IGN PC put up a preview on their main page of one of the games I'm working on at Petroglyph

http://pc.ign.com/articles/997/997715p1.html

This game is really something else.  I suggest reading the article, but to summarize, it's a massively-multiplayer mix of action, RPG, and strategy.  There are a TON of different summons and spells, and your goal is to collect them and use them to your advantage.

Oh yeah, and it's FREE, with no monthly fee.

For iPhone.

I use this thing all the gosh darn time - internet, e-mail, music, gps, weather, notes . . . and occasionally as a phone.  The only thing my old Pocket PC did better was have a pull out keyboard, and copy and paste.

One down, one to go.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/03/apple-highlights-slew-of-new-features-coming-in-iphone-os-30.ars

I await a reconfigurable tactile display that lets me have a keyboard when I want and a large, smooth screen when I don't.  Also handy for the blind, I would think.

http://www.digital-dash.com/display.html

Aside from being a late night show host, the former Doritos spokesman, and a car fanatic with a huge garage (even writing the occasional, completely professional, non-humor laden editorial for car mags), he's also generous in his way.  Unemployed in Detroit?  Check out the free show he's giving:

http://www.leftlanenews.com/jay-leno-to-present-comedy-stimulus-plan-free-in-detroit.html

Not here, obviously, but on IGN, I just saw the most amazing friggin' iPhone commercial. At first it looked like a normal, irritating flash advertisement, but then, as part of the movie, the buttons on the top of IGN's page started spinning off and coming back again - all bouncing around and stuff like a cartoon.  I'm guessing that apple made the ad specifically to work with IGN's user interface and not that IGN provided them with a "make the buttons burst of the page" function.  Above and beyond the call of duty, really.

Here is IGN in all its commercial goodness:

http://www.ign.com

...although the lady reassured me that next year they would only charge about $900, to account for depreciation.

As it happens, I very recently moved from Orlando, FL to Henderson, NV.  Wanting to be able to vote in the national election, I filled out the Absentee Ballot Request form.  The form had a place to enter my Florida address, and a place to enter my non-Florida address to which I wanted the ballot sent.  It happens that I was still paying rent in Orlando so technically my address was valid.  This was about a month ago.  Well, time passed.  I had a gallstone attack, I went in for surgery, and I spent a lot of time in bed, in pain.  When I was finally well enough to walk to my apartment complex's mail room, I did not find my ballot waiting for me.

So I called the Orange County Supervisor of Elections.  The person who answered the phone informed me that it was too late to request a ballot.  After repeating to her that I'd already requested the ballot, she checked their records and informed me that it was sent to my Florida address.   Does anyone see a problem here?  I asked her to re-send it.  This was on Thursday.  She informed me that she would send it again but that it probably wouldn't get to me on time.  I thanked her.  Click.  She'd hung up the phone.

At the request of one Ben McGraw, I've gone an added an 'About' link on the left.  It also serves as a "contact me" page.

It's still in progress but I've got particles going.  I surprised myself in deciding to use Microsoft's particle sample on their XNA page.  Unlike some of their other XNA samples, it's actually good code, arranged in a Maya-like "Emitter and Particles" pattern that I would have adopted anyway. I modified it to use perlin noise.  For those unfamiliar, perlin noise gives you what looks like animated cloud or (in this case) flame textures, allowing you to get convincing motion without having to use as many particles.

I also added a fade-in to hide where they clip through the ground plane, but did not do the depth-buffer comparison trick that would hide clipping with other objects (I don't think i will add this since it's less noticeable).

I had to be quick with the "Print Scrn" key to get this shot.  The particles are used for a flame trail that only shows up when you hit the "boost" button, sending the ball bouncing all over the screen.  Here you can see the motion blur applied to the spinning ball as well.

Aaru is an XNA tech demo for PC / 360.  It demonstrates real-time depth map shadows, motion blur, depth of field, bloom lighting, particles, perlin noise (on the fire particles and clouds, shown) and simple 2D physics (applied to a 3D sphere).  There is also some basic lighting with normal maps.

Click the images for the full 720p versions. 

The philosophy was to create a 3D "tile-based" engine mimicking the feel of 8-bit and 16-bit era games with some extra 3D polish.

In the following image you can see the motion blur applied to the entire screen as the ball moves.  When the screen reaches the world boundary it stops and the motion blur is on the ball only.

A camaro just drove through a stop sign and into my fender. It's all dented and scraped up and the reflector is broken and falling off. I normally don't post stuff like this in my blog but it's really depressing me considering that after 2 and half months of driving loaners and rentals, I finally got a new car, and after only 8 days something like this has to happen.