Mark Danks

I am in Tokyo for a few days and I went to the Tsukiji Fish Market this morning.  The market is the main place for all seafood for Japan…a giant warehouse of fish, crab, eel, and other sea creatures.  Of course, the earlier that you arrive, the more interesting it is, so I was up at 5am to head over there.

After wandering around for a while, I went to get breakfast. The best breakfast around the fish market?  Sushi!  At 7am, I was eating maguro, saba, uni, and other wonderful raw food.  Got to love Tokyo!

One of the big things for games programming these days is dealing with multiprocessing. I have been working on a multithreaded renderer in my spare time to do interactive brush work. The previous movies for peduncle are all non-interactive. They actually render in faster than realtime, but they just run from a command line. First, I had to create the basic infrastructure, which is not much different than a game. This infrastructure means all of the usual subsystems like fileIO, memory, debug scaffolding, and rendering. I already had fileIO running in another thread. This evening, I got my multithreaded renderer working.

Continue Reading »

Stormfront Studios has closed its doors. While I have not worked there for a number of years now, it was my first games job…they took a chance on a strange music guy who had been focusing on image processing. I am incredibly proud of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The tech that my engineering team and I created was truly some of best in the industry at the time.