Kikkoman

Good thoughts on Status Reports

THE J2EE 1.4 Tutorial

Nifty program design

The underbelly of Japan FAQ

Bio Diesel Jet Fuel 40/60 Soy/JetA

How to use Built-in GarageBand audio filters

Muhahaha MS caught by Word Doc changes

Nice gadget site

Last Friday, watched Duke give the beat down in the NCAAs. Had my favorite soup for dinner. And then played the WOW beta at my friend’s place from 11 pm to 8:30 in the morning.
Took a hottie Night Elf rouge to level 9; some days its good to be a geek.

One thing that “bugged” me about the game was the water, eg lakes and rivers. While are beautiful, they are all the same … All the bodies of water in the game have the same super wavey yet calm pool look too them. Odd in WOW where the world/level detail is so varied and high. Its an unnatural amount of wavey ness, if I had to put a number on it, I’d say 4 cm from wave peak to wave trough. The best way to describe the water in WOW is to think of a swimming pool at a birthday party when the cake comes out, everybody leaves the pool, and for a few minutes the pool has a very wavey yet natural looking texture.

It hit me the next day when I was out running along Town Lake. Non-super wavey water would be harder/impossible to render. Town lake is very smooth, the waves there have maybe an amplitude of .5 cm. That means that I expect to see reflections on Town Lake, trees, buildings, the sky, the sun, etc, but with a little shimmer. That wouldn’t work in the game. Either the water has to be perfectly smooth, so that it is basically a mirror (which there are in WOW now that I think about it, the Night Elf Moon Wells), or so wavey that there is no expectation of reflection.

Drop the $$ being spent on the Space Station and put it into this.