Idea for the Bioshock game to be made a movie

a dystopic ayn rand storyline also identified as a continuation of the deus ex series is going to be made into a movie (http://www.stuff.co.nz/4520856a28.html). i'm sure its not the first person to think of this but it seems in this case there is a unique opportunity due to one of the critical in game mechanics: the ability to choose whether to harvest the little children to increase your magic power or to rescue them from their trance. Here’s the basic idea: 2 versions of the film, released at the same time, one is ‘the savior’ version, the other is ‘the harvester’. Film them both at the same time to keep costs down, each 85 minutes of film, both have unique goodies to help you better understand the world to incent seeing both films. As a consumer, I think this would be worth watching both, and as a studio, I think the cost structure is would be favorable and the folks seeing both movies would be pretty high, with the caveat that the differences have to be sufficient enough to have word spread its worth seeing both. Of course the dvd package will include both versions with an extra level of gameplay, etc. you’ve got the plotline, now harvest!

Consumer Spending and Inflation Visualization

A great visualization of consumer spending habits by the NY Times.

new iPhone SDK with OpenGL ES emulation

got this email from apple this week:

The fourth beta version of the iPhone SDK adds OpenGL ES support to the iPhone Simulator. You can now quickly build and test your mobile applications and handheld games using OpenGL ES on the iPhone Simulator.

Sweet! Now OGL ES programs can be written for the emulator.

Detailed report on housing overvaluation in America

A great report from National City on housing prices in American, how much they're overvalued, and where. Bend, OR is #1 most overvalued market in the US, and Portland is #11. See the .pdf here.

Evansville, IN high school team crushes competition!

way to go mater dei high school, 2,834 MPG. while a long time rival of my own castle high, this is an incredible feat! they beat out some of the best colleges in the world!

cool to see a little small town news make it to cNet.

read the article here.

unsnobbycoffee.com by McDonalds ?!?

Mcdonald's launches unsnobbycoffee.com and a whole list of cafe's in Washington! Taking on Starbucks in their home turf. Free coupon as well as mini-games on the website.

My experience at McCafe's in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand has been very positive.

Gas Leak, Yikes!

A few days ago I made some dinner…some fresh caught sockeye salmon, cream sauce, and some fresh noodles with peas on the side. It was frickin’ amazing. Anyway…later that day stacey asks if I smell gas. ‘well’, yeah, I do kinda, but just figured it was ‘cause I just cooked’. Next day, we still smell gas. Next morning she calls the gas company to come out and check out the situation. Sure enough, gas leak. I was out working on edits to a SIGGRAPH paper so I wasn’t around. Gas dude tells her where the leak is and how to fix it, she’s off to home depot, buys all the gear, gets in there and replaces the gas line. Cool or what?

Anyway, gas leak is gone thanks to Stacey.

Married!

had an awesome time at the Wynn in Vegas this weekend. was a total blast and great to see everyone. seemed we just got engaged a few months ago. time flies! next, i plan the portland gathering.

2007 Portland Street of Dreams data...

recently, a few friends and i were talking about the street of dreams. we were wondeirng if the homes for sale last year had sold yet in portland. here is the data. apparently, one of them has sold, the others are still on the market!

Joyous iPhone SDK is released!

Downloaded the iPhone SDK a few days ago and i've been playing around with it. had to scrounge up a macbook and download mac os x 10 to get started, no windows development capability (yet). the SDK is very cool, and apple has lots of great information on their website including some demo apps and extensive documentation....looks like they've done this before :). just playing right now but have a few proof of concepts of cool new things to do with an iphone i wanted to try out. ran into a few things i wish they would have spelled out right away on the site that i've learned:

you can use a simulator to do development (the Aspen Simulator), very nice with identical in look/feel to the iphone EXCEPT for the things that are not yet completed. a few of those details i've learned so far:

the accelerometer is not yet simulated. this was mentioned in a document buried somewhere deep in the SDK. at least provide us with a left/right button to simulate sending events along a specified x,y, or z axis ASAP please :)

there is no OpenGL ES simulation yet. i confirmed this later with some documentation, but i originally poked around for a few minutes to determing that this wasn't possible. the documentation also points out that rendering a transparent EAGL surface (alpha blending w/ the framebuffer) is 'very intensive for the GPU and not recommended'.

SDK developer vs. the developer program:

when i attach my iphone it asks me to have a newer version of firmware. since i do have the latest version i conclude that downside of only registering to download the SDK is that you cannot develop for a real device with just the SDK, you have to be in the developer program, and that was a very limited subset that i am not a member of.

for now, i'll workaround these limitations, plenty for me to get used to in the apple development world, including objective C, XCode, and i'm sure i can dig up an OGL simuator for my PC somewhere's on opengl.org if i need it. i can put the pieces together when i get access to the developer's firmware update.

for the OGL ES simulation, this should be easy enough, just compile into the simulator an OGL ES .dll that supports all the API calls into OGL ES via emulation on x86. this shouldn't be more than a week's worth of work provided the source code is already developed for an OGL ES software simulation, but i can understand it not being the top priority this early in the game. later they can connect it into the real GPU hardware on the platform you are running Aspen for acceleration, but this gets complicated with various IHVs hardware needing OGL ES drivers or wrappers around the definitely existing OGL drivers, etc.

just wanted to capture these notes for anybody else joining the revolution.