Remaking Luna from Scratch

(WIP/Learning) In the process of building up Luna from scratch. Mind the lack of texturing makes her look creepy ;)

The old mesh was broken due to lack of knowledge when modelling...Optimizing too late, not knowing how to do seams etc etc etc...

This time - easier to UV-map, all visible areas are quads (almost). And - nostrils, eyelids and proper eyeballs. Good-to-have things.

Going to bake down this to a normal map later. The higher-order bump map painting is still a todo though - mainly some ridges/structure/noise on the lips, maybe some noise in the facial skin.

Surprisingly, the hair fared particularly well with catmull-clark subdivision. Going to bake that too... (it's very low-res) The bangs crawl upwards when subdividing however, so I have to extend them 10% or so. Also left to do.

This (the head) is about 2k vertices... Not terribly well optimized, but should do; after all the mesh grinding thread only consumes about 20% CPU so I think I can throw some more at it... Or I'll just optimize it down later.

Face will be the most high-res area, so body should hopefully only be about 3k vertices.
(The extra stuff and hair are not counted in this total as they're not deformed by the armature.)

Cache+cache page size in linux

This is how you do it:

jaw@eris:~$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index0/size
32K
jaw@eris:~$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index0/number_of_sets
64

Thus, the size of each cache page is 512 bytes.

Why Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is broken for game(r)s

Ubuntu 12.04 has great potential - to be the greatest Linux desktop version for game(r)s and for a long time. 
Valve supporting it with their Steam client, and the nice Ubuntu store at that means it has great potential.


Game developers, want to target a stable (predictable) OS/platform.
As an example, Windows provides this - Windows XP has a life span of more than 5 years (supported by Microsoft with service packs etc).

Ubuntu 12.04 is an Long Term Support (LTS) version - it will be supported for 5 years.
But sadly - from an end user (gamer's) perspective - it's broken.

Canonical's move to extend the time for Ubuntu 12.04 to 5 years is a great initiative that could enable a competative Linux desktop platform in this aspect.

Now, on to the (fixable) problems!

 1. The way nvidia driver installations are (not) handled. 

Earlier Ubuntu versions did offer to install (or am I blind?) binary blob drivers where the kernel module was updated when the kernel was patched.

This is essential for games to run well - shaders and other advanced stuff is not handled well by the noveau driver (maybe on some cards, but we're talking mass consumption here).

While I like the idea of an open source driver, I honestly never think noveau will be good for anything other than providing 2D graphics during installations.

Installing nvidia's own driver is not easy for end-users, and Ubuntu made it even harder for experienced linux users because they do not supply kernel headers when updating the kernel.

        Conclusion: This totally breaks Ubuntu 12.04 for gamers.
        Can be fixed: Yes, please! 

2. Compositing is always enabled 

On Ubuntu 12.04 it can't be turned off - regardless of running something in full screen or not.

This is allegedly fixed in Ubuntu 12.10, but this really should be backported to 12.04 as it almost breaks the frame rate on simpler graphics cards like the Intel HD Graphics 4000.


        Conclusion: Ubuntu 12.04 is broken for gaming on most (all?) 2013+ laptops
        Can be fixed: Yes, please!

 3. Lack of UEFI boot loader support

Secure boot aside, new machines - mainly laptops from october 2012 and onwards can only boot from a UEFI partition.
BIOS is no more, and Ubuntu 12.04 can not successfully install to these machines. (It installs, but the UEFI ROM doesn't find it and can not boot).

        Conclusion: Ubuntu 12.04 itself is broken
        Can be fixed: Hopefully (not sure about kernel versions)

Summary

Pretty please... Canonical, fix this!!!

Colored bezier connections

Just implemented the colored beziers for connections.. nothing new I know, but still works well in realtime when zooming out. a lot better than my previous straight white lines for sure!

This is about half of the stuff open in the luna:reactivation demo.
Of course one zooms in and closes most of these boxes when working, but I wanted to see how well the bezier drawing stuff performed, and it's good enough.. red pipes are render, green is float values, blue is textures, orange is unit quaternions (rotations) etc.

VSXu bezier curve connections

Still need to add color, but this looks promising.

Kinesis Advantage + Multi-touch Touchpad

Running this in Ubuntu 10.10 with utouch and ginn:



Works for scrolling around in code, quite nice! No need to move the hand to the mouse anymore for scroll wheel... I'm going to attach it properly later on...

APIC tuning Linux for I/O performance

Some handy links related to IRQ and I/O performance in linux:

http://www.asteriskguru.com/tutorials/pci_irq_apic_tdm_ticks_te410p_te405p_noise.html

Setting IRQ SMP affinity, explanation, statistics:

http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~brecht/servers/apic/