(an old post-GDC blog post that got lost in the madness)
Everybody from The Sims to XNA is jumping on bandwagon and letting garage indie developers publish games left and right.
The Democratization of Game Development
To add to that, we now have MORE portals for higher-end PC games that did not exist a few months ago:
Add comment April 22nd, 2008
because the visual effects (VFX) business causes more divorces, has longer hours, and more unscrupulous bosses than the game industry. Competition at its finest!
Add comment April 22nd, 2008
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. We all watch sports, but why not watch computer games? I doubt there is much of a market for watching Half-Life or Halo, but maybe a future version of Rock Band or SingStar?
I’m not the only one who wants this, as at GDC many presentations casually mentioned it. I think it’s has a brighter future than hardcore games, but right now the current crop of games aren’t worth watching (no social aspect). Microsoft is pimping PGR 3 as a game to watch. No thanks.
How about? (all live – using networked 3D games)
Add comment April 22nd, 2008
BULLET 2.68 has been released with soft body support! The demos are amazing and it looks very simple to use (a quick call to create the soft body mesh with some extra parameters).
Glift – an abstraction and generic template library for defining complex random-access graphics processor (GPU) data structures. After reading about Sparse Virtual Textures, I wondered if there was a generic set of functions that could be created virtualize GPU/texture memory to allow for similar algorithms. Well, Glift is just that! Normally, GPU shader programs are limited to 1D/2D/3D/4D texture access or float arrays which have to be hand bundled together into more complex data structures (rarely does anybody do this).
And performance-wise it’s not that bad.
Advanced shadow techniques – while shadow volumes + shadow maps are the most common techniques they are also the most problematic.
In general, shadow maps are the most flexible of them all because there is no need to create a degenerate shadow volume for extrusion. However, they are noisy due to the lack of shadow map resolution and numerical imprecision in post-projection space.
After reading the up to date literature on shadowing algorithms, I believe strongly in two methods: Adaptive Shadow Maps that increases the resolution on the shadow map in areas where it is necessary but requires a tree-like data structure that makes it hardware-unfriendly until Glift came along…
and the other is custom rendering techniques that enable “shadowing” like Pre-computed Radiance Transfer, Irradiance Volumes or Alex Evan’s Signed Distance Functions. If a game has specific limitations (i.e. mainly indoors), then the graphics system should leverage this.
Add comment April 22nd, 2008
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