Mark Danks

I just put up a post on the PlayStation blog about the PlayStation-edu program:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2008/06/06/playstation-edu/

It is a program to get development hardware into the classrooms of universities and colleges.

I am giving a talk about it at the Game Education Summit next week in Dallas.

[update]

Made slashdot!

The soundtrack to the game PixelJunk Monsters has been released on the PSN Store! There is a great interview of Otograph, the group behind the music over on the PlayStation blog. I managed to find time to play a number of levels in the game…I probably got 5-7 rainbows before other things demanded my time. I would love to go back and play it some more. The amazing thing about the soundtrack is that it does not have any DRM. I can move it off my PS3 to my main PC (where I can stream it to my Roku Soundbridge) and to my iPod Nano for when I go running and traveling.

It is really nice that you can play PixelJunk Monsters via RemotePlay. I can sit on my couch and play the game on my PSP with headphones on, instead of taking over my main TV. The game works just fine and the music is even more addictive with headphones on.

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.

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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.

Sunday afternoon…mostly nice day outside.  I’m trapped inside working on my presentations for GDC.  So many good things have happened over the past year with the PS3 that it is taking quite a while to put it all together.  It does not mean that we are done improving it, but it certainly makes me feel good about the future.

The Game Developers Conference 2008 is next week. Suffice to say, preparing for it has been occupying most of my time lately. To the game developers who read this (and you know who you are :-)  )and want to meet with Sony, let me know. Our meeting times are mostly booked, but we have a few left.

Today is my one year anniversary with Sony. A lot happens in one year…

Amdahl’s law is mentioned a lot these days, especially with the multi-processor consoles which are out in the marketplace. I have been thinking a lot about how it actually applies to a typical game tick-loop. The main thing with Amdahl’s law is that it needs to be applied with all of the information or you can get incorrect results.

Amdahl’s law is the following formula:

Where:

F = serial part

N = num cores

For example, if you had an application which was set up as follows:

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Warner Brothers and New Line have decided to support the Blu-ray format. Hopefully this ends the pointless high def format war with HD DVD. Michael Bay summed up the real reason behind the war: Microsoft does not want either side to win. While I am all for digital downloads, they are still a long time coming, and until they do, I would like to be able to see my movies in high def.

Obviously, as a Sony employee, I am totally biased, but I believe that the benefits of Blu-ray for the next generation of games and movies are obvious.

I play a lot of games and read a lot of books.  I spent a little bit of time compiling a list of all of the games which I have played (for consoles) and the books which I read last year (2007).  I am slowly setting them up with links and one-line reviews.  As I finish new items, I’ll add them to the list.  For example, I’m currently reading Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink and playing God of War II.  The scary thing was when I looked at my list of games and realized how much time I have spent playing them over the past years…I could have read War and Peace!