First things first: My system uptime is 44 days now. However, svchost.exe has crashed multiple times, so I'll be rebooting after this entry. I just got back from SIGGRAPH in San Diego. Overall, the conference went well. The first few grueling days involved setting up our portable CAVE on little sleep and empty stomachs. Once things got going, we all felt a lot better. People were impressed with ISU's work, and a ton of students wanted to apply to ISU's new HCI department. I got to meet Joe Lee (JL) at the Game Developers Birds of a Feature (BOF). He also came by ISU's booth to say hi a few more times. Speaking of the BOF, I got to see Jason Della Rocco of the IGDA and a bunch of the High Voltage guys. I also attended a Game Developers course thingy where some developers in the industry (Splinter Cell - Ubisoft Montreal; NWN - BioWare; Sly Cooper - I don't remember) talked about some of their experiences developing the games. The French guy from Ubisoft was hilarious. He sort of insulted id Software, Sony, and nvidia all in the same presentation. I also saw a presentation by the special effects folks for the Matrix. AWESOME. They talked about how they did facial expression scanning, motion capture, and cloth and hair modeling. nvidia's fairy chick was everywhere. She even danced for me. The OpenGL BOF was reassuring. It looks like OpenGL is still going places. 1.5 will be out before too long. When non-power-of-two textures were announced, the whole room cheered. :) Also: superbuffers RULE. Imagine being able to swap around the memory used for rendering, textures, and vertex arrays. You could render the scene into a superbuffer, then use that memory as a texture, and then as a vertex array. *drooool* Lots of people had displays that could show 3D without needing special glasses. Holograms and such. Not too expensive either... $15,000 for a 42" 3D plasma display. See here for info. San Diego is a pretty cool city. I never found a DDR machine, but I did manage to find LOTS of Initial D soundtrack imports for sale at a comic shop. $10 / CD. I simply had to get some. Otherwise, the food there wasn't that impressive. I only had three great meals in the whole week. You'd think at least Mexican food in San Diego would be okay... I didn't even leave a tip at that restaurant. You wouldn't believe how many nice cars were in SD! BMWs, Mercedes, and Lamborghinis were everywhere... Wish I had that much money. :) There were an amazing amount of young women and kids at SIGGRAPH. o_O I expected 95% male engineers, but that was definitely not the case. Last night (Thursday), we were tearing down our booth and the portacave when someone pointed out that a booth by ATI had a ton of books in a pile on the ground. They were lacking covers and were clearly intended for the trash. So we took all of the ones that looked interesting. The security guards even looked the other way. (and then decided they'd take some after we left.) :D Our layover in St. Louis on the flight back was 25 minutes. The first leg was delayed 23 minutes. We had boxes and boxes of heavy programming books from the conference. Our plane from SD came in at gate C35. The plane to DSM left at D32. You can imagine the rest... Let's just say we could barely move once we finally (somehow!) made it on the plane. Bryan and Andres are very interested in Empyrean! Bryan's a gameplay designer and programmer, and Andres is a great artist and programmer. I'll be scanning some of the concept art Andres whipped up and I'll put it on the web site. Okay, done!