Sent out a bunch of emails telling people where I'm going and how they can contact me. This will probably be the last update on here; the work log may end up moving to my other website eventually. For the record it is www.finality.net.

Printed several copies of the final manuscript, and sent them out via courier to the editors of the IEEE CG&A, which is the journal that I eventually decided to submit to.

Transmeta's new Crusoe processor looks very interesting.

Doing a lot of organising files and compressing them ready to be backed up onto CD-R. In total I think I have around 300 MB of stuff to take with me.

Time is running out extremely rapidly. The paper hangs together very well in its current state, and if the referees decide that another example is required I will supply one. Looking at the instructions for submission on the IEEE website, and should have everything ready to be sent off tomorrow.

Finished tidying up the paper and wrote an abstract. Just the cover letter to go.

Bungie released the source code for Marathon 2 today. Unfortunately their FTP server immediately crashed. :)

Wrote much of the results section and collected a couple of screenshots and timing sets.

All right, so I'm weak, and I bought it. :)

Helped out Troche with his tournament again for a bit.

Making plans for dinner next weekend.

Adding a rather useful hierarchical profiler to my code. Mmmm... hierarchical profiling.

Discovered that after I turn off my MP3 player and close down the development environment I actually get 15fps on this particular update. I knew there was something wrong. Heh.

The profiler is complete enough that I can generate some results tomorrow - I have to build another model first, but that shouldn't prove too hard (fingers crossed).

After talking to Alex, it seems that it may actually be possible for me to head over there very much sooner than I had anticipated.

The next thing to do is gather some results from my code. Started adding some profiling routines that I can use to measure frames per second accurately.

Having trouble getting WINZ to do what I want - they keep losing pieces of information that I give them.

Marathon films are such fun. I wish we could still find people to play it around here. :)

QT4 is still interacting poorly with my display drivers and requiring restarts in order to watch movies. Argh.

Found an extremely important and relevant reference that I absolutely should not have missed in my previous literature reviews. This is very disturbing. Fortunately it doesn't invalidate any of the work that I've done - on the contrary, it supports several of my basic assumptions - but it's still worrying.

Found a website with some Marathon films on it, so I'm going to download them and see how good these guys are... heh heh.

Writing up another algorithm for octree combination... the disconcerting thing is that all of these algorithms are in fact longer than the verbiage that they're replacing. But I guess they aren't as dense...

Suffered from a lapse of willpower and ordered System Shock 2 over the Internet. I probably shouldn't own a credit card. No expensive lunches for me for a week. :)

The halo.bungie.org forum is a mess right now. I'm basically going to give up on it for a while - there is no signal, it's all noise.

Built the figure in question. Time to start sketching out the algorithms.

Ran into John la Rooy while wandering around town and had a chat to him about how everything is going at Allied Press. Sounds like it's the typical barely-constrained chaos that most production systems turn into. :)

Playing Myth a bit - we won our MLM match and then suddenly Phod and I discovered that Odin had entered our order into another tournament without really telling anyone. Not such a good move. Still, we played a few of the games for fun - against a thoroughly reprehensible bunch of spoilt kids. I also helped out the tournament organiser a bit, but I doubt that even a hundred people available to host games would have been able to save the organisational disaster that it turned out to be.

Printed out a new copy of my paper for Geoff since he hasn't read the one that I gave him two weeks ago, and a few things have changed since then.

The text is a lot more solid now.

Apparently the INS sent their 'Notification of Action' today, so they have received my application for a work visa and started processing it. I should know in 40 days or so whether or not it has been successful.

Watched 'Bungie TV' webcast live from their booth at Macworld. It was pretty cool. :)

Trying to put finishing polish on my paper and coming up with more stuff that desperately needs fixing.

Solved some ugly driver conflicts between my new GeForce card and QuickTime 4.

Played Myth for most of the evening... fun fun fun.

The university is rumored to be shutting down totally over the Dec. 30th to Jan. 5th period. I have no official knowledge of this, so I'm just going to keep on working right through.

I really have been shirking my bungie.net admin duties, so it's time for a bit of that today.

Thinking about setting up a personal website once I get enough money to afford a domain-name.

