Stuff that has invaded my mind….
FastLSM - a neat soft-body physics system that allows for dynamic fracturing of models. It makes everything look like latex/rubber and requires ZERO artist setup. The negative is that it doesn’t integrate well with skeletal animation. Full-source code provided above.
Sparse Virtual Textures - imagine using a single 32,000 x 32,000 texture instead of numerous separate textures. The goal is to create a “texture database” that will allow for faster rendering and more importantly techniques like polynomial textures or texture based geometry representations. Actually the entire field of using textures to store FUNCTIONS not just single values (see Deep Shadow Maps, Polynominal textures, photon maps (kd-trees), RenderMan’s a-buffer etc.) is a large area itself… if we can build a fast texture database system then the future of real-time graphics is bright.
Trilight shader - Tom Forsyth generic (simple) shader. Lambert and Blinn need to die.
Optimized particle rendering - instead of naively create 4 vertices per particle (and transforming them in CPU)…. this guy uses hardware instancing, a fixed set of 4 UV co-ordinates, and a simple vertex shader to render particles.
Gamebryo - a multi-platform game engine that is I quite like. It’s animation tool is fantastic and allows for animation event tagging and explicit animation blending. i.e When transitioning from a walk to a run, you want it to start when one of the feet is planted on the ground and not in mid stride. It’s Floodgate system (stream processing model when using threads) is fantastic. I wish there was an open-source equivalent.
Modern C++ design - I have read parts of this book off and on the past 4 years. It has always felt like C++ template masturbation, but I am beginning to see many worthy aspects of policy-based design. The book also explains the design behind a small object allocator - being from the console development side this is absolutely required reading.
Add comment March 28th, 2008