Having cut most expenses, the bleeding of money has been reduced to a bare minimum and I can say we are mostly balancing our finances right now. Of course, this does not leave much for any unexpected events nor does it help towars an accelerated replayment of my debts. So I have decided to create a little contest which may help jumpstart my debt replayment.

The contest is quite simple, join for a free trial of Amazon Prime or purchase an Amazon Kindle eBook reader and you are entered to win a $1000 Amazon gift certificate. You can also be entered in the drawing simply be referring others into the contest. You can read more details about the contest here: http:\\www.SebbyLive.com\HMOContest1.aspx.

I have tried to keep the rules to the contest as simple as possible and you can enter via either a purchase or by referring others to the site (in hope it encourages my readers to spread the word). The only real restrictions is that the drawing will only occur if at least 200 subscriptions/purchases occur, which allows me to ensure sufficent referral funds are earned to at least cover the cost of the gift certificate. I will post frequent updates as to how the contest is progressing....

Yep, starting Dec 3rd, I will be moving from the ACES team to the Media Center Extender team.  Although somewhat of a sharp direction change from my previous position, the new job is still graphics related but obviously focuses on low-level and embeded technologies. I always wanted to work on something that was more of a driving technology than a singular product. Although this is not within the console environment as I would have initially thought, the Media Center Extender is essentially at the center of the digital home (or at least will be) and it is actually exciting to be part of such a central piece of technology!

Why am I moving on? Well this is a tough question. There is alot of factors, some personal, some professional. But overall, suffice to say that I had reached the point where I needed new challenges. With the new year comming up, the best time ever for a fresh start :)

I do wish the best to the ACES crew... They have alot heading their way, but I also know they can step up and deliver!

Also, I take this opportunity to officially retire my MSDN blog... From now on, all posts will be done on my own personal blog at www.SebbyLive.com

The purpose of this post is to address a question that was sent to me in regards to water reflections in general. The question actually is two questions... The first one asks me to explain the difference between the various Water 2.X settings (Low/Mid/High/Max) and why these settings have such an effect on perf. The second question was in regards sd to why dynamic reflections are only on bodies of water and not other wet surfaces (such as a wet runway). I want to keep the answer as simple as possible but at least provide some insight as to how things work and why we have to make some specific decisions some times...

Why no Reflections Elsewhere? 

This is actually a good questions. We do apply "reflections" to the other wet surfaces but the reflection map that is used is static and is not dynamic as with the water. There are a few reasons for this but I will cover the main ones. The approach that is used with water surface reflections is to assume that the water is a flat surface and to treat as if it was a plain mirror. With this assumption, we can generate a reflection map simply by reflecting the camera around the plane that is generated by the water surface and taking a "screen shot" from that point of view. This is a really nice and easy way to accomplish water reflections and when dealing with waves, we simply distort the lookup into this reflection map. This is far from perfect but does the job really well in this case.

But what about adding reflection maps on everything else? There are a few problems with this in general. The first one was implied in the first paraghaph "to assume that the water is a flat surface"... This is not generally true for general objects and this method breaks down rather quickly as soon as a surface is not planar. The next best alternative is to use a cubemap as a reflection map, but this automatically increases the cost by a factor of 6x. Going back to the specific case of runways and wet pavement, in the majority of cases, we could likely assume a flat surface. But there is another overall problem (which is also a problem with water in genral). What if there is more than one planar surface in view? What to do in the case where you can see two lakes that are at a different altitude within the same view? The correct approach in this case would be to generate a seperate reflection map for each planar surface that is visible. But as you can imagine, that would be impractical and would make the cost of rendering the reflection maps unpredictable. For water, we simply look at what is in view and make a good faith guess as to what is the predominent body of water and use its elevation to generate the water reflection map.

Also, in the case of water, we have nice vector data which outlines the contour of the body of water, making it easy for us to determine the outline of the bodies of water. For generic reflective materials, it is more difficult. We do have similar information for airport related asphalt but not necessarily for other reflective surfaces in the game. Dynamically generating a reflection map is something that can get hairy real quick so it was decided that, at least for FSX, we would focus only on water reflection.