Played an awful lot of Myth.

id Software released the source code to Quake 1 today under the GNU Public License, so I downloaded that. God, it's hard to read. But there might be some gems in there anyway, so I'll probably slog through it. :)

Eek - I thought email was being forwarded to me here. Apparently not, and I had a big backlog up there. Oops.

Heh - a 'little bit' up in the air. Time for some very deep thinking.

Mike has a spare GeForce card (!!!) so I'm installing it in my machine. It should accelerate my PhD work nicely.

After about an hour of driver installation, it works fine. Direct3D, OpenGL and everything are a lot faster. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to support one of the OpenGL options that my modeller uses, so I will have to go in and fix that code. :\

Finished another alteration and proofing cycle, hopefully one of the last on the sections that I'm currently working on. (Sidenote: How depressing, my paper has separate sections to work on. It's too long! Wol!!!)

I was wigging for much of the afternoon, because Bungie's mail server has fallen over mysteriously. All of my messages are bouncing with 'unknown user' errors.

Had some very productive discussions with Jaime and others concerning the Halo ranking system.

Planning and budgeting for my move to the US - I think that I can do it, but I'm going to have to put my fees for this year onto a student loan (suck).

Final Christmas shopping.

Working on the paper, will it never end?

Apparently R&I won't have any problems with me studying part-time overseas. However the Postgraduate Scholarship will no longer pay my fees, which will eat a significant chunk of my liquid reserves right around the time that I'll be wanting to move. I need to weigh up very carefully whether I can afford to do this.

This weekend is graduation weekend - Stephanie and Melanie are back down here from Wellington, and it's nice to catch up with them again.

Played in the final week of the initial Major League Myth rounds. We managed to triumph over the 'Sea Dawgs' by the skin of our teeth. :)

At the risk of sounding over-confident, I think I'm back at about 80% now after far too long. Now hopefully I can get back to trying to actually accomplish some useful stuff.

Played some Myth, fixed some problems with PluginViewer and its interaction with different 3D cards.

Got some work done on writing the paper, but I seem to be getting much worse again. Ugh. Going home to collapse again.

Stephanie and Melanie are coming down for their graduation this weekend, but I suspect that I will be quarantined for the duration. :(

This sucks. I literally can't concentrate on anything, so I'm going home to try and get some rest.

Trying to hunt down Shawn about a Mac version of PluginViewer.

Various admin board things, mostly discussing ranking systems for b.net III.

Creating a nice and consistent whole out of the paper plus figures. It's looking much better now.

Going to head home and catch the shuttle. No updates for a week, probably.

Fortunately the review went very well, and was relatively un-taxing. Time to get back to designing figures.

Figure drawing hell. Buggy tools, crashes, corrupt data, printing and font woes, I've had them all today. Still, I think I have a draft version of the seven figures that the paper requires, and that means I could potentially look at working on the text from now on.

Watched the election coverage until rather late indeed last night - poor Greens (and indeed any supporters of the centre-left) all over the country must be mourning. So close!

Played a lot of ranked Myth; tons of fun.

It's a lot harder than I thought to explain some of these concepts, even graphically. I guess I'll just have to try more. :\

Good God, Donnelle is playing her Beatles CDs in the graphics lab. I'm going to go find somewhere else to work this afternoon I think.

Agh! My bibliography is no longer working in LaTeX!

Fixed the bibliography problem, proofing.

One of the guys from Magnum Mac brought an iBook around for us to take a look at - it's a fun toy, but not of any practical use to us, as it doesn't have a video output for a projector or monitor.

Finalised the travel details and I will be flying out to Chicago a week from today.

Tried to sort out why the gcc compiler on Heffalump isn't working for Jamie - turned out to be a path issue.

Restructuring the jgt paper, it's much sleeker now.

Uuuuugh... felt ill for at least an hour after inhaling too much solvent while drawing the mindmap.

Sorted out what needs to be done to the draft of the paper to make it a nice, bounded component that is publishable.

The fourth-year marks were provisionally released today... extremely punishing. I feel sorry for the examiners, it can't be easy to dish out such marks.

