Finished writing a (self-installing) WinNT/2K/XP Performance Monitor Extension DLL. What a pain… But now it seems to be working. 😉

LightTest code is done for now. Test it here (needs DX9, PixelShader 1.2, VertexShader 1.1, 4 TextureStages, A8R8G8B8 Texture-RenderTarget. It works on my Geforce4, should work on a 3 as well. Probably Newer ATI-cards, too). Features:

• 4 textures w/ 4 combiner-stages (i.e. should run at a minimum of 50% max fillrate)
• lighting performance independent of # vertices of object
• attenuation from light -> object and object -> viewer (no fog needed, ambient retained)
• ambient is done with filtered HDR cubemap (i.e. depends on normal!)
• different attenuation for diffuse and specular light (from object -> viewer)
• directional and point-lights
• decal texture + glossmap
• per pixel diffuse + specular [attenuated for point-lights] (limited to about 6 point lights + 7 directional lights = ~13 per pixel lights!)
• specular power is not fixed in pixel shader
• accurate reflection vector calculation, no halfway vector cheating
• approximates elliptical objects (for point light attenuation)
• specular color is always the same as the diffuse color of a light

Comments? Queries?

When you unwrap a cube into the plane (i.e. the familiar cross-shape) and rearrange the squares into a rectangle with area 6 (e.g. 1 x 6, 2 x 3, 3 x 2 or 6 x 1), then you can have at most 4 adjacent sides (if you allow rotations).

working on a new lighting technoly based on POINTLISTs ^_^

I’ve been pondering about about some problems that (all?) Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have, where users are not particularly worried about the nature of material they are sharing. In short, you want to prevent the MPAA or RIAA (sp?) from getting your IP address if you share something they think they own the rights to.
The idea now is: Encrypt a bit of known data (say the requesting host’s IP) and your own IP (making sure the return address of the packet itself is masqueraded through a number of others hosts) w/ something that is reasonably easy to brute force (say 16 bit DES or even more interesting: use the Content Scrambling System (CSS) used on DVDs as there are many brute force attacks for that requiring only 5 bytes of plaintext). Now the requester has to reverse-engineer a protection measure for digital content (indirectly) and the DMCA would apply should the requester want to know the IP where the file is available. So the prosecutors themselves are provably breaking they law (there seem to be some exceptions, though: See the Elcom / Dmitri Sklarov (sp?) case where some FBI agents weren’t playing by the book…) ^_^
I am not a lawyer. All of the above may be incorrect, illegal, immoral, or anything else that starts w/ “im”.

I ended up writing a little bit of Ruby-code (reparsing EDICT), and I must say I was quite impressed with its ease of use (“Principle of Least Surprise”)… Very nifty…