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Written by Vishvananda Ishaya
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Tuesday, 19 July 2011 05:18 |
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Networking is hard. No, seriously. When I started working on Nova over a year ago, my networking skills were good enough to configure a home router. I understood basic packet structure. I once used some libpcap-based packet sniffing tool and manually decoded the authentication packets that a game was using. A year of bridging, routes, vlans, tap devices, vpns, and tcpdumping later, and I've rewritten the networking code in Nova at least three times. I understand a lot more now. And I still feel like a n00b.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 19 July 2011 13:33 |
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Testing Nova (Openstack-Compute) with Vagrant and Chef |
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Written by Vishvananda Ishaya
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Wednesday, 12 January 2011 18:54 |
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 Integration testing for distributed systems that have many dependencies can be a huge challenge. Ideally, you would have a cluster of machines that you could PXE boot to a base os install and run a complete install of the system. Unfortunately not everyone has a bunch of extra hardware sitting around. For those of us that are a bit on the frugal side, a whole lot of testing can be done with Virtual Machines. Read on for a simple guide to installing Nova with VirtualBox and Vagrant.
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Last Updated on Friday, 21 January 2011 01:33 |
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Cartoon Rendering Seminar |
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Written by Vishvananda Ishaya
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Tuesday, 09 February 2010 17:36 |
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 In 2001 I worked for a startup game company called Vinayak 4D Games. During one of our endless redesigns, we came up with the idea of giving the game a cartoonish feel. The technique of rendering 3D objects so that they look hand drawn is called cartoon rendering or cel-shading. It is perhaps the most exciting style to come out of a category of techniques known as non-photorealistic rendering. The company eventually went under but I became fascinated with cartoon rendering and continued to perfect the rendering style on my own.
I spent a good deal of time researching cutting-edge techniques to coerce graphics hardware into producing cartoonish images. I eventually created a combined technique that leveraged the new (at the time) pixel shaders that had recently become available. This technique worked on graphics hardware that supports first generation pixel shaders, which includes the original x-box. I posted an article about the technique on GameDev.net and eventually turned the material into a seminar for gameversity.com. The seminar only ran briefly, so I'm posting the text and source from the seminar for posterity. Enjoy!
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 09 February 2010 18:47 |
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Written by Vishvananda Ishaya
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Friday, 23 July 2010 03:35 |
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 For the past few months, I've been working for an awesome company creating open source cloud software that powers NASA's Nebula cloud computing platform. It has been a wild ride, and interspersed between my 60 hour weeks, I've had a moment or two to think about cloud computing and where it is heading.
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Last Updated on Friday, 23 July 2010 04:21 |
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Written by Vishvananda Ishaya
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Monday, 19 October 2009 19:44 |
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Our story begins six years ago. The game company I was working for had just gone belly up. I was coding for a game company that had licensed a full-featured game engine that from Epic. Then, without warning (well, maybe a little warning), the company went belly up. Undaunted, with an unchecked yearning for adventure and just a touch of insanity, I embarked on a quest to build my own game engine in C++ from the ground up.
Attachments:
 onyx.zip | [The beginnings of an object oriented game engine written in C++.] | 658 Kb |
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Last Updated on Monday, 19 October 2009 22:10 |
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