The wedding went off very well, if you like church weddings (not my favourite). I decided to skip the reception in favour of a dinner party that Sandy was holding in the house he's currently house-sitting for Nathan and Janet; a good choice IMHO.

Apparently civil won their MLM matches in my absence, which is always nice. Not like I would necessarily have helped their cause by being there. :)

Ugh - the QuickTime problems were fixed by a restart, I didn't need to reinstall the drivers at all. Curses.

Considering putting together a digest of the rankforum.

Some new Halo screenshots (linked off h.b.o). Very nice.

Jero is down from Auckland to act as the Master of Ceremonies for George and Leeanne's wedding this weekend, so he came by the lab to catch up.

Today is the second anniversary of the original Myth's release. I'd like a moment of silence for all the work not done since then. Thank you.

Finished up a first draft of the article, time for proofreading and tweaking.

Agh, I am in a foul mood today, probably because I'm teething - the last of my four wisdom teeth (upper right) is coming through.

Sketched out a plan for the jgt article.

Taking a little programming 'mini-test' this afternoon.

Profiled the inner recomputation loop of the plugin viewer, and discovered a big slowdown that was being caused by use of C++ member function pointers where I could just have easily accessed a variable directly. After fixing that, it sped up immensely.

Tidied up all my memory allocation stuff so that it dies nicely if it runs out of memory, instead of crashing hard. Also reduced the memory footprint by smart deallocation strategies.

Finished the pluginviewer and released it to the public. Finally, it's done. :)

Implemented some DirectDraw code to do fullscreen properly.

Solved some problems with scenery colouring and tinting, it's working nicely now.

Added a GUI front-end on to the map selection dialog - what a nightmare that was. I don't like Windows programming, not at all. :(

Fixed all of the colormap issues, it works fine now. Beautiful Myth maps in true color - aaaah.

Posted a brief note on the concept of community on bungie.net to Ferrex's Core forum.

My involvement in the beta program is now effectively finished; several members of the Badlands dev team are flying to Chicago to put the final touches on at Bungie HQ and then it'll be shipped.

Spent most of the day going over the final candidate plugin, only found 2-3 new bugs or failed fixes. Looks like we may be ready to rock shortly.

Played a lot of Freespace 2. Damn, that game is fun.

A new version of the fc plugin is up and I'm downloading it. It's a big one though :(

Basically no work today. :(

Final beta testing, while the weather goes from cold to wet and cold outside. Oh well.

Surprise, surprise, the barbequeue has been cancelled.

Helped Mike resolve a few issues with the Windows OpenGL bindings and full-screen mode. I've been finding Google to be a very useful search engine lately, even on very specific queries for which most other search engines return garbage.

Finally managed to meet with Geoff and Richard at the same time; we sat down and went over where I currently am in my PhD, and possible future directions. The overall consensus seems to be that I can either look at tackling some of the ambitious "deep UI" problems associated with CSG modelling, or divert my attention towards refining the current technique through adaptive and primitive-specific polygonization. Both of these sound like fun things to do... I'm going to write a paper for the Journal of Graphics Tools and then look at what I want to do after this has (hopefully) solidified my thoughts on the current status.

Fixed a crash bug related to object deletion and a really boneheaded control logic error. Not one of my brightest hours.

Spent most of the afternoon going shopping at the supermarket. :)

WHOOOOOO! After about an hour's coding, the new architecture has let me implement the transformed-combination octree code just like that. A few bugfixes later and it's all working! Truly, it is a joy to behold. And now it's time for a graphics meeting. I love it when a plan comes together... booyah! :)

Stayed in late working on the code, finalised and compiled it; having some trouble with the OpenGL drivers crashing the machine again. I really should look into a nicer cleanup method.

Sorted out some final plans for the New Year - we will probably be going to Nelson to soak in some sun and invade Stephanie's parents, who have a nice big house and wouldn't mind meeting some of her quiet, peaceful friends. Mwahaha! :)

Coding, debugging, fixing. The collectiongraph code is all working nicely now, and it's much cleaner than the SplitTracker that it replaces. It should be relatively straightforward for me to add the transformed-octree code before the meeting this afternoon.

