If your non-Apple keyboard won't eject using F12...

...make sure that if your keyboard preferences (either in Apple's preferences or a preference list created by keyboard install software on your machine) offer a keyboard type of 'Generic', try setting it to this value.

My new Microsoft Ergonomic 7000 Wireless was set to ANSI for some reason after installation of the software on OSX and F12 would bring up dashboard (like it should) but would not trigger the open/close tray command when depressed longer (as it was supposed to.)

Switching the setting from 'Ansi' to 'Generic' solved this for me (for this keyboard the value was under 'Options' in the system preferences->Microsoft Keyboard.)

Hope this helps someone someday :).

Bought a new crApple Mac Pro for work...

...the other day.

Un-freaking-beleivable how ridiculously stupidly overpriced the thing is. Oh, don't get me wrong, it's sexy, sleek, and oh so very shiny with 12 cores, and multiple terabytes of drives (et cetera); but, how on earth are there people so stupid that they actually buy memory from crApple? 24GB of memory (you start with 6GB) from Apple is more than $2100. You can buy 24GB from Crucial for about $420 and then you get to keep 2 of the 1GB sticks that crApple gives you by default for a total of 26GB, plus you get save $1700 (think of all the iPads, iPhones, iPods, iTouches, iWhatevers you could buy with that.)

I love the Woz, hate the Jobs...

COLLADA rant

Ok, having added OgreXML support, and our own personal skeletal animation file format support, I decided to add COLLADA support to our skeletal animation system because art puke types are always talking about how great it is.

Now, COLLADA is a good idea that has been horribly HORRIBLY implemented. It is the very definition of needlessly complex and convoluted, the documentation is absolutely terrible, and to top it off, none of the exporters actually support the spec - only parts of it AND THEY SUPPORT IT DIFFERENTLY DEPENDING UPON THE TOOL USED. WTF? LOL.

Anyhow, I stumbled upon a real doozy this past week when supporting the 'library_animations' element. I came across a sample file with baked matrices (meaning that the rotations/translations/scales/et al. were all baked down into representation by a single matrix) that did something so bizarre I couldn't understand it for about 4 hours even though it was staring me in the face and even then I said "it can't be... It just can't be." Oh, but I was wrong, it was.

Apparently, COLLADA allows (and some exporters do this) animation data for a given set of keyframes to be exported not just as a giant clump of keyframes (all animations globbed together) but stored on an individual matrix element basis. I know, sound confusing/bizarre and you probably don't know what I mean by that so I will try to explain since I don't know a very concise way of explaining something that strikes me as so batsh*t crazy that I cannot fathom how some ultramaroon implemented this or though it was a good idea (maybe someone can enlighten me on this...)

What I mean is that even though COLLADA can already bizarrely store all animations lumped together as disassociated keyframes on a per bone basis (strange but I can understand why they might want to do this) storing a set of 16 floats per keyframe (representing a 4x4 matrix) - there is another format to the storage of this data that creates a child XML node FOR EVERY ELEMENT OF THAT 4X4 MATRIX AND STORES EACH KEYFRAMES VALUE FOR THAT PARTICULAR ELEMENT IN A FLOAT ARRAY.

If that still isn't clear (and probably wouldn't be for me because I'd be thinking - "no way, I'm not reading that correctly..." - I mean there's an actual XML element under:

<library_animations>
     <animation id="MySkeleton_Root">
          <source id="MySkeleton_transform_0__0_-output">

If the file has, say, 600 keyframes of animation in it, there will be (no sh*t) 600 floats in a float array under that source ID that are meant to be stuff in 600 different 4x4 matrices in the position MyMatrix[0][0]...

It strikes me as absolutely crazy as a loon to see 16 entries under a given bone with each entry holding a huge float array representing an individual element of a 4x4 matrix. WTF?

Why, for the love of all things holy and good, would you not simply store the damn thing as a float array of 16 * 600 floats under a single element? The matrix is baked - you can't extrapolate the original DCC toolset translations and orientations (although you can pull translations and orientations out you have no idea whether they're the exact ones used by the tool to generate the matrix) so WTF?

