I’d previously never been to Alton Towers, but as always when in close proximity to theme parks, I reverted to a 10 year old, running around like zombies were after me - which, indeed they were on one of the rides. Coincidence or premonition? Fortunately, I was armed with dual laser pistols, the obvious choice when dispatching the lurching undead. To my embarrassment, my comrade-in-arms took down one more eldritch creature than me, which I attribute to devious arcane forces acting behind the scenes against me..

We explored all the major rides, which due to our perspicacity in going on a week day had generally short queue time, though an hour wait for a minute ride still seems a somewhat strange tradeoff. The sheer acceleration of Rita was ridiculous - watching the train before us, one moment it was standing still, the next it was running at 200 mph and I could not see it accelerate. Something has to be said for a railgun as a method of launching. Maybe a use in public transportation? Hand the passenger a parachute, aim the railgun at their destination, and GO!

Driving back from a friend’s house last night, I noticed the car at the end of my street was damaged pretty savagely, the back end one fused lump of plastic and metal. I continued along, thinking nothing of it except to lament people’s driving. Further down I observed skid marks, a severely dented car and one missing paint and a wing-mirror, at which point my brain chipped in to tell me that all might not be as it should. I continued round the corner to see a van parked outside my house; more specifically, parked in the side of a car, outside my house. The van was still wobbling in an attempt to extricate itself from the car, presumably to continue it’s path of destruction through those remaining unblemished.

To be honest, I was in two minds about getting involved more than taking a photo of the number plate. My car was fine, though if I’d got back a couple of minutes earlier the repair it’d got back from the day before might have been the least useful service in the history of man. The car in front of me must have come to the same conclusion as it steered round the mess and shot off - I can’t criticise really, the length of time it took to sort out later would make anyone think twice.

In the end, it was the van reversing out to continue it’s reign of terror that forced my hand. As I jogged over, my first impression was that the man had been drugged, he was so completely out of it. Then the smell of beer hit me. I made calming noises at him, carefully avoiding the words such as police and insurance amongst other, more explicit words. Taking the keys out of the engine and pocketing them (hey, I could do with an extra van), I took the guy by the arm and sat him on a wall. Asking one of the onlookers from the gathering crowd to call the police, I moved my car slightly off the road to avoid a similar fate to the others on the street. 15 seconds later, and the guy is weaving down the street. Running after him, people tell me later, might not be such a good idea, but he starts running at that point, and the chase is on!

Unsurprisingly, his athletic abilities are somewhat lacking. His fighting skills aren’t so restricted, however, and he puts up a bit of a fight. Fortunately for me, he manages to fall over himself, seemingly more docile once stunned by the concrete floor. As ever, the cavalry arrives at this point, two of my neighbours down the street, who ensure no further misadventures before the police arrive.

All in a night’s work, for The Vigilante!

The dawning moment of realisation happened a good step and a half towards the car, in a rush to get to the gym on time. Needless to say, I failed to run my allotted 7km that evening, though in hindsight the associated running around surely carried me a good portion towards it.

Now, in my youth, I was not unfamiliar with lock-picking, if for no other reasons than my chronic forgetfulness and the relatively simple locks on the doors. Finally, I had a chance to put all that practice into use… were my picks not in the house also. Other efforts involving credit cards and sticking my hand through the letterbox proved the house’s resilience beyond doubt. I suppose that’s a Good Thing, but not much consolation in these trying times.

The next course of action was to contact my landlord, in the optimistic hope of a spare key secreted in the grounds or at a helpful neighbour. Alas, this avenue too proved fruitless. Much love must thus be afforded my brother, who, after explaining my predicament and the exorbitant £150 fee for a locksmith, suggested the landlord post down a spare set of keys.

Now for the next couple of days, I’m staying at a friend’s house, spending their money and drinking their wine. Were it not for the limited wardrobe, I could see myself settling well into my new roll as hobo, slacker and general drain on society.

If your memory is as ignominious as mine and you’re sensible, it would be wise to leave a spare key with a neighbour. However, if you prefer a more.. exciting life, I would strongly advise installing flimsy doors locks. These have a proven track record of facilitating action-packed entrances as you kick down your door.

I’ve started buying in packs of ten.

More the fool I, Dave Hill, and a number of friends took up this gauntlet of insanity, vowing to complete this Herculean task or be-very-disappointed-with-ourselves (hastily changed from ‘commit seppuku with a blunt spoon’ by general consensus).

Starting at noon on Saturday, though we managed to complete a gruelling 16 hours, that still left us fully a third short of the goal. Surprisingly, the difficulty arose not with imbibing the considerable quantities of alcohol, but in remaining awake for the duration of the trial. As those who know me will attest, I’m far from a heavyweight, so I have to ascribe my survival and amazing lack of hangover to my choice of Kopparberg as my poison. Other scoffed at my choice of quite sweet pear cider, but when beer and cider drinkers were blowing out left and right, I remained strong in, sipping my way to sweet, sweet victory (well, in the right direction at the very least).

The accumulation of so much alcohol in one place was in and of itself was a truly epic event; bringing tears to grown men’s eyes and bowing their heads, fixing in their minds that moment so they might one day say to their children, and their children’s children, “I was there.” Yes, their children might be malformed, undernourished and in the care of social services, but at the least they’ll finally know the turning point in their father’s lives when they finally took upon themselves the mantle of alcoholism.

Without the vacuous hyperbole, here is a subset, not by any means exhaustive* of the hi-jinks surfacing on that fateful day:

• Top Hat-tastic action!
• Moshing sans shirts to Jamiroquai
  (yes people, apparently you can mosh to anything..)
• The Game of Mao (The first rule of Mao, is don’t talk about Mao)
• Exploding Lollipop Conkers - try it today!
• An exclusive Glow staff performance to 4, you lucky few!
• More sleeping people in a room than explainable by physics
• A face full of… socially inappropriate posturing and presentation

* The majority of stories may not be retold for litigation purposes.