Aaaargh. Richard is away sick and Geoff is in Auckland, so I guess we won't be having our meeting this afternoon. Whatever happened to scheduling? Sigh.

Bingo on the Halo news; now that's a lot of killer stuff. Check it out!

Ugh, a very odd error has had me stumped virtually all day. I have no idea what's causing it.

Ferrex and the Core have been shut down by his sponsors. Boo, hiss. I understand that he is making arrangements to be hosted elsewhere and will be back shortly under a different name.

Helped Ken Musgrave with some random number stuff.

More beta testing, most of the afternoon.

Tried to hold a meeting with my supervisors this morning like we scheduled, but Richard has a lecture at this time. Sigh. We've re-scheduled for next Wednesday; hopefully this will work better. Maybe. Given time.

Went to Ken Musgrave's seminar, it was very entertaining (even if he did try to squeeze 45 minutes' worth of presentation into the last five minutes).

Finished the conversion of the object-transformation code across to a hierarchical cube-voxel-intersection technique. However while doing this it's become apparent that the other big feature which I was going to implement is going to require some mammoth reworkings of the whole split code. I don't really want to think about tackling this at present; it's an issue that I will put aside for much later if at all. I've written up detailed notes on it so hopefully I will be able to come back to it if necessary.

More beta testing, going well.

Trying to get more work done on the object-transformation code, but haven't had much success. It's been a moderately hot day here and I'm not coping well... summer could be very bad.

A very interesting article on Slashdot this morning with a patent from Transmeta. I spent about an hour going over it and trying to understand what they're getting up to... very enticing stuff.

Sorted out people to flat with next year.

Tidying up dead-wood from the code (in this case, the repeatobjectnode CSGnode type).

Some deep thinking about how I can change the object transformation code to work much more efficiently. It shouldn't take much effort at all... fingers crossed.

It's a gorgeous day today, so Steven and I went and had lunch in the botanical gardens.

Trying to find flatmates for next year; Morag and Steven are both moving on.

Investigating US immigration law and got sidetracked into the FEMA website and their Y2K readiness program. It's all very reassuring; I'd be happy flying on December 31st, after reading that (in the US, of course... haven't seen anything similar from NZ yet).

Had a look on the Web and found a solution to the vertex-buffer / display-list problem. It all works fine now; also solved a nasty few bugs introduced by the vertex-indexing scheme.

Half-finished the displaylist stuff.

Corrected all the typos and small mistakes; the code now compiles. Also caught myself on a very insidious bug that would have been hell to track down; fortunately I spotted it while just leafing through the code (I was keeping pointers into an array that might move due to calling realloc() ... instead those need to be indices).

Thinking deeply still (!) about triangle splitting, vertex buffers and why this code has been inefficient right from the start.

Trying to educate Dan in the Tao of Halo Worship.

Sent the application. Now it's wait and see time...

Argh... the reference drivers are very slow (but the lighting does work). I'm going to have to go back to the standard V550 drivers, which have specular lighting issues but are fast. Oh well.

Fixed a bug left over from the WC - C merge.

Implemented split-edge highlighting on selected objects. It makes it a lot easier to see what's going on. Cool.

Next up is changing the way that entire subgraphs are updated when you move them. Ideally we want to reproject the top-level octree's collections and not reproject the bottom-level collections and re-split them in the new space to produce the identical result. This can be done by changing the calculation type for all collections in the split space. We'll also have to change the octree-generation to be more akin to new_prim_position than incremental_update. This is a big change, so I'll do it after the seminar (and spend the time before the seminar thinking about how I'm going to do it).

Decided to change the way that the clipping planes are positioned around the object instead of doing the subgraph thing. Now you can zoom in or out as far as desired without clipping planes getting in the way or screwing up the glPolygonOffset code through Z glitches.

Went back and tried my first original sphere case, and I'd say I'm getting about 20 fps on the updates there... woo! There seems to be at least one bug left in the triangle-splitting code, which is not good. I'll try and fix that this evening.

Decided not to look at the triangle-splitting bug. Instead I hooked up several display features to buttons on the toolbar... it looks very pretty. Damn, it's nice to get this project to a point where I'm proud of it. :)

Sandy is going up to Christchurch to sit the GRE... good luck man!

