Thursday, July 16, 2009

the good read

Bruno, a friend of mine, gave me a link to a very nice essay today
http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtFeynman.php

It's about the early days of "Thinking Machines", a company that built parallel computers in the early 80s, and how Richard Feynman helped them in an almost fatherly role.

And stumbled upon anther creative mind today, Michel Gagne. Very cool illustrations and the latest game based on his universe looks fantastic.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

the 3dsmax sdk frustration

3dsmax sdk gives me so much love... not. Today found out (the hard way) that their BitArray.EnumSet function is broken in 64 bit...

on a sidenote the SDK states if you want something you draw in viewport to have a fixed nonscaling size, to use
vpt->GetVPWorldWidth(wpt)/360.0f;
however this isnt correct, you want to use
aspect = ((float)gw->getWinSizeX()/(float)gw->getWinSizeY());
aspect = max(aspect,1.0f);

(vpt->GetVPWorldWidth(wpt)*aspect)/(float)gw->getWinSizeX();