Visual Results for the Various Detail Settings 

Instead of writing a long paragraph on this, I think a picture is worth a thousand words. I have captured a snapshot of the same scene using the various 2.x water settings. In the caption below the image I indicate what is rendered inside the reflection map and I've also turned on a debut feature which shows the content of the reflection map in the top-left corner. I will not go into the details of where all the performance goes, but you can likely extrapolate from the amount of detail in each map that the Max setting is going to cost LOTS MORE than the Low setting.

Water 2.X Max - All is rendered, equivalent to rendering the whole scene twice with the exception of a few optimizations which take advantage of the autogen and batching LOD system to reduce the overall number of draw calls.

Water 2.X High - Only the aircraft, full sky (with clouds), terrain and non-autogen scenery is rendered.

Water 2.X Med - Only the aircraft, full sky (with clouds) and non-autogen scenery is rendered.

Water 2.X Low - Only the aircraft  and sky (without clouds) is rendered.

My Winzip trial expired again, but this time I noticed something interesting. In addition to the "Buy Now" option, there was now a "Use TrialPay" option. Out of curiosity, I checked it out.

Turns out that they offer a new twist on affiliate marketting. Instead of loosing a sale when a customer does not feel like spending $XX for your software, you can use TrailPay to instead offer them a variety of partner offers for which they can join. If they do decide to signup for the offer, then TrialPay does pay you a portion of the affiliate proceeds and at the same time the customer gets a free copy of your software as a bonus. To quote their website:

TrialPay is an innovative payment method that enables customers to pay you by trying something else. Through TrialPay, customers can purchase your product or receive a gift certificate for your site by trying an offer from a reputable advertising partner. Because we have advertising partners who place high values on interacting with new customers, we can often pay you more for your product than the retail price. We have access to diverse offers from thousands of companies so your customers are guaranteed to find something they like. Why would you use TrialPay? The answer is simple — we are dramatically increasing sales for our merchants in the software, games, publishing, online services, and traditional retail goods industries.

I myself have signed up and will be implementing their checkout as part of the checkout process for EasyBarcode. I am unsure how many more sales it will generate but from my experience, my customers do prefer to have various payment options. And TrialPay do offer a plus as they can sign up for another offer for which they may be interested and at the same time and get your software/product as a bonus. If you are selling software online, this is an option to consider. Click the logo below to visit the TrialPay website to get more details...

Yay! Time for another post about some of the upcoming graphical changes in FSX SP2/Acceleration. This time I take a look at the topic of Bloom (as in DX9) vs HDR (High-Dynamic Range which is DX10 only). From some of the forum posts I have read, there seems to be alot of speculation as to what the difference really is and as to whether or not there is actually any difference (you just have to love those conspiracy theories). The point of this post is to give a side-by-side comparison of the two approaches and then I will make a brief talk as to what the differences actually are from a more technical point of view...

The two videos below compare the DX9 Bloom with the DX10 HDR...

If you take a close look at the videos, you can see some visible but subtle differences between the two clips... But the hot question, is what really happens behind the scenes...

Although the techniques used in DX9 and DX10 are different, they both aim to reproduce the same effect. To keep this simple, bloom or HDR is the effect that occurs when lights of various intensities affect the viewer (generally by darkening or oversaturating the image). The best way to picture the effect is to imagine that you are driving on a bright sunny day and that you approach a dark tunnel. From a distance, the inside of the tunnel appears black, which is due to the fact that the bright intensity of the sun forces our eyes to adjust themselfs to the ambient light intensity. This means that even though there is light inside the bridge, our eyes are adjusted to brighter intensities and the lesser intensities get filtered out (essentially the same thing as playing with exposure setting on a camera). The reverse is also true... If you are inside the tunnel looking towards the exit, it will generally appear quite bright, mostly white and washed out. This is due to the reverse process where the overall ambient lighting is low and the eye adjusts itself consequently meaning that any bright source of light will have a tendancy to appear saturated.

The exact detailed technical description of what is HDR and how it can be repsented can be quite long. Maybe the beat and easiest is to simply refer and quote the relevant Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_rendering):

Preservation of detail in large contrast differences
One of the primary features of HDRR is that both dark and bright areas of a scene can be accurately represented. Without HDR (sometimes called low dynamic range, or LDR, in comparison), areas that are too dark are clipped to black and areas that are too bright are clipped to white. These represented by the hardware as a floating point value of 0.0 and 1.0 for pure black and pure white, respectively.

