This is interesting. Apparently they have managed to remove all those pesky Sines, Cosines and Tangents from trigonometry. I wonder if the new way will be faster when implemented for things like 3D.

It strikes me that many things are fighting to be the best thing in the world at the moment. This is the latest. You probably have to be interested in Archaeology to think so though.

The most modern looking UI available at this moment has to be MacOS, but applications like Google's Picasa also have a quite similar feel to them. Now that we're on the final straight before Vista comes along and makes Windows look different the question becomes what is it about these UIs that makes them so different? The most obvious is that a lot more colours are used, and there are gradients everywhere. Icons also become more colourful and detailed of course, with a more photo realistic style being used for things like recyle/trash bins and drives. This, of course, is a...

Ah, yet another year of not going to the PDC. Not that I'm too bothered, if I wanted to be there then I would have been, but I really wasn't expecting that many exciting things to be announced. Guess what? I was right, but luckily there are a few gems that I'm quite interested in. First up in C# 3. I'm not too excited by Lamda expressions because I still haven't clicked with that way of doing things yet. On the other hand LINQ looks like a very handy thing to have. Now, how many years before I can use it?...

I spent the day today trying to speed up my texture loading for my app as much as possible while, at the same time, trying to reduce the texture sizes as much as possible because the original data (which was a subset of the full data anyway) came on 11 CDs and you can only add so many extra DVDs to a product before it starts to annoy people. I don't have any conclusions yet, but when I do they're going to be so specific to my unusual use case that they're going to be irrelevant for everybody else so...

A couple of times a year we enter a panic because we need to get some software ready for some show or another. This generally means that I end up working of show specific code instead of doing things such as, say, fixing massive memory leaks in my Direct3D texture management. Now that I've got a chance to look at it again I think I may have fixed the problem, but I'm not sure how as all I did was fiddle slightly. I may have had a stupid bug where I was stopping the memory from getting GCd by holding...

When you have a map that has a resolution of 2.5 meters per pixel you start to wish that you understood why DirectX wasn't unloading textures when you need them to be gone. Stoopid managed pool, why don't they just die? A square KM of map takes up about 1MB and if you're having to coexist with existing code that is also memory hungry it soon starts to really hurt. Well it's one way of learning how too do 3D graphics I guess but I can't help but feel that I've started at the deep end. This probably explains why...

Here's something that I'm excited about: In two months I can start using VS.NET 2005 for all of my work. I love a new release of Visual Studio (having used it since version 2 or so), and ever since they've been tied in to releases of .NET they've been a lot more fun. The code I'm writing at the moment is just calling out for generics, but since it needs to be ready by next week I'm stuck with using 2003 and lots of casts. Of course the cynical out there say that the link between .net version and VS is...

This is the best thing ever invented by mankind. We can stop now, we have achieved perfection. It's the "buy this set" button that makes it so great.

I've spent the last few days borrowing code from that there internet thing to help my Managed DirectX code move along. Gradually I've noticed a bug that is in an awful lot of the example code out there, including books such as Tom Miller's kick start book. I can't verify that it's wrong in the code on the CD because I don't have it here, but it certainly is in my printing of the book. So what is the bug? It's the aspect ratio code for Matrix.PerspectiveForLH. Quite a lot of code out there is using form.Width / form.Height which,...