Back Home & Max 9 Arrives!

I have actually been back from Ohio since late Tuesday evening. The trip was fun and very productive overall (2 days of business meetings plotting out the next year, which include 3 new games), but I have to admit that it's nice to be home.

I have spent the past few days doing some back end management stuff with Adrian, plotting the next game that will be wrapped up soon, as well as give my input on all the killer new features that we are putting into the Lore Sequel (the features are already developed, they just need to be integrated). The Xbox 360 also got some love with the addition of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Oblivion and Lego Star Wars 2 to the list of game.

As an added bonus, one of my copies of 3DS Max 9 arrived (thanks Autodesk team for sending this over so quick) as well. I have been working with Max 9 for a while now and I honestly have to say this build rules! It doesn't look strong when you view a features list overview, but just ignore that, sit down with the application and tear around it for a bit, you will not be disappointed by the changes that have been made (all of which make you an even more productive 3D artist).

The only negative thing of this past week has been the need to rebuild this Pentium 3 machine that I use for junk collection (ie. internet & email). I just now have it back up to a normal state and I think its pretty stable after rolling back my ATI Catalyst drivers to version 5.1 for this Radeon VE graphics card that runs in the machine.

Is SGI The New Intergraph?

Hot off the presses today is word that SGI plans to sue ATI over potential patent infringements with regards to the way that ATI's Radeon brand of graphics cards work(Links).

Normally I don't care about patent infringement since companies are always suing one another all the time over this type of crap. What intreges me however about this particular instance is that SGI for all intents and purposes is a dead company that's lasting on life support. Most of their revenue today has come from selling what little assets they still own, for example a few years back they sold Alias (a graphics company that hand in hand helped sell workstations for SGI before PCs became powerful and capable enough to rivle what SGI offered) for about 80 million dollars, back when the Xbox came out they sold a bunch of OpenGL patents to Microsoft for about 20 million (most of this was due to nVidia fucking the pooch and not realizing that they couldn't transfer a bunch of pantents SGI licensed to them). What this has left SGI with is a server and workstation market and a barrel full of patents (most of them relating to graphics and graphics hardware), so when the going gets tough and you need to boost your bottom line, what do you do? Option 1 is to sell more patents and Option 2 is to sue the hell out of everyone to get revenue from patents.

What is particularily interesting is the parallels SGIs current path has to an old PC vendor known as Intergraph. Like SGI, Intergraph also made workstations but they were PC based. In the few years that Intergraph sold machines they developed a plethora of patents for hardware design, but when the going got tough they got out of the hardware sales market, downsized the company and are now for all intents and purposes a holding company that sues the crap out of anyone that they feel infringes on their patents (you can find numerous articles of this if you like). Its sad to see a previous market and industry leader go down in flames, but its even more sad to see them following the Intergraph route.