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While leading the software R&D team at Square USA (we made the "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" movie and one of the "Animatrix" shorts) our team got to deve

While leading the software R&D team at Square USA (we made the "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" movie and one of the "Animatrix" shorts) our team got to develop some cool software both for the PS2 and the little known GSCube experimental machine. The GSCube was 16 GS processors in a box, and could be configured to access the frame buffer as a 4x4 tile format or as 16 layers composited in real time. For Siggraph 2000, we showed a demo of a shot from the movie running in real time, allowing the user to interactively change the surface materials of the character. The scene was Aki floating in zero gravity, and included individual hair strands. My own memorable piece of geekery involved implementing Perlin Noise entirely on the VU1, and demoing a field of tall grass blowing in the wind. Fun stuff.

carabiner 4y ago
Wow. What are you working on now? What is life like?
- kaveh808 4y ago
  Life is great. I am currently working on a new open source 3D package written in Common Lisp: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9 https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9
  - spookie 4y ago
    Hell yeah!
bangonkeyboard 4y ago
The Square USA team, along with contemporaneous Naughty Dog, are famous for having used Lisp/Scheme in game/graphics production of that time. Would you attribute this decision to your shared MIT heritage?
- kaveh808 4y ago
  We had a serendipitous confluence of Lisp/Scheme fans at the company. My boss had worked at Symbolics Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DTjrY1LXrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DTjrY1LXrk I was a Lisp fan from my days of hacking on Symbolics at the Media Lab: https://kaveh808.medium.com/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-d22a0e2d83fa https://kaveh808.medium.com/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-... And one of our developers was a Lisp programmer who had implemented his own version of Scheme: http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/ http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/

carabiner 4y ago

Wow. What are you working on now? What is life like?

kaveh808 4y ago
Life is great. I am currently working on a new open source 3D package written in Common Lisp: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9 https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9
- spookie 4y ago
  Hell yeah!

bangonkeyboard 4y ago

The Square USA team, along with contemporaneous Naughty Dog, are famous for having used Lisp/Scheme in game/graphics production of that time. Would you attribute this decision to your shared MIT heritage?

kaveh808 4y ago
We had a serendipitous confluence of Lisp/Scheme fans at the company. My boss had worked at Symbolics Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DTjrY1LXrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DTjrY1LXrk I was a Lisp fan from my days of hacking on Symbolics at the Media Lab: https://kaveh808.medium.com/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-d22a0e2d83fa https://kaveh808.medium.com/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking-... And one of our developers was a Lisp programmer who had implemented his own version of Scheme: http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/ http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/