So what do you guys think? I didn't have a chance to watch the whole broadcast yesterday because of streaming issues, but it was funny to hear the "audience" clap, cheer, and whistle at every feature. It's perhaps a smart marketing move IMO that they decided to feature cable television. It would be a way to coerce non-gamers to invest in the box as a multirole media device. Hardware seems decent, although I would have preferred 12GB or maybe even 16GB of memory just for that added leverage. Memory is cheap these days, so it wouldn't have bumped the cost that much more. Voice commands... heh, that will probably need some work. I can imagine a house filled with hyper children yelling for control over the device

Hardware Details

Every now and then you hear some aspiring game developers wanting to copy or use something without treading in hostile legal waters. Unfortunately for Diego, he did just that. Diego produced a "replica" of a Montreal metro station as a map for counter-strike. The first cease order from the transportation company apparently didn't convince him, but now a threat of a lawsuit seems to have turn some heads. More on that story here.

It's an interesting subject matter because at some point we all face those decisions. Often the best choice is to replace the logo with an imaginary one and you're golden. Would you ever consider going to court to defend your "rights" over such a matter?

Disney's Find Your Way To Oz WebGL app was released yesterday and it's quite good. It's more of an HTML5 tech demo than a promotion of their upcoming movie IMO, but it's still quite impressive. Nice visuals, utilizes web audio and web video. A full tech writeup is also provided here.

I just heard about the release of Firefox 18.0. The biggest feature announcement is the introduction of the IonMonkey JavaScript engine, which claims to boost performance by using better optimizations in their JIT compiler. There were no specific numbers that I could find, so I did my own performance benchmarking to compare browsers on my machine. The results are as follows.

Machine
Windows 7 64bit
AMD Thuban X6 2.8GHz

Browsers
1. Firefox 16.0.2
2. Firefox 18.0
3. Chrome 23.0.1271.97

Google V8 Benchmark

Firefox 16.0.2	 Firefox 18.0	Chrome 23.0.1271.97
4614		 6911		 10570

Kraken Benchmark

-- Firefox 16.0.2 -----------------------------		-- Firefox 18.0 ----------		-- Chrome 23.0.1271.97 ---		
Total:				4423.7ms +/- 0.9%	  Total:  3014.3ms +/- 1.8%		Total:  3397.1ms +/- 4.6%
-----------------------------------------------		--------------------------		--------------------------

  ai:				 198.3ms +/- 1.2%	  202.5ms +/- 1.4%			276.3ms +/- 3.6%
	astar:			 198.3ms +/- 1.2%	  202.5ms +/- 1.4%			276.3ms +/- 3.6%

  audio:			 1595.4ms +/- 1.7%	  1266.1ms +/- 3.4%			1240.8ms +/- 7.1%
	beat-detection:		  408.6ms +/- 2.9%	  320.0ms +/- 9.1%			276.4ms +/- 8.4%
	dft:			  532.6ms +/- 0.9%	  392.9ms +/- 9.5%			507.8ms +/- 5.0%
	fft:			  315.8ms +/- 3.4%	  212.0ms +/- 11.3%			208.9ms +/- 10.4%
	oscillator:		  338.4ms +/- 2.6%	  341.2ms +/- 11.8%			208.9ms +/- 10.4%

  imaging:			 1697.9ms +/- 0.4%	  658.0ms +/- 1.2%			695.1ms +/- 6.5%
	gaussian-blur:		  924.7ms +/- 0.6%	  280.6ms +/- 1.8%			266.3ms +/- 2.5%
	darkroom:		  460.5ms +/- 1.3%	  238.6ms +/- 1.2%			258.2ms +/- 15.6%
	desaturate:		   312.7ms +/- 0.9%	  138.8ms +/- 4.9%			170.6ms +/- 5.9%

  json:				 185.9ms +/- 1.5%	  188.7ms +/- 2.1%			272.5ms +/- 10.0%
	parse-financial:	 110.0ms +/- 2.1%	  113.8ms +/- 3.1%			135.5ms +/- 5.6%
	stringify-tinderbox:	 75.9ms +/- 2.9%	   74.9ms +/- 2.6%			137.0ms +/- 20.1%

  stanford:			746.2ms +/- 1.7%	  699.0ms +/- 3.9%			912.4ms +/- 7.7%
	crypto-aes:		170.7ms +/- 2.8%	  149.5ms +/- 3.1%			254.4ms +/- 10.2%
	crypto-ccm:		123.4ms +/- 5.4%	  127.9ms +/- 1.8%			221.4ms +/- 9.3%
	crypto-pbkdf2:		334.8ms +/- 1.7%	  312.5ms +/- 8.8%			282.7ms +/- 8.8%
	crypto-sha256-iterative:  117.3ms +/- 0.7%	  109.1ms +/- 2.9%			153.9ms +/- 10.0%

It's interesting to see that Firefox now outperforms Chrome on the Kraken tests, but most importantly I think is that Firefox improved their image processing, which has been very slow for quite some time. I haven't had much time to run it through my own tests, but according to these results it should now be on-par with Chrome to manipulate RGB data on an Image object, which is useful for games that want to take advantage of grayscale tinting or generating procedural textures.

Now, if Mozilla would implement web audio in Firefox I would be a happy camper.

MS recently announced the availability of VS 2012 SP1, which adds support for compiling executables compatible with Windows XP. I've been holding off upgrading my IDE, but now with XP support I'm looking forward to it. Does anyone have upgrade or usability experiences you would like to share? I've read that VS 2012 is a bit lacking in the c++11 department, but for the most part I'm not that crazy about it.