More tech and research…
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.
Entry Filed under: Game Development
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