What’s wrong with Autodesk? Part I, Feedback Mechanisms
In the past month, I was part of a conference call with Autodesk and industry technical artists about integrating .NET into Maya (and how we use it in game development), and a couple weeks later we also had a couple Autodesk reps visit BioWare Austin to talk about their...
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The Development Isolation Layer
Joel Spolsky over at Joel on Software has an excellent article from 2006, called “The Development Abstraction Layer.” The gist of it is that, developers must be abstracted from the distractions of business. Management’s primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing...
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Generic Interfaces/Abstract Base Classes
I want to show a really useful pattern I’ve been taking advantage of recently. public interface IXElementSerializable where T : IXElementSerializable { T Deserialize(XElement element); XElement Serialize(); } public class MyType : IXElementSerializable { public MyType Deserialize(XElement element) { … } public XElement Serialize() { … } } I...
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Math Libraries
.NET 3d math libraries are a bit strange. There are a few options available- arguably the best one, XNA, only works for 32 bit. If you want an x64 math library, your pickings are slim. So, after having been through a number of the public offerings available, and having...
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Against Serialization with XmlSerialization
There’s a terrible monster in .NET’s closest, and its name is XmlSerialization. I love serialization to XML (or whatever your node-based text format of choice is), and I love XML in .NET and C#, but XmlSerialization is a horror. Let’s look at the requirements for XML serialization with the...
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Extending LinqToXml for better XML interaction
Many tools programmers or tech artists work with XML on a daily basis. For .NET developers, there are three ways to work with XML. You can use XML serialization (built in or custom), the System.Xml namespace, or LinqToXml (System.Xml.Linq). I usually advocate XML serialization (with custom serialization routines!), but...
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Blogging again!
I’m going to start blogging again (and more seriously for the first time). I’ve been doing most of my posting over at www.tech-artists.org the past few years, but now with increased free time (no more crunch for me), and an expertise in a relevant area (I feel like I’m...
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Speaker at GDC 2009
I’ll be on a panel for “Technical Art Techniques” at GDC 2009. I am so psyched about going, I can’t wait. My bio (with awesome Sith photo) is here: https://www.cmpevents.com/GD09/a.asp?option=G&V=3&id=589097 Money is tight but it is always well worth it to go if possible.
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Yes we can!
Not yes we did. There is still lots of work to do. Yes we can.
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zomg I still have a blog?
Odds are if you visit this blog, you know about the site I opened, www.tech-artists.org , a community for 3D technical artists. I probably won’t be updating this blog much, especially with tech stuff, since it will be on there mostly. Stop by, even students and hobbyists, there is...
