Jun 27, 2010

Volumetric lines 2 + News

Hello!

Sorry for the long time silence but I have been very busy recently: PhD writing, not accepted paper I have to modify, internship students to take care, researchers who want to use my engine, etc... Now it's better, I will have more free time by the end of the week.

So what are the news! Volume Lines 2 demo is on-line. In fact, I have submitted it to GpuPro2 but it was not accepted: I expected this answer because indeed the method is pretty simple. The results are nicer than previous volumetric lines but it requires geometry shaders and it is more computationally expensive.

Also, I started to work in Virtual Textures few weeks ago. I have the low resolution feedback buffer working with required pages to load, indirection table, etc. Just need to load required pages from the disk to GPU virtual memory in a separate thread together with a LRU cache. I will work again on it soon.

The development of my light-pre pass renderer with relief mapping is... well... deferred. :/ I have a lot of optimization ideas and I hope I can show you more about it soon.

Finally, I will go to Siggraph 2010 this year as an attendee! :) Many courses and talks to attend! It will be hard to attend every sessions I would like to but, I will do my best. I may talk about this conference, show some pictures and report about courses/talks on this blog. Maybe I will be able to meet some of you overthere! :D

Jun 1, 2010

Knee deep in the dead

Some pointers on fast but pretty good reviews of old IdTech and their adaptions to iPhone!

Wolfenstein3D iPhone
Doom PC
Doom iPhone
Quake PC

Ah those good old days... I was so young when I played Doom the first time on a friend's computer. By the way, everyone should read Micheal Abrash's Black Book full of anecdotes and in-depth details about Quake renderer algorithms. For instance, you would learn that John Carmack bet that he could implement dynamic lighting in the quake engine in less than an hour. Indeed, he failed but of only few minutes (3 to 7, I can't remember). But hell yeah! In an hour! :)