Graphics processor company nVIDIA summarizes one of HDRR's features in three points[4]:

Bright things can be really bright
Dark things can be really dark
And details can be seen in both

Accurate preservation of light
Without HDRR, the sun and most lights are clipped to 100% (1.0 in the framebuffer). When this light is reflected the result must then be less than or equal to 1, since the reflected value is calculated by multiplying the original value by the surface reflectiveness, usually in the range 0 to 1. This gives the impression that the scene is dull or bland. However, using HDRR, the light produced by the sun and other lights can be represented with appropriately high values, exceeding the 1.0 clamping limit in the frame buffer, with the sun possibly being stored as high as 60000. When the light from them is reflected it will remain relatively high (even for very poor reflectors), which will be clipped to white or properly tonemapped when rendered.

Likewise when light passes through a transparent material, the light that passes through has a lower brightness than when the light entered. An example of the differences between HDR & LDR rendering can be seen in the images to the right, from Valve's Half-Life 2: Lost Coast which uses their game engine "Valve Source". In the example pictures, with low dynamic range rendering, much less light passes through the stained glass, causing the scene to be darker. The reason for this is that when light passes through a transparent material, it lowers the light’s brightness. In a simple example, say the stained glass can block 40% of the light. Since the highest value of the low dynamic range light is 1.0, this means a brightness of 0.6 is illuminating the other side. The high dynamic range light is perhaps 100, which means a brightness of 60 is illuminating the other side.

As I have mentioned, both the DX9 and the DX10 approach aim to accomplish the same goal but use different approaches.

DirectX 10 VS DirectX 9:

The easiest implementation is actually the one taken under DirectX 10. As mentioned above, true lighting intensities cannot be represented by a simple 0->1 range and DX10 guarantees floating-point texture support. The implementation takes advantage of the this feature and do all our rendering directly to a floating point texture. We then use this texture and apply standard texturing operation such as a blur filter (to create a bloom/glow) and a star filter which is used to crate the stat-like patterns that generally occur when the light traverses a imperfect medium such as glass.

Under DirectX9, the back-end (bluring and filtering) is mostly the same. However the main difference is that we do not use floating point textures. I can already hear the conspiracy theories right now that we didn't use the DX9 support for floating point textures to force users to upgrade to Vista and purchase new hardware. This is far from true....

The main problem under DX9 is that support for floating point textures was introduced late and is an optional feature (although most Shader 3.0 cards have some support for it). In addition, alpha-blending and filtering on floating point textures is not required and most cards under DX9 do not support these features which are not a requirement but can make a huge performance difference when we do the actual bluring and filtering passes (under DX9 we would have to potentially filter the texture manually wihin the shader, not the most efficient approach). Since proper floating-point texture was so sparse under DX9 and that DX10 had guaranteed support for the features we needed to implement proper HDR, we decided to keep the floating point implementation for DX10 only.

So what do we do under DX9? We seperate our Bloom rendering into two distinct passes which are only applied to blooming objects. In the first pass, we capture the color of the pixel as it would occur during regular rendering. In the second pass, instead of capturing the color of a pixel, we capture its intensity (which is in essense a multiplier to the base color). We then use these two sets of information to complete the bloom filtering in a similar way as it is done with the DX10 HDR. The main advantage of using this approach is that it can be implemented on any video cards that has support for shaders and render targets. There are a few drawbacks:

• The intensity map is sampled at a lower resolution (1/4 resolution) in order to optimize bandwith
• There is a small overhead due to the need of having to render two passes for any Bloom emitting object.
• Using a 8-bit value to represent the intensity does not give us as much fine grain detail as the use of a floating point texture. Consequently, the DX9 Bloom has a tendancy to get "hot" really fast and has less of the warm glow feeling that the DX10 HDR effect gives.

Redmond, WA (PRWEB) October 12, 2007 -- One of the world’s foremost publishers of computer programming guides Paradoxal Press is proud to announce the release of its second edition of “Practical .NET2 and C#2,” a guide to C# programming and using the .NET platform.

