realtimecollisiondetection.net - the blog

One of the most popular articles I’ve posted on the blog was the one on salaries in the games industry from back in 2008. What made the article extra interesting was that I mined the public H1-B visa database for games companies. Unlike salary surveys, where people can claim arbitrary wages (and the submitted salaries are never posted), the H1-B data contains actual wages! In other words, it is a rare opportunity to get some objective data points on industry salaries.

Since some time has passed since I posted the article I thought it would be interesting to repeat the process, which I did, and here are the results. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

I thought I’d post another summary of some (mostly) recent blog posts and links that are worthy of a read, in case you didn’t read them already. Here goes… Read the rest of this entry »

As a technical director for the SCEA Santa Monica studio I do a lot of interviewing and, to a lesser degree, hiring of programmers for the God of War team. At some point during any hiring process the issue of salary inevitably comes up — as it should. Often that bit is painless and company and candidate will find an offer that makes both parties happy. Occasionally, though, there will be a difference in what someone is asking and what a company is willing to pay. There are several reasons this can happen, but one particular reason I wanted to address through this post: a lack of knowledge of prevailing wages in the industry on behalf of the candidate. Read the rest of this entry »