John Ratcliff's Weblog

Pretty cool, here is a YouTube video showing the cloth integration I did for GDC. To be clear, I did not myself create the cloth technology (that was done by my friends at Nvidia/PhysX) but I did the game engine integration and the demo for GDC.

Well, I'm back from my seven day vacation at the Riveria Maya in Mexico. The goal of the vacation was relaxation and I would have to say that it succeeded wildly. I was on a really strict GDC deadline that went down to the wire. The last week, and especially the last two days, before I left I had to work very long hours to get the demo ready for GDC. Not only did this create a lot of stress but, also, I had to miss the robotics competition my son was part of. His team ended up making and winning the regional finals match! I was pretty dissapointed I wasn't there to see it. I brought a big stack of books to read for the trip and made quite a dent in them. I read a number of Neil Gaiman books. I especially enjoyed 'American Gods' which was a luxurious 600+ pages of storytelling. On the last day of the trip I read John Mack's 'Passport to the Cosmos' and David Jacob's 'The Threat' back to back. These two books take the same exact phenomeno

(The final score between Troy Chapter and Kirkwood) The Iphone has a pretty crappy camera that takes pretty crappy pictures but, I suppose, it is better than having no camera at all. Here are some recent photographs I found on my camera today. This first photograph shows the final score between Troy Chapter and Kirkwood Chapter after their first meeting in the DeMolay basketball tournament sponsored by the Moolah Shrine and hosted at their facility. Troy DeMolay has always had a number of members who were quite athletic but, being a small chapter, we always had an uphill battle in competitions. Kirkwood Chapter has so many members that they would show up to conclave and be able to host not just a first and second string but often times a third string of players for flag football, volleyball, and basketball. Two years ago Troy Chapter made it all of the way to the finals of the flag football competition at conclave and took Kirkwood Chapter to two over-times before we unfortunatly lo