Released this month, the second edition of Practical .NET 2 and C#2 takes upon the success of the first edition which is the English adaptation of the best selling French title on the topic which has sold over 3,800 copies in the French market since its release (ISBN 978-09766132-5-1, C# programming. Its latest additions are sure to make it one of the greatest resources available on C# programming.

Paradoxal Press is also introducing an introductory program to allow purchasers of the first edition to upgrade to the second edition at a rate of $20.00. For more details on the second edition and the upgrade program, visit: https://www.ParadoxalPress.com/Book_PracticalUpgrade.aspx

In addition, Paradoxal Press is proud to announce its upcoming fall 2007 and spring 2008 lineup of new books, which is composed of two titles: “Practical Ruby on Rails” and “The Complete Effect and HLSL, DirectX 10 Edition.”

“Practical Ruby on Rails” is another adaptation of a French title, authored by Eric Sarrion, that is an in-depth reference of the new and buzzing Ruby on Rails technology which allows optimal web design by adopting a MVC (Model, View, Controller) model. Eric Sarrion explains everything with his legendary level of detail in a book that is very progressive. Practical Ruby on Rails is composed of five parts: An Introduction which shows in 15 pages how to install Ruby and to create a simple application. It then dives into the basics of computer programming using the Ruby language, which is required to take full advantage of Rails. The part on the topic of controllers shows how to create the actions that are meant to be called through the Web server based on the URL provided by the client. In the section about models, the programmers learn not only how to create and modify the objects of a database, but also how to properly design a relational database from the ground up. The part on views focuses on the rendering of the values computed by the controllers and the other objects of the model. This is where the reader will learn to page HTML code as well as making usage of CSS, JavaScript and Ajax. The final section tackles some of the various methods which come in handy on a regular basis. These are utility functions such sending emails or the publication of a Web service.
This title is a complete and progressive guidebook for any reader wanting to learn how to master Ruby on Rails. “Practical Ruby on Rails” is scheduled for release in early 2008.

“The Complete Effect and HLSL Guide, DirectX 10 Edition” takes from the success of the first edition “The Complete Effect and HLSL Guide” (ISBN 978-09766132-1-3). The topic of the first edition is focused around the development of graphical shaders and their management. It is written for any developers who have an interest in being efficient at using and integrating shaders within their applications. This computer programming book was written to serve as both a teaching and reference manual, making it a must-have to everybody from hobbyist programmers to professional developers. The approach taken throughout “The Complete Effect and HLSL Guide” makes it the perfect book for anyone who wants to integrate shaders into their application and take advantage of the power of the DirectX SDK and the HLSL shading language. The book covers the following topics:
* Introduction to both the HLSL shading language and effect file development including their detailed syntax and use.
* Complete reference with performance considerations to every HLSL and assembly shader instructions.
* Introduction the DirectX Effect Framework and complete overview to its API.
* Optimization tips and tricks to make the best out of shaders.
* Coverage of all the main components of the DirectX effect framework in addition to putting the pieces of the puzzle together allowing a programmer to develop a shader management framework.

The second edition, “The Complete Effect and HLSL Guide, DirectX 10 Edition,” takes off where the first edition left and introduces several revision and corrections as well as expanding the existing content to cover both the DirectX9 and DirectX10 platforms.

For more information about “Practical .NET2 and C#2” and to see how it helps its readers learn the art of computer programming and C# programming, or to see sample chapters or download code samples from the book, please visit www.PracticalDOT.net.

For more information about Paradoxal Press, visit www.ParadoxalPress.com

I have received my inventory on Friday and have updated the www.ParadoxalPress.com website so the book can now be purchased directly. We offer a special release pricing of $36.99, which includes free USA shipping. If you already have the first edition of the book, we are also offering an Upgrade Program which allows you to purchase the second edition for only $20.00.

Book Description
The second edition of Practical .NET 2 and C#2 takes upon the success of the first edition which is the English adaptation of the best selling French title on the topic which has sold over 3800 copies in the French market since its release. With the recent release of .NET 3.0 in 2007 and the ever increasing popularity of the .NET platform, the second edition of Practical .NET 2 and C#2 continues in the footsteps of the success of the first edition by offering revised and adapted content to meet the changes that came with the release of the .NET 3.0 Framework.

The book can also be purchased on Amazon.com using the following link: Practical .NET2 and C2 Second Edition: Harness the Platform, the Language, the Framework