The reference drivers fixed the lighting without any problems at all.

Now I have to sort out some issues related to the normals being transformed from collectionspace to worldspace; seems I need to transform the plane-distance values as well which will require some deep thought.

3DFX have announced a new texture-compression method that they'll be using in their next chipset. It looks to be very well-designed and should take off bigtime. This is starting to renew my belief in 3DFX's ability to lead the accelerator marketplace. Can't wait for the next generation of cards to come out with great fillrate and hardware transform accel.

Time for a major change... nuking the triangle info stored in the WorldCollections and doing split operations in collectionspace. This will require changes to a lot of the triangle calculating code, but they should all be simplifications. It'll make the code more elegant and faster too, I hope.

The extentlist seems to be finished now, but there's a crash bug in there somewhere.

Mike has been having trouble with RF interference from the power lines in the walls of his office; the projectors were producing weird distortion artifacts. We were all ready to junk the graphics card when he thought to try it in the graphics lab instead.

We're going to Filadelfio's for dinner to wish Ben well on his big overseas excursion.

Tidied up the graphics lab so that Ken Musgrave has room to work.

Fixed the ODBC conflicts by just copying the relevant DLLs over from another NT machine. Never did find out what service pack or other I would have had to install in order to get the right version. Sigh. At least I can actually launch VC++ again now!

Thinking about faster means for testing which terminals overlap a given cell in a WorldCollection... my program is spending 7.5% of its time in this one little loop that may not be necessary.

Went to Hugh Malan's seminar on his Masters. Maybe I'm just a cynical, twisted individual, but I think he may be in for a rude shock when the markers get through with him.

Tried to finish the optimization of the extentlist for cell-terminal testing, but didn't quite get it all working before the weekend.

Faxing documents across the globe, on a whim.

Implemented the solution and we're back to a 100%-clean state again. Also did some optimization of vector maths... however it's still not as fast as I'd like. I need to do some serious optimization (again).

Optimizing, playing, tinkering... a few minor speedups.

The split-cell test case works fine, but when I run the actual model it's very slow and there are weird cancer-type artifacts around profile edges. Hmm.

Fixed most of the artifacts. The slowdown was caused by hardware acceleration spontaneously turning itself off again (grr).

Uncovered a very subtle bug that involves an interaction between the primitive tree, leafnode structures and the interactive-octree update cycle. The recursive splitting of parent collections is causing the splitinfo to become overwritten by children's information... solution is to create a stack of splitinfo structures in the primitive, perhaps. Tomorrow; it's 5:24pm and I'm off home.

Making plans for the New Year.

Finished the coding, fixed compile bugs. And now it's time to run it...

Well, the split code isn't working at all. I'll need to construct some test cases and examine what the story is. But at least it's not crashing or memory leaking.

Trying to get the CD -> MP3 process to work on Iago so that I don't have to walk out to Steven's office quite so much for music.

Preparations for Rob and Justine's wedding tomorrow.

The triangle-string-cell hierarchy appears to be working perfectly now. Lunch, and then I'll look at doing the triangle vs string splitting.

Lots of considerations about where and how to cache various values for the greatest efficiency. I don't want to have to go back and re-optimize all this code later.

Didn't get the code finished, but I have a nice structure in place and hopefully should be able to complete the remainder tomorrow morning.

I really need to start organising my free time better if I'm to have a hope at tackling all the projects I want to do. :)

Coded up the lazy-evaluation stuff reasonably quickly. Very pleasing, it gives a small speedup when actually manipulating things and a big speedup when starting up the system.

Did a lot of deep thinking about the possibility of using arbitrary polygons to represent surface geometry, and then realised that they're damn near impossible to render. Looks like I'm going to stick with triangles for the time being... however there is one important improvement which I can make that should (hopefully) speed up the triangle-intersection code significantly.

Had a play with the System Shock 2 demo, it's quite pretty but didn't exactly draw me in quite yet. Maybe I just need to play it at night with the lights off.

Reviewing my PhD and current research directions. They can basically be divided into three categories...

