Pleasing People

Am I the only one who is appalled at how hard it is to please most people? I can think of many times I've witnessed this, but right now I'm thinking of one or two specific instances, centered around Battlefield Heroes and Battlefield 1943, two games being released by Electronic Arts and Digital Illusions CE. I'll start off with people's reaction to Battlefield Heroes. Yes, EA has missed their initial release date by months, but if it makes the game better is it worth it? In my opinion yes, and people shouldn't find reason to complain about it, but they do. They are currently holding a closed beta, which of course has many people yelling for a beta key to get in, or complaining that it is closed. Has it occurred to them that, this being a game in development that is completely online, it probably doesn't have many servers to run from? Apparently not, because they just yell and whine that the game isn't out and the beta is closed. O, one more thing, this game is and will be COMPLETELY FREE! Right there I think unless EA or DICE really messes something up, people lose most all room to complain. Now onto Battlefield 1943 and the lack of gratitude surrounding it. EA announced this game about 10 days prior to this writing, and it is the debut of the Frostbite engine on the PC. This allows almost complete destruction of buildings and other objects in the playing environment, which is great! However, people have already found ways to complain about it. Saying EA will just ruin it, or it isn't realistic enough. If people assume EA is going to ruin it, then chances are they will think it is ruined when it is released due to their current mood. I just don't see why they don't give EA a chance; they have yet to majorly mess up any Battlefield game from what I've seen. And if you want realism, go play America's Army, and if that is too real, go play Call of Duty. But really, complaining about a free game, or about a game that no one has any detailed information on? That's just childish and stupid. Thank you for reading.

Physically Based Rendering

After learning about Physically Based Rendering (PBR) in Houdini, I realized it is cool and useful, if one knows how to use it. PBR uses to physical properties of light, hence its name, to render scenes. This allows it to render with caustics and global illumination by the use of "photons". I knew how to do caustics before this, but using PBR makes it more straightforward. After reading up on PBR, I know most of my way around it, so for the past few days I've been messing with it, and here are the results all smashed into one image. All of these are low resolution and low quality renders, because I was just experimenting and didn't want to spend a lot of time rendering.

http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/3252569754/