Pic of Matt Pritchard's shipped title award

Pic taken during a late night debugging session. (I have one just like it.) This thing is so well done and high quality.

Ensemble Studios (Microsoft) was such a classy outfit. No other company I've worked at treated its employees as well as Ensemble's did (including Valve).

End of year realization

I'm basically an artist who "paints" with code, and good debuggers are one of my brushes. Except, each "painting" involves a variable amount of mental and/or physical resources. The Steam Linux project was the hardest one I've ever done so far. Getting games on Linux and pushing the GL driver teams to go in the right directions was extremely difficult.

Thankfully, each project is a learning experience. Each time I get better at understanding myself.

Visual Studio 2015's Busted Find Dialog

In Visual Studio 2015, Microsoft decided to wreck the Find dialog so it's perma-docked into the upper right-hand corner of the document. The dialog is too small, and the key icons (to enable case sensitive searching or searching for whole words) are too small and hard to use:

By comparison, here's 2010's:

The new find dialog in 2015 is an example of bad UI, and I'm not the only Windows C++ developer I know who seriously dislikes it.

"The Ballad of the Green Beret"

I heard this playing at the local Pagliacci's recently, and I realized this is one of the tunes my father used to play all the time. He was in Vietnam in I think '68 or '69, totally lost alone in the jungle, and was saved by a branch of the Special Forces called the Green Beret's.

Why Age3 used low poly skinned meshes

Age3 used CPU skinning of relatively low poly models (even in "high" model mode). To help improve this technical design misstep made by the Age3 team (before I joined the team near the end of production) I rewrote the skinning code to be multithreaded. Unfortunately, by the time I came on board the artists had already created a ton of low poly skinned meshes.

I also built the skinning DLL with Intel's compiler, so I was able to easily rewrite all the skinning code using SSE1/2 ops using compiler intrinsics. Back in those days MSVC's support for vector intrinsics was weaker than Intel's compiler. (I'm also the developer to blame for Age3's SSE requirement, which bit some owners of very early AMD processors who otherwise could have played the title at low frame rates.)

Anyhow, I mention this because if you play Age3 today, like on a 4k monitor, the game's terrain and other effects hold up pretty well. Except the skinned character models look terribly low poly by comparison. On Halo Wars I used GPU skinning, instanced rendering, and I heavily jobified the animation system.

Another little note about the Halo Wars engine

There's still a lot of misunderstanding out there about where the Halo Wars engine technology came from. Starting in very early 2005 the HW team wrote a new engine pretty much from scratch. The Age3 code was only single threaded, didn't use SIMD, and consumed huge amounts of RAM. (Age3 used over 32MB just for UTF16 strings - not good for a console game!) The "Bang!" engine ran at ~7Hz and took around three to five minutes to load on the early Xbox 360 devkits.

Colt McAnlis (now Google), Billy Khan (now at Id Software) and I wrote the entire Xbox 360-only renderer almost from scratch. We started out with Age3's particle renderer and my "wrench" demo deferred shading engine for SM 2.0 hardware. Ensemble Studios basically gave us a blank check to do whatever we wanted on Xbox 360. (What good times!)

Age3's particle engine (written partially or mostly by Graham Devine, now at Magic Leap) was so good that the artists refused to allow us to rewrite it. Billy and I threaded it by converting it into jobs, and we SIMD'ified all the key loops using Altivec ops. We also offloaded as many computations as we could into vertex/pixel shaders, to cut down on the very high CPU cost of the original code.

The Halo Wars particle engine would have ran circles around Age3's (once ported back to x86).

Please don't get me wrong, Age3 was a beautiful and fun game, and I loved working on it. The team was super easy and pleasant to work with. Just remember that Halo Wars was created by a very different team with different goals. We had some pretty awesome goals for the next Halo Wars, but the studio was shut down.

RDO ETC1 compression examples

I've compressed the kodak test images using the prototype RDO ETC1 compressor I've been working on recently at various settings. You can download a .7z archive containing the RDO compressed .KTX files and unpacked PNG's here. The .KTX files can be loaded using the Mali Texture Compression Tool (v4.3.0).

