The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
Chris HeckerChris Hecker always seems like the smartest guy in the room. Even when the room is big and full of lots of people, he still seems like the smartest guy in the room. He's a hardcore programmer who fights crime at night and can fly. Here's a sample of his everyday conversations:
We use a 4th order polynomial in the squared distance from the sample point to the center of the given metaball for the implicit surface, similar to Triquet, Meseure, and Chaillou. They use a 2nd order polynomial, but we square the main term again to get more continuous derivatives to avoid lighting discontinuities. The actual equation is:
![f_i(p)=s_i[\frac{(p-c_i)^2}{R_i^2}-1]^4](http://chrishecker.com/images/math/4/e/e/4ee3b53152fabeb35b0027e84cbf4367.png)
ci is the metaball center position, Ri is the metaball radius (the function is defined to be 0 outside this radius), and si is the scale factor for the metaball, affecting its goopiness.
Anyway, he often talks about non-programmery stuff at conferences so that the rest of us can learn something from him, too. At the Montreal International Game Summit, he talked about the game industry as a whole. He looked at a lot of data and I'm not able to pass that on to you because I don't have it, so instead I'll cover more holistically what his point was.
The Game Industry Is Bigger Than Movies
Hecker started by showing several stats that show the game industry is bigger than the movie industry. We make more revenue per year, our biggest blockbusters pull in as much or more cash than movie blockbusters in the opening weeks, and so on. Even though there's lots of convincing figures that support this overall claim, Hecker says that it's all basically bullshit.
The Game Industry Isn't Bigger Than Movies
Hecker told us about the Sultan of Brunei, a man who owns 6,000 cars
Return to Article
