Avalanche in SSX: 'Survive It' Trailer

The recent SSX-'Survive It' trailer revealed the first look of the avalanche feature. My colleague and I have been working on it for a while. We were challenged by limitted performance budget, visual and dynamics target. One thing we are certainly all proud of is that the avalanche dynamics are simulated in real time. It means every avlanche you see in the game is different.

SSX 3D Globe UI: First Public Appearance in SSX Production Video

So glad to see the 3D globe UI appeared in the latest SSX production video: "Massive World Producer Video - Part #1". It took us a few good months to implement it, and we are so proud of the results that we have achieved so far. My colleagues and I are still polishing it towards the final quality.

WebGL: Water Simulation

Recently, a lot amazing work has been done with WebGL. Water Simulation from Evan was one of those. The water heightfield is simulated using a floating-point texture and the caustics are rendered using the GLSL derivative functions. Take a look if you are interested.

Nikkor AF-S 18-200mm 1:3.5-5.6 G ED vs. AF 50 mm 1:1.8 D ( Amateur Test )

I am really tired of switching lenses. So I went out today and bought this Nikkor AF-S 18-200mm 1:3.5-5.6 G ED from a nice lady photographer. After a few test shots, I am very impressed by its performance. So I decided to compare its image quality against my nikkor AF 50mm f/1.8 D prime lens.

Although it's not very fair to compare a prime lens and a zoom lens, it's fun to see the results. Test images were shoot at different ISOs with the same fixed manual settings on my D200. Since I am an amateur, I forgot my prime lens wasn't DX format, and shot with 18-200mm also at 50mm. This made the image frame sizes not match exactly :( But it's good enough for an amateur.

Here are the results: 50mm definitely has much better bokeh ( isn't shown in the comparison image ), but the sharpness and details from 18-200 is as good as the prime lens. Of course in this comparison, I set the aperture of both lenses to 1:5, otherwise, the prime lens will have better image result. In general, I am very happy that I bought this lens.

Photos taken in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic 2006

Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic

This was the first stop when we visit Czech Republic in 2006. We almost lost when we arrived, and we ended up asking for help to find where our hotel was. Later on we found German is sometimes more useful than English in this little spa city. My guess was there are a lot German Tourist, and its historical relationship with Germans since early 20th century.

Photos shot in Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic 2006

Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic

This is the first batch of re-post-processed photos I shot in Europe. Cesky Krumlov is a lovely town. We stayed there for a few days in 2006, and it's been so far the greatest travelling experience we had in Europe. My wife kept saying to me that we should re-visit it and stay a bit longer.

Enable mounting of remote CD/DVDs on any Mac

My old Mac Mini couldn't read certain DVD format, so I decided to try to remotely mount the CD from another computer. MacBook Air has the remote disc integrated, however for other Mac machine, there's a trick to turn it on.

I shared the DVD on my windows 7 computer, which has Apple "DVD or CD Sharing Update" installed.
Download Link

If your Mac has Leopard or above system installed, you should have "DVD or CD Sharing Update" integrated. Otherwise, install it on your mac as well.
Download Link

On both system, go to System Preferences, and enable 'DVD or CD Sharing.

Then, on the Mac that uses the remote disc, go to a Terminal window and enter:

$ defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
$ defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

Reboot this machine, and when the reboot is finished, you'll see the remote CD/DVD under Devices in the Finder's sidebar. Thereafter, you can remotely mount a CD/DVD from another machine.