Here are the unpacked images for 512 endpoints and 1024 selectors (1.65 average bits/texel vs. 2.85 average bits/texel for non-RDO ETC1):

Non-RDO:
best_luma_psnr: Avg: 40.009226, Std Dev: 2.154732, Min: 35.193684, Max: 42.750275, Mean: 41.113007
best_luma_ssim: Avg: 0.983419, Std Dev: 0.002109, Min: 0.980131, Max: 0.989254, Mean: 0.983190
best_bits_per_texel: Avg: 2.851078, Std Dev: 0.341672, Min: 2.184774, Max: 3.482361, Mean: 2.822876
best_orig_size: Avg: 196676.000000, Std Dev: 0.000000, Min: 196676.000000, Max: 196676.000000, Mean: 196676.000000
best_compressed_size: Avg: 140136.166667, Std Dev: 16793.846305, Min: 107386.000000, Max: 171165.000000, Mean: 138750.000000

RDO (#endpoints_#selectors):

512_256:
rdo_luma_psnr: Avg: 31.638530, Std Dev: 2.891301, Min: 25.210732, Max: 35.657692, Mean: 33.023266
rdo_luma_ssim: Avg: 0.903939, Std Dev: 0.022998, Min: 0.839709, Max: 0.941335, Mean: 0.902615
rdo_bits_per_texel: Avg: 1.478541, Std Dev: 0.211604, Min: 1.075765, Max: 1.888489, Mean: 1.453206

512_512:
rdo_luma_psnr: Avg: 32.549770, Std Dev: 2.950959, Min: 25.927277, Max: 36.671211, Mean: 34.135223
rdo_luma_ssim: Avg: 0.916562, Std Dev: 0.020127, Min: 0.860491, Max: 0.950293, Mean: 0.915359
rdo_bits_per_texel: Avg: 1.555512, Std Dev: 0.211616, Min: 1.142314, Max: 1.969767, Mean: 1.533732

512_1024:
rdo_luma_psnr: Avg: 33.600601, Std Dev: 2.981399, Min: 26.842752, Max: 37.809361, Mean: 35.187038
rdo_luma_ssim: Avg: 0.928182, Std Dev: 0.017318, Min: 0.879742, Max: 0.957868, Mean: 0.926356
rdo_bits_per_texel: Avg: 1.648000, Std Dev: 0.208101, Min: 1.249207, Max: 2.055928, Mean: 1.623047

512_2048:
rdo_luma_psnr: Avg: 34.828563, Std Dev: 2.959008, Min: 27.984495, Max: 38.820568, Mean: 36.302998
rdo_luma_ssim: Avg: 0.939762, Std Dev: 0.014454, Min: 0.898490, Max: 0.964750, Mean: 0.938300
rdo_bits_per_texel: Avg: 1.765885, Std Dev: 0.208030, Min: 1.368184, Max: 2.174438, Mean: 1.735372

512_4096:
rdo_luma_psnr: Avg: 36.244860, Std Dev: 2.824295, Min: 29.513725, Max: 39.823002, Mean: 37.670746
rdo_luma_ssim: Avg: 0.951658, Std Dev: 0.011454, Min: 0.918562, Max: 0.971457, Mean: 0.950959
rdo_bits_per_texel: Avg: 1.924732, Std Dev: 0.210003, Min: 1.535360, Max: 2.343709, Mean: 1.893290

1024_4096:
rdo_luma_psnr: Avg: 36.375379, Std Dev: 2.881440, Min: 29.531380, Max: 40.141788, Mean: 37.697235
rdo_luma_ssim: Avg: 0.952464, Std Dev: 0.011512, Min: 0.918884, Max: 0.972384, Mean: 0.951676
rdo_bits_per_texel: Avg: 1.992114, Std Dev: 0.220525, Min: 1.569580, Max: 2.418762, Mean: 1.949666