round out the blocky world. Assume that I already have a large generated polygon of my terrain (or some of them). I heard of some techniques like volumetric light, global illumination, ... What approaches of a very realistic lighting are there for my "organic shaped" voxel game?

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  • Learning to optimize with Assembly

    - by niktehpui
    I am a second year student of Computer Games Technology. I recently finished my first prototype of my "kind" of own pathfinder (that doesn't use A* instead a geometrical approach/pattern recognition, the pathfinder just needs the knowledge about the terrain that is in his view to make decisions, because I wanted an AI that could actually explore, if the terrain is already known, then it will walk the shortest way easily, because the pathfinder has a memory of nodes). Anyway my question is more general: How do I start optimizing algorithms/loops/for_each/etc. using Assembly, although general tips are welcome. I am specifically looking for good books, because it is really hard to find good books on this topic. There are some small articles out there like this one, but still isn't enough knowledge to optimize an algorithm/game... I hope there is a modern good book out there, that I just couldn't find...

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  • How can I test if my rotated rectangle intersects a corner?

    - by Raven Dreamer
    I have a square, tile-based collision map. To check if one of my (square) entities is colliding, I get the vertices of the 4 corners, and test those 4 points against my collision map. If none of those points are intersecting, I know I'm good to move to the new position. I'd like to allow entities to rotate. I can still calculate the 4 corners of the square, but once you factor in rotation, those 4 corners alone don't seem to be enough information to determine if the entity is trying to move to a valid state. For example: In the picture below, black is unwalkable terrain, and red is the player's hitbox. The left scenario is allowed because the 4 corners of the red square are not in the black terrain. The right scenario would also be (incorrectly) allowed, because the player, cleverly turned at a 45* angle, has its corners in valid spaces, even if it is (quite literally) cutting the corner. How can I detect scenarios similar to the situation on the right?

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  • How to create a 3D world with 2D sprites similar to Ragnorak online?

    - by Romoku
    As far as I know Ragnorak Online is a 3D game world with 2D sprites overlayed. I would like to use this style in a game I am making in Unity, so I would like the player to be able to select little square tiles on the terrain. There are a couple routes I could take such as using a bunch of cubic polygons and linking them together or using one big map. The former approach doesn't seem to make any sense if the world is not flat as polygons wouldn't be reused often. The goal is to break down a 3D polygon into tiles which is heard to wrap my head around. I believe using something like an interval tree or array would be appropriate to store the rectangle grid, but how would I display a rectangle around the selection the player has his mouse over on the polygon terrain itself? Here is a screenshot. Here is a gameplay video. Here is the camera usage.

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  • Pixel perfect collision with paths (Android)

    - by keysersoze
    Hi I'm writing a game and I'm trying to do some pixel perfect collisions with paths. The player's character has a bitmask which looks for example like this: Currenly my code that handles player's collision with path looks like this: private boolean isTerrainCollisionDetected() { if(collisionRegion.op(player.getBounds(), terrain.getBottomPathBounds(), Region.Op.INTERSECT) || collisionRegion.op(player.getBounds(), terrain.getTopPathBounds(), Region.Op.INTERSECT)) { collisionRegion.getBounds(collisionRect); for(int i = collisionRect.left; i < collisionRect.right; i++) { for(int j = collisionRect.top; j < collisionRect.bottom; j++) { if(player.getBitmask().getPixel(i - player.getX(), j - player.getY()) != Color.TRANSPARENT) { return true; } } } } return false; } The problem is that collisions aren't pixel perfect. It detects collisions in situations like this: The question is: what can I do to improve my collision detection?

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  • Handling buildings in isometric tile based games

    - by MustSeeMelons
    A simple question, to which i couldn't find a definitive answer - how to manage buildings on a tiled map? Should the building be sliced in to tiles or one big image? EDIT: The game is being built from scratch using C++/SDL 2.0, it will be a turn based strategy, something like Fallout 1 & 2 without the hex grid, a simple square grid, where the Y axis is squished by 50%. Buildings can span multiple tiles, the characters move tile by tile. For now, the terrain is completely flat. Some basic functionality is in place, so I'm aiming to advancing the terrain and levels them selves - adding buildings, gates, cliffs, not sure about the elevation.

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  • Random/Procedural vs. Previously Made Level Generation

    - by PythonInProgress
    I am making a game (called "Glory") that is a top-down explorer game, and am wondering what the advantages/disadvantages of using random/procedural generation vs. pre-made levels are. There seems to be few that i can think of, other than the fact that items may be a problem to distribute in randomly generated terrain, and that the generated terrain may look weird. The downside to previously made levels is that I would need to make a level editor, though. I cannot decide what is better to use.