Sorry, that was just the cherry on the cake of my dealings with COLLADA, the amazing file format that seems to be dying a slow death at the hands of Khronos (who I like, but man is this a weird thing they've got here.)

*** END OF RANT ***

It is ridiculous that there seem to be no reasonable explanations of skeletal animation

...and that includes in books (there's a book devoted to it but it's a little horky [props to Nathan for the word], and the only other book I've seen on the topic depends on DirectX code to handle many things.)

I'm going to put one up on this blog shortly as I ran into someone looking for this information and I was shocked to find that Googling was not very helpful as there are bits and pieces of the information all over the place. It would be very helpful, I presume, for someone to post everything you really need to do from importing file formats (I'll probably explain OgreXML and maybe Collada as well), to blending vertex and skeletal animation, to skinning.

I know I wish someone had done that for me back in 1999. Hopefully I'll get it up this year. Probably a short series of posts starting with the background, the terminology (lots of terms for the same things [i.e. Bind Pose/Reference Pose, Palette Matrix/Inverse Model Space Matrix, et cetera...]

It will all be CPU based skinning so that it applies potentially to any language. Hmmm... I wonder if anyone has ever put a skeletal animation system in Flash before (I hate ActionScript/Flash programming, but that might be interesting.)

Nerd score...

It's certainly obvious how to game this thing but an honest evaluation led to:




I'm nerdier than I thought...

Lemonade... That cool refreshing drink...

After the fast last week, I didn't think I'd be hot for lemonade anytime soon; however, for some reason I had the urge for a glass of real lemonade today. I'd never made 'real' lemonade before but since I have some leftover lemons, I went ahead and took a tall glass (probably a little more than 20 fl. oz.) and put the juice from a good sized lemon in there, filled it with cold water and added a heaping teaspoon of suger. Stirred. Drank. Yeow! Sour. Ok, more sugar. Two more heaping teaspoons full. Stir for a few minutes to dissolve that much sugar into cold water. Taste. Delicious!

My daughter Kate wandered over and asked for a taste and since it was still really tart even though it was also sweet - I figured she'd make a face like 'Daddy you should not have given me that' but instead she started chugging. She then suggested that I help her (by picking her up and standing her on the kitchen counter) obtain the drinking cup of her choice and she would allow me to fill it with lemonade for her. She's very thoughtful that way. 5 minutes later, she was back for more lemonade. So, I had a little bit of tasty tasty lemonade today, and Kate had the rest.

Java JRE, IE8, and 64-bit systems...

I just put Windows 7 Ultimate on my HP QuadCore laptop, and after downloading and installing the latest 64-bit JRE from SUN, I found that it didn't appear to actually install properly. Applets wouldn't load, but java showed up through the command line. So, I went to 'manage add-ons' in IE8, and saw only 1 of the usual 2 SUN plug-ins. I figured I'd just had a screwy install, so I removed, re-downloaded (you never know) and re-installed. Bang, same problem.

At this point, I usually slow down and ensure I'm not being a complete idiot about something and I carefully evaluate my actions. Yes, this is Windows 7 Ultimate x64, yes I downloaded the x64 JRE 6, update 17. Ok, time to google. People having problems with this? After sifting through the inevitable mountains of detritus trying to find a nugget of useful information (should I have used Bing? ;)) I ran across a tiny little comment in forum about 17 posts down saying "Make sure it's IE8 x64 you're using..." Click. No way, I thought. I could understand and appreciate why Microsoft would install two versions of IE8 on an x64 system, but I figured there's no freakin' way the default IE to be used would be the 32-bit version, right? Wrong.

Turns out that that the default IE8 that shows up 'pinned' to the taskbar is the 32-bit version. Jerkoffs... So, 30 seconds later I had both added a quick launch toolbar to the tastbar (some idiot decided to remove this from Windows 7) and replaced 'IE8' with 'IE8 (x64).' Bingo applets showed up.