Short-term tasks:

• Lazy evaluation of Collections and WorldCollections, possibly also on a cell level [done 1/9/99]
• Triangle splitting against planes, not individual triangles [done 8/9/99]
• Fix the specular lighting [done 14/9/99]
• Ghost profile edge highlighting [done 16/9/99]
• Contemplate losing Collections entirely to reduce overhead of t.cspace [done 16/9/99]
• Possibility of merging left and right Collections together, if they overlap (may be deprecated by prim-specific tesselation) [not wise]
• new_prim_position -> new_position and transformation of already split Collections [done 8/10/99]
• Model generation from a Mirage object-graph

Medium-term research directions:

• Primitive-specific tesselation and collection construction
• Look at scalability to larger models

Long-term goals:

• Assembly-constraint-based object construction

Started looking at the lazy-evaluation tools. Unfortunately the VC++ development environment seems to have stored some directory settings from the old machine and I'm going to have to rebuild the whole goddamn workspace. Maybe tomorrow.

VC++, MSDN, Emacs and all the LaTeX tools appear to be up and running now, even better than they were before!

Wrestling with QuickTime. It insists on downloading the latest version from Apple's website even though I have the latest datafiles locally (from a few days ago). Very frustrating, especially at 5:00 on a weeknight when our network link is so saturated. :\

Got Freespace 2 running under Win98 on my machine. Mmm, it is a pretty game. Very pretty.

Trying to debug a particularly nasty cell I/O problem that took a few hours just to find a repeatable case of...

Fixed the problem. Next up: looking at transparency draw orders. I wonder if I can fix this problem.

Easy! glPolygonOffset() is your friend, and I didn't even run into the problems that supposedly exist with the Riva TNT card when using this function. It's a bit slower now when you're looking at large selected components, but it looks a LOT prettier.

Eeek... discovered that my mail folder on Iago was almost 1 GB in size. Time to trim that bad boy down a bit.

Backed up all the important stuff on Iago, ready for some repartitioning and OS installing fun.

I think I've found a way, but it will take a bit of reorganising and things like that. Hmm.

Tidying away MWC99 stuff, archiving the website, etc etc.

How right I was... the match itself took six and a half hours, and it's now after 8pm this evening. After a totally epic final in every sense of the word, the Myth World Cup is over. Almost six months to the day since I sent the first call for volunteers, things have finally slowed and come to a stop. It's been a hell of a ride.

Ugh. Rules problems and Internet woes from hell when trying to run the last match of the Bottom Bracket. It was painful.

Who would have guessed it... a team made up of thirteen to seventeen year olds can't handle the fact that there are rules, and can't conceive of anyone's impartiality. I probably shouldn't be surprised.

Fixed a very subtle problem to do with surface extents, and exactly what the difference is between a voxel-intersect against a primitive (used to determine which areas of the octree change) and which cells overlap a terminal. Required moving the point-intersect on no-opposing-triangle cells to the surface rather than at the cell midpoint.

A few scattered cell-classification problems that I still need to work on, which the point-intersect changes didn't fix. Lunch time now.

Didn't get any serious work done after lunch, mostly taken up with seminars and meetings. Spent a while clearing space off my machine to make room for a possible Win2K installation.

Prep for the MWC99 finals this weekend.

Went to Mathew and David's PhD progress presentations. I managed to get out of mine due to fortituous SIGGRAPH timing, so it looks like I'm in the clear for a month or so.

Fixed a nasty crash bug and managed to trim out a lot of unnecessary code. The SplitTracker is much more streamlined now. Still have to try and find the cause of the Mysterious Floating Ring Bug(tm) though.

Actually, never mind, it does work how I want it to. Not perfectly accurate but it looks good enough to be usable. That's a relief.

Massive speedups are now possible by removing the ghost-tracking code. Unfortunately I have to replace it with a similarly complex (but much faster to execute) subsystem and it requires some heavy thought.

MWC99: trying to sort out stupid people who can't get their organisational act together. It's heavy going.

Back to Hapkido this evening, after two weeks' break from it... it may be somewhat punishing.

Eek. I just discovered that I put a URL on my technical sketch to pages with more content... which I haven't written yet! Oh noooo!!

Quickly hacked together a web version of my technical sketch, but the page really needs more content. Don't know if it's really necessary, however. How many people will ever look at it? Hmm...

