Welcome to my home page! Here you have interesting things related to game development, computer graphics, music and algorithms.

This week I was notified that the article about boids simulation was online in the ACM Journal called Computers in Entertainment (CIE).

This article approaches the boid's algorithm that was presented at SBGames, but it compares our CUDA implementation with the rendering pipeline.

You can access the article in the ACM link.

Soon it will be available in the http://boid.alessandrosilva.com too.

Ilusis Interactive Graphics is pleased to announce that Peixis has been submitted to 2010 IGF Main Competition ( http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2010.php?id=217 ).

The game is a third person racing game that joins the fun of street races with an underwater environment full of obstacles. As a little fish you will run through four unique environments and face jellyfishes, sharks, sting rays and other marine species. You may also use three special fishes as weapons!

You may check it out at: http://www.peixis.ilusis.com

A long time have passed since my last post so I'll try to briefly tell what occurred until today.

In november 24th, 2008 I defended my master thesis about radiosity using GPU at UFMG. It was approved, and now I have a master's degree in computer science!!!

In the thesis I've tested some Radiosity's classical algorithm issues, including visibility aliasing related to the projection, occluded area related to interpolation on the scene rendering and compared then with the radiosity matrix method.

Some images from the thesis:

Radiosity rendering.

Occlusion aliasing due to spherical projection.

In the beginnig of 2009 I joined Ilusis Interactive Graphics, a company that was founded in 2006 in the Federal University of Minas Gerais Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation of the Computer Science Department.

We work with a lot of cool things, mixing several areas such as computer graphics, computer vision, sound, design, information technology, network and parallel computing to came up with amazing interactive solutions, softwares and games.

Yes!!! The SBGames 2008 will be held in Belo Horizonte - Minas Gerais here in Brazil from November 10th to 12th. The SBGames is the "main event on game research and development in Latin America". This year the event will have keynote speakers from Ubisoft Brazil, Microsoft, Novamente Institute and Minho University (Portugal). The symposium is composed of 4 main tracks (Computing, Art & Design, Industry and Games & Culture), and have some tutorials and a game festival(or game development competition).

Last year I presented with my friend Bruno a tutorial about shaders. This year I'll present the results of our research on Reynold's algorithm for boid simulation in the Computing track. I've prepared a website to address this work, as soon as I present the work in the symposium I will update the information to the Boid Simulation page.

You can see more about the event in this link http://www.inf.pucminas.br/sbgames08/index_ING.htm.

Today I found in my pc three recordings that I made in november of 2007. These recordings uses synthesized drums made with Hydrogen, and have some tracks of eletric guitar that I recorded and mixed with Ardour.

The titles of the musics are:

• I want this but anyone can't give me
• Dark side
• Running out

See the music section for more music.

Hear them a lot :-).

Yesterday I programmed the news auto content generator to support RSS through PHP. I've tested the feed with Google Reader and IGoogle, the result was pretty good and now the xml feed is configured with 60 minutes time to live(ttl).

The final RSS feed link is: http://alessandrosilva.com/?rss

The revised version of the slides about lecture that I gave with Bruno Evangelista entitled "Creating photorealistic and non-photorealistic effects for games" are available in the academic section in Portuguese and English.

I uploaded one boid simulation video over the GPU. The program is under development, but the visual result is cool.

If you can't see the video get the latest Adobe Flash player.

I uploaded the shaders demonstrated in the SBGames 2007 to the projects section.

I uploaded one video on youtube about the shaders related to the presentation about photorealistic effects for games in SBGames 2007.

The video shows all the FXComposer2.0 projects that I made:

• Texture filtering and multitexture: It shows the filtering configured in the shader and an earth rendering with 2 textures (day and night).
• Procedural texture: It shows one squared wave over the uv texture space and one object space marble. Notice that the object space texture maps the whole space, so the texture seems to be continuous across objects.
• Bloom: It shows the shader that expands the bright intensity according the thresholds by blurring it and blends with the original image.
• Cartoon Rendering: It shows the cartoon rendering shader with the edge detection configuration.
• Post processing: It shows the brightness/contrast, grayscale extraction, color blend, blur and laplacian filter like post processing shader algorithms.

If you can't see the video get the latest Adobe Flash player.

I put online the slides and the full text presented as a tutorial in the Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment - SBGames 2007.

The SBGames is the most important event that occurs in Brazil related to game development.

In the academic section you can check the slides.

Soon I'll upload the shaders presented to illustrate the tutorial.

Today the CGGT prepared one morning of lectures at PUC Minas game development undergraduate course event called SEJA.

I presented the fourth lecture about shader development in the SEJA.

The lecture is similar to shader development with CGFX presentation that I made at UFMG but it has a new layout and a new sequence of topics.

The sourceforge gamelib project have now his own homepage. The documentation about the functions and algorithms will be in that page.

To see the page click here.

The project of gamelib was accepted at sourceforge.net under the MIT license.

I made the copy of project files to this link http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=200558.

The links in alessandrosilva.com of gamelib and projects built with it will be redirected to the download page of sourceforge.net.

The code with light calculation was wrong, because I wrote the code to calculate the halfway vector with normal vector. The shaders that uses lighting calculations in the shaderExamples and cgfx are fixed and uses the eyeVec and lightVec to compute the halfway vector.

I fixed the presentation about shader development and cgfx too.

The tetris binaries files to linux_x86 and linux_x86_64 weren't with the correct platform CGFX lib files. Before this change the linux_x86 was with 64Bits CGFX libs and the linux_x86_64 with 32Bits CGFX libs.

You can find some music files that I used in some projects (games and programs) and some musics that I played and recorded in my computer. You can download everything in Music section.

When I presented the game and shader development at UFMG I made some sample programs. People there asked me about the source code and binaries.

I put the code and examples in the Projects section.

Some images to illustrate.

I used the Gamelib to make all examples . This library has been developed to help the process of create a game or an interactive application.

The Gamelib 0.1 was implemented in C++ and uses external libraries helpers:

• OpenGL: Helps the creation of opengl applications by introducing an abstraction layer over Texture Objects, FrameBuffer Object, Display lists, and so on.
• CGFX: Helps to create a shader over OpenGL through CGFX format file.
• Math: A lot of matrix and vector operations like cross product, dot product, vector decomposition were implemented in a GLSL math definition fashion.
• XML: The TinyXML was used.
• OpenAL: Was created one abstraction over openal too. Here you can create streamed and non-streamed sources of sound in application
• WindowAPI: Was created one generic window abstraction to be used as skeleton for any application. One GLUT window initialization was implemented.
• Other: The Gamelib has many others things to help the process of creating an interactive application like bresenham iterator, keymapper, and so on.

This section just has the links to sources and binaries. In the future I'll put some explanation about algorithms, design of the applications and games.

All sources are distributed under the MIT license.

The references about my publications and presentations are in the Academic section since 2003 until 2007.