Sunday was officially by far the best ‘day after’ ever, most significantly for a distinct lack of.. pain. The entire day I was waiting for the hangover to kick in, the worst I felt was actually the caffeine hit from the super-sized Frappachino we bought when we headed into town for jeans… and which we roundly failed to purchase, getting waylaid in the arts and crafts store and buying canvases instead. I’ve never painted on canvas before, it was like being 5 again! With longer arms.

Fishing for plumbers..

This video from Inside Xbox doesn’t do much to dispel that furtive feeling, but it does shed some light on the game that I’ve been working on for the past year.

Ideally, the base texture would be of high enough resolution to provide enough detail close to the viewer (using mipmapping to handle the lower sampling frequency at further distances). In fact, the use of mega-textures achieves just this, by texture streaming the relevant resolution segments into memory. However, this solution is not yet in wide use, next-gen engines such as id Tech 5 being among the first to implement it in real-time on current hardware.

Excluding this, the usual method is to stretch one texture over a large mesh to provide a low frequency basic colour and modulating it with a repeating texture to give the illusion of higher detail. The same is done with detail normal maps, but because the maps represent unit length direction vectors, the base and detail normals can’t simply be multiplied together the same way albedos (colours) can.

Primary normal map

Instead, the primary map perturbs (rotates) the interpolated vertex normal, passing the derived normal as input to the next normal map. Pertubation is performed by constructing a matrix composed of the current normal/binormal/tangent vectors that defines the ”basis” of the polygon. This is simply the vectors in world space representing the 3 axes that are perpendicular to the surface (normal), parallel to the surface (binormal) and a third vector also parallel to the surface but perpendicular to the other two vectors (tangent).

By multiplying the normal sampled from the normal map by this NBT matrix (actually the BTN matrix, as the normal is z-axis), the sampled normal is transformed into world space. Breaking down the matrix multiply, the transformation of the sampled normal (n₁) from tangent-space into world space (Normal′) becomes straight forward:

 Normal′ = n1.x * Binormal + n1.y * Tangent + n1.z * Normal

In the case of a flat normal with no deviation, n₁=(0,0,1), resulting in Normal′=Normal. The x and y components cause according Binormal & Tangent contributions, and as long as the basis axes and the sampled normal are all unit vectors, the resultant linear combination is also of unit length.

Detail normal map

After the primary normal map has been applies, you’re left with Normal′, Binormal and Tangent vectors as the new basis. As only the normal is required for the lighting equation, the fact that the Binormal and Tangent are no longer orthonormal (perpendicular) to Normal′ isn’t a problem with only a single normal map. With a second perturbation, the Binormal and Tangent need to be made orthonormal to the first perturbed normal Normal′ before the . This can be achieved by removing the Normal′ component in the Binormal vector and renormalising it. After that, it’s a simple matter of taking the cross product of the normal and binormal to derive the perturbed tangent:

 Binormal′ = normalise( Binormal - (Binormal . Normal′) * Normal′ )
 Tangent′  = Normal′ x Binormal′

Strictly this may not be the geodesic rotation (the least rotation required to map the basis to align with the perturbed normal) like you can get through the use of quaternions, but it provides consistent results for a relatively small performance impact.

The man had sat, willing himself to sleep, but slumber would not come to him in this place. Unendingly tended by servants, cleaning and replacing the lights as they faltered, the hall was free of all shadows. His wonder at first entering the hall, which had prompted him to privately name it the Court of Light, had long since passed. After this long bathed in the unceasing colour-sapping brilliance he had come to realise its true name, Hell.

Gotta catch ‘em all! (or something equally cheesy but less copyright infringing)

Couch Surfer - Level Up!

Matt: awesome to see you again, sorry about the inadvertant shopping spree.. you need to get on msn/googletalk more, let’s talk about getting you into the games industry.
Sina: cheers for keeping my conversation grounded in computing, to the bemusement of the others.
Sami, Lily & Xtn: you’re never online, so meh, but I’ll see you guys at Synergy.
Emma: you’re rubbish. Be around more - I expect you waiting on my beck and call.

Plans to come down again currently rely on my driving licence practical at the end of October, so if that goes well, I’ll come down the week I get back from China.
P.S. I’m going to China.

..with Dee on 1st Nov.

All new programmers are asked to create a game to familiarise themselves with the hardware & network. Not having anything particularly I wanted to port, and my ill-fated attempted at Tower Defense for the DS still on my mind, I began to create a TD game with the aid of some demo code. From this, I clocked in around 60 hours last week, what commitment! To be honest, I may have spent less time at work had I been able to drive home. Around here you really need a car to be able to do anything. Instead, I’ve been catching lifts with some friends who also live in Ashby de-la-Zouch. They’ve been going through a sprint week (with some deadline, in their case demos to Microsoft), and as such have been glued to their desks as good code monkeys.

In terms of life, as in “having a life” outside of coding, to which I often find myself unaccustomed, I arrived just in time to go to the Rare Summer Fete; a glut of free food and alcohol - and bouncy castles! There were worries that adults would not be allowed on this year, after someone managed to knee themselves in the face last yet. O fortune, we were allowed, though with slightly less enthusiasm due to the drizzling rain.

During lunch break in day to day work, there tends to be football on the pitch outside (weather permitting),  confined to table football otherwise. As it stands, my table football trick shots are being improved immensly. There are also two pool tables and a table tennis table, with talk of tournaments soon.

 I’ll be out in the first round.