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  • Mise à jour : les statistiques Xiti de Developpez confirment les résultats d'AT Internet, sur la progression de Bing en Europe

    Recherche en ligne : Bing gagne du terrain en Europe Selon AT Internet D'après les derniers résultats du baromètre mensuel d'AT Internet , le moteur de recherche de Microsoft, Bing, serait en train de gagner du terrain en Europe. Le classement du top 5 des moteurs dans 5 pays d'Europe au cours du mois de février montre que Bing a gagné respectivement 0.4 et 0.3 point en Espagne et en France comparé à janvier 2011. En Allemagne, le moteur de Microsoft affiche une hausse de 0.2 point. Enfin, après avoir partagé la seconde position du top 5 britannique avec Yahoo! le mois dernier, Bing le relègue sévèrement à la 3ème position avec un écart de 0.7 point en part de visites (gain de 0....

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  • OcclusionQuery: how to ignore some objects?

    - by ApocKalipsS
    I'm trying to make a LensFlare effect when the player watch the sun in my XNA 4.0 Game. To do this, I use OcclusionQuery, here's my code: http://pastebin.com/meAkdwmD I also have some models, a terrain and a skybox. Here's my main Draw code: terrain.Draw(); model1.Draw(); model2.Draw(); skybox.Draw(); lensFlare.UpdateOcclusion(); lensFlare.Draw(); The problem is that the occlusion considers the sun to be behind the skybox, and the lensFlare wasn't showing up. So I moved lensFlare.UpdateOcclusion() before the drawing of the Skybox, and now the lensFlare appears, but my skybox is blinking (it's like it disappear and reappear at each frames...) How do I ignore the skybox in the occlusion?

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  • XNA VertexBuffer.SetData performance suggestions

    - by CodeSpeaker
    I have a 3d world in a grid layout where each grid cell contains its separate vertex and index buffer for the mesh/terrain of that cell. When the player moves outside the boundaries of his cell, i dynamically load more cells in his walking direction based on his viewing distance. This triggers x number of vertex and indexbuffer initializations depending on how many cells that needs to be generated and causes the framerate to drop annoyingly during this time. The generation of terrain data is handled in a separate thread and runs smoothly. The vertex and index buffers are added during the update cycle of the game loop. I´ve tried batching the number of cells to be processed to avoid sending too much data at once into the buffers, which worked ok at a shorter viewing distance (about 9 cells to process), but not as well at greater distances with around 30 cells to process. Any idea how i can optimize this?

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  • How do you load in a .bmp file to use it as a height map in C++?

    - by user1324894
    I need to create a terrain that can be used in C++ and opengl and I am told that using a height map is the way to go. I have a .bmp file that is a greyscale image that I would like to use. However, I do not know how to load that greyscale image into the project so that it can be used as a height map or how I can apply a texture to it to create terrain nor how to compute the normals that I'm told will be required. How would I go about achieving what I would like to do?

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  • Rendering a WPF Network Map/Graph layout - Manual? PathListBox? Something Else?

    - by Ben Von Handorf
    I'm writing code to present the user with a simplified network map. At any given time, the map is focused on a specific item... say a router or a server. Based on the focused item, other network entities are grouped into sets (i.e. subnets or domains) and then rendered around the focused item. Lines would represent connections and groups would be visually grouped inside a rectangle or ellipse. Panning and zooming are required features. An item can be selected to display more information in a "properties" style window. An item could also be double-clicked to re-focus the entire network map on that item. At that point, the entire map would be re-calculated. I am using MVVM without any framework, as of yet. Assume the logic for grouping items and determining what should be shown or not is all in place. I'm looking for the best way to approach the UI layout. So far, I'm aware of the following options: Use a canvas for layout (inside a ScrollViewer to handle the panning). Have my ViewModel make use of a Layout Manager type of class, which would handle assigning all the layout properties (Top, Left, etc.). Bind my set of display items to an ItemsControl and use Data Templates to handle the actual rendering. The drawbacks with this approach: Highly manual layout on my part. Lots of calculation. I have to handle item selection manually. Computation of connecting lines is manual. The Pros of this approach: I can draw additional lines between child subnets as appropriate (manually). Additional LayoutManagers could be added later to render the display differently. This could probably be wrapped up into some sort of a GraphLayout control to be re-used. Present the focused item at the center of the display and then use a PathListBox for layout of the additional items. Have my ViewModel expose a simple list of things to be drawn and bind them to the PathListBox. Override the ListBoxItem Template to also create a line geometry from the borders of the focused item (tricky) to the bound item. Use DataTemplates to handle the case where the item being bound is a subnet, in which case we would use another PathListBox in the template to display items inside the subnet. The drawbacks with this approach: Selected Item synchronization across multiple `PathListBox`es. Only one item on the whole graph can be selected at a time, but each child PathListBox maintains its own selection. Also, subnets cannot be selected, but would be selectable without additional work. Drawing the connecting lines is going to be a bit of trickery in the ListBoxItem template, since I need to know the correct side of the focused item to connect to. The pros of this approach: I get to stay out of the layout business, more. I'm looking for any advice or thoughts from others who have encountered similar issues or who have more WPF experience than I. I'm using WPF 4, so any new tricks are legal and encouraged.

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