Has it been 1 year already?

The Ruby city demo, the very reason why I started this blog, was first shown to the world on June 4, 2008. Check the date on this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq1KTtU8loM

One full year, I cannot believe it. AMD has released every Ruby demo to the public well within a year after the introduction of the hardware. It began with Ruby Double Cross on Radeon X800, then Ruby Dangerous Curves on X850, followed by Ruby The Assassin on X1800, and finally Ruby WhiteOut on HD 2800. So it made perfect sense that the Voxelized Ruby would come out within a few months after the unveiling of the Radeon 4870. Even Dave Baumann said on the Beyond3d forum that the demo would be released for the public to play with.

So what went wrong? Did ATI decide to hold back the demo or was it Jules Urbach? I think the intial plan was to release the demo at a certain point, but the voxel technology was not finished and took longer to develop than expected. To enjoy the demo at a reasonable framerate, it had to be run on two 4870 cards or on the dual 4870X2, so only the very high end of the consumer market would be able to run it. The previous Ruby demo's were made by RhinoFX, and this was the first time that OTOY made a Ruby demo. Either way, if AMD is making another Ruby demo (with or without OTOY, but I prefer with), it has to look better than the last one, and they better release it within a reasonable amount of time.

Something else that crossed my mind: OTOY is now being used to create a virtual world community (Liveplace/Cityspace) and I think OTOY's technology would be a perfect match for Playstation Home. Virtual world games are much more tolerant to lag than fast-paced shooters or racers, and I think that even a lag of 500 milliseconds would be doable. Imagine you're playing a game on your PS3. Once you're done playing, you automatically end up in Home, being rendered in the cloud. Sony has trademarked PS Cloud, ( http://www.edge-online.com/news/sony-trademarks-ps-cloud ) and I wouldn't be surprised if Sony moved the rendering for PS Home from the client to the server side sooner or later.