That Slippery Slope
by colin
I’m standing at the top of a precipice staring down a slippery slope. Much of my day is spent dealing with ‘cutting edge’ visual effects which in layman’s terms means very non-realtime computer graphics. Granted, the size of the data sets we are dealing with would bring hundreds of PS3′s to their knees ( one would think, this hasn’t been tested – yet… ) but having spent a few years toying within the realm of highly optimized game code ( and the extremely intelligent developers ) my mind wanders.
I miss the chance of being able to rapidly prototype a dynamic simulation of some sort without having to wrap it up inside an archaic plugin architecture and bound by a badly designed API. This is how many of the tools and solutions are produced at work, duct taped to a 3rd party application where most time is spent in glue code. At home though I have no excuse ( except that nagging feeling that, if I spend all day at work on a computer why should I bother doing the same thing at home? we’ll come to this later ) and am now slowly constructing what I would consider a slightly soft design for a small framework that I’d like to implement that would allow me to investigate some ‘hunches’ I’ve had for a while.
Though not a game engine, for now, my focus is more towards that as a guideline vs. an interactive application such as Maya or Houdini. It’s not a project that should consume my time, rather a solution to help me quickly prototype ideas that may lead to further investigation. I’d like it to be scalable, threaded, possibly parallel and have the ability to harness the latest hardware acceleration. If possible I’m hoping to carve off afternoons here and there, as if it was my own self inflicted google project, rather than cutting into my evenings. More than just an experiment I’d rather it be seen as educational as I’m sure there will be elements I’ve never encountered before, which is all a part of my master plan ( a post for later ).
I miss the chance of being able to rapidly prototype a dynamic simulation of some sort without having to wrap it up inside an archaic plugin architecture and bound by a badly designed API. This is how many of the tools and solutions are produced at work, duct taped to a 3rd party application where most time is spent in glue code. At home though I have no excuse ( except that nagging feeling that, if I spend all day at work on a computer why should I bother doing the same thing at home? we’ll come to this later ) and am now slowly constructing what I would consider a slightly soft design for a small framework that I’d like to implement that would allow me to investigate some ‘hunches’ I’ve had for a while.
Though not a game engine, for now, my focus is more towards that as a guideline vs. an interactive application such as Maya or Houdini. It’s not a project that should consume my time, rather a solution to help me quickly prototype ideas that may lead to further investigation. I’d like it to be scalable, threaded, possibly parallel and have the ability to harness the latest hardware acceleration. If possible I’m hoping to carve off afternoons here and there, as if it was my own self inflicted google project, rather than cutting into my evenings. More than just an experiment I’d rather it be seen as educational as I’m sure there will be elements I’ve never encountered before, which is all a part of my master plan ( a post for later ).