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The previous episode of the ACM saga had a powerful organization bully a young impressionable PhD student into deleting his fully legal web pages under an implied threat of legal action if he did not comply.

This weeks episode has ACM fighting against a US government initiative for open access to research papers supported by government funding! This is a highly important initiative. ACM is trying to kill it so they, and other greedy scientific publishers, can continue to make money on those papers that you paid for with your tax money.

Read all about it in US Gov Requests Feedback on Open Access – ACM Gets it Wrong (Again). Then please lend your voice — in favor of the US government initiative and against the ACM — in the manner suggested by Naty in the blog post.

And spread the word, before it is too late!

OK, WTF, this got me so annoyed that I had to get out of blog posting dormancy. I just went to Ke-Sen Huang’s brilliant page of conference papers on the web. Except, this time, all ACM pages (such as SIGGRAPH 2009, I3D 2009, etc) have been taken down, with the comment “This page has been removed at the request of the ACM Publications Board.”

What the fuck!?

ACM has no rights to request require(*) someone to remove links to pages on the net, and it’s unfortunate that their request was complied with.

According to this page the ACM Publications Board is run by the following nasty little censoring asses:

Ronald F Boisvert (chair) - boisvert@acm.org
Holly E Rushmeier (co-chair) - holly@acm.org
Tamer M. Ozsu (vice-chair) - ozsu@acm.org

I strongly urge you to email them, with a cc to the ACM president Wendy Hall (wh@ecs.soton.ac.uk), to tell them what you really feel about ACM practicing censorship on Ke-Sen Huang’s pages (or anywhere)!

And if you have anything to do with ACM and SIGGRAPH, as people in the games industry tend to do, then I implore you to immediately stop your involvement and furthermore that you boycott their conferences (SIGGRAPH in particular) until they straighten their shit out.

Do not let their censoring of free information stand!

(*) Changed the wording here, because some dip-shit on Reddit can’t understand the message otherwise.

Update 11/23/09 16:04

The latest news is that, while Ke-Sen’s pages have not yet been restored, ACM has rescinded their censoring (through bogus copyright claims) as per the following email:

From: Pat Ryan
Date: 2009/11/24
Subject: Web pages with SIGGRAPH Proceedings
To: “kesen.huang@gmail.com”
Cc: “boisvert@acm.org” , “Rushmeier, Holly” , Bernard Rous , “M. Tamer Özsu” , John White , Prof Wendy Hall

Patricia Ryan
ACM Chief Operating Officer

They are still implying Ke-Sen’s pages were infringing on ACM copyright, which is still a legally suspect claim as (1) Ke-Sen’s pages are first and foremost factual listings which are not subjected to copyright infringements, (2) as Ke-Sen’s pages were sufficiently different from ACM’s so as not to be a derivative copy, and (3) even if they were outright copies of ACM’s table of contents, “fair use” of TOCs have apparently not been tested in a court of law, so ACM has no legal leg to stand on in this issue (and in fact, a ruling against all libraries in the US seems logistically implausible):

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FWE/is_6_8/ai_n6080446/

It will be interesting to see how this truly plays out over the next several weeks, but it seems a battle has been won, though the war is likely to continue for quite some time.

Thanks to everyone who read my post and voiced your concern to the ACM Publication Board. An organization is its members, and there is no stronger means of controlling an organization than through the vote of your voice and your purse!

Artists get a lot of mileage out of animating the alpha reference value for the alpha test. Lets call the alpha reference value t. Then, for example, by having alpha come from a 0..1 alpha “contour” or “depth” map, artists can make things gradually appear or disappear by animating t. Read the rest of this entry »

GDC — as you (should) know — is the premiere conference for game developers in the world. That said, the conference is not without flaws. In fact, you can criticize GDC for a lot of things, but one thing they’ve been reasonably good at is posting slides from the talks (as long as the speakers have bothered to submit them, that is). You can find the GDC proceedings archives here. Read the rest of this entry »

My previous post contained some of the links I’ve gathered in the last 6 months. Here’s another post to try to clear out the backlog. This time covering gameplay and graphics. Read the rest of this entry »

As many have probably noted, I haven’t had much time or energy for updating this blog in quite a while. To rectify this I thought I’d make an effort to at least share the many interesting links that I’ve gathered since I last posted. In fact, there are so many links that I probably have to do this in parts. Let’s start with those relating to tools, process, and software. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many things that can kill the frame rate in a modern game, and particles are up near the top of the list of causes. A key contributing factor is that particles are subject to a lot of overdraw that is not present in your opaque geometry. Read the rest of this entry »

Some CPU instructions sets offer a way of selecting bits from either of two registers based on the bits of a third register. For example, the SPUs of the CELL in the PS3 have the selb instruction:

selb rt,ra,rb,rc

The result of selb is placed in rt and each bit of rt is either the corresponding bit from ra (if the bit in rc is 0) or from rb (if the bit in rc is 1). Read the rest of this entry »

For several years now I’ve participated in the physics tutorial session at GDC (along with Jim Van Verth, Gino van den Bergen, Erin Catto, Brian ‘Squirrel’ Eiserloh, and Marq Singer). One section I’ve covered in some detail is robustness and within this area I’ve stressed (amongst other things) the importance of distinguishing between absolute and relative tolerances when performing comparisons of floating-point numbers.

I won’t go into details about why you would want to care about how your floating-point numbers are compared. (Detailed information can be found in part in my GDC presentation slides and in much more depth in my book.) Here I will assume you already know why you care, and I will just note that absolute and relative tolerances are tested as Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago a local developer (hi Rick) asked about what I thought was the best way of ordering draw calls for sending to the graphics chip. As the topic came up again in a discussion at work recently, I thought I’d share my thoughts about what I think is the best approach these days. Read the rest of this entry »