Looks like people really screwed up while I was away, MWC99 has basically stalled. And now it's time to dig it back out.

And the afternoon was spent debugging minor errors. It's now back to the state it was in the static-update code, but the dynamic-update code is all totally screwed up. I hope that I can fix it tonight or tomorrow morning.

Aha! Discovered a serious flaw in my memory-management routines that gave me an immediate 2x boost in frame-rate.

Had a good idea as to further optimizations that can be done to the display and triangle spliting code. Should be able to boost fps by at least 25%.

Wrote up a transcript of a video interview that a friend did with Jason Jones at MWNY.

Found and fixed several rather insidious bugs. Still more cases that need fixing though. I had hoped to be finished with this by the start of this week, not the end. :(

Bungie announced their new game Halo in Steve Jobs' keynote address at Macworld New York last night. I stayed up until 1am and watched the streaming Internet video feed... it was very impressive. :)

Mmm, downloaded and watched the Halo movie. It's pretty.

Fixed the last few glitches in the triangle-splitting code; it's all watertight now as far as I can tell. Now it's time to start optimising it for the SIGGRAPH presentation.

Trying to install QuickTime 4 on my NT box. Requires display driver updates etc.

Came up with the Final Solution for MWC99... the last few rounds are going to be delayed for two weeks while I'm away at SIGGRAPH. We will then play the semi-finals when I get back.

My Homeworld beta CD arrived today. I only wish I had the time to actually beta test it like I should be. :(

Found and fixed a bug that was causing spurious polygon errors. On the home stretch now!

Writing articles for the MWC99 storyline, preparing for the fallback time tomorrow.

Finalised travel arrangements to the US. I still have to get a credit card though.

Found and fixed several minor bugs, trying to get the system into a 100% state so that I can then easily find the bugs that are caused when the dynamic code is run.

Some trouble on the admin BBS over a few comments I made yesterday. Hopefully I've managed to soothe people's feelings.

But once that was solved, everything went pretty well. The static polygon error took longer to track down than I'd thought, which was a problem though.

Hunted down and killed a deeply concealed bug with adjacency graphs getting mismatched. Sum total observable fixes: one erroneous polygon that was hardly noticeable disappears. But at least it's right now, dammit!

Fixed a few cases so that they no longer generate torrents of debugging errors when the program is run (it's actually working, it just looked like there were problems).

There are now two spurious triangles in the static polygonization of the piston example. Once I've tracked those down (I've isolated the incidents, it shouldn't take longer than an hour or so tomorrow morning) then it will be time to move back onto the dynamic errors. Oh joy. T-minus two weeks until they HAVE to be fixed, every last one of them.

As far as Myth goes, MWC99 is still kicking ass. It's become the first tournament since 7PR to really captivate bungie.net, and do so for a significant amount of time. People keep remarking that you can't find an order on bungie.net that wants to do anything except practice for the next round's games. The teams are all chugging along with varying degrees of success, and the team effort has turned out much better than I'd initially anticipated. Traffic analysis shows us that in June, 297,572 pages were served up out of the website ... approximately 17 GB of requests. A few minor problems with players, but nothing that we haven't been able to handle. On the whole, I think the investment of my time (between 30 and 65 hours per week for the last two and a half months) has been worth it. As long as I can recover and get back into workmode solidly for the next month of SIGGRAPH preparation.

Other Internet play: I've been accepted for the Beta 2 phase of the Homeworld beta test, and that might prove interesting. If I get time. Freespace II looks like it could be a lot of fun, and I may try getting my hands on a copy of that.

Post-SIGGRAPH, starting in August, I'll be able to get back into more tramping than I have been lately. Winter's just not conducive to fun trips, when you've only got a three-season sleeping bag and your weekends are usually full. :)

Hapkido is going well, with a grading some time soon that should be... interesting. I hope to sit the grading and pass it, but if Grand Master Lee can only come down to Dunedin in early August (which is on the cards) then I'll be at SIGGRAPH during that time period.

On the whole, life is good. I'm having lots of fun and working towards bigger and better things on several fronts... it's important to have dreams. :)