Thoughts Serializer

Computer graphics, Games, Personal

Getting Started Again… True Megatexture

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Greetings everybody!

It been a long time since this blog was updated, I know! Well I was kind of busy lately. Looking for a job, finding a job, then doing the job and finally trying to get some free time for summer vacation and free time projects. You know that getting a new job always makes things a bit harder until you get comfortable. The good thing is that now work has stabilized and I finally start to have some free time.

I’m not going to write a lot here at this time. I just wanted to let you know that I’m well and good. I’m also planing to start working on Sylphis3D again in a more committed and persistent manner.

Regarding Sylphis3D I would also like to inform you that I’m working on something big! You probably know my opinion on megatexture on terrain. Well I managed to think of an algorithm to apply megatextures on any kind of geometry. Yes you heard correct! The new Sylphis3D will have totally virtual texturing.

You will be able to apply any size texture on any kind of mesh with no impact on performance! Would you like to apply a 4096×4096 texture on that talisman the player wears just in case someone gets so close to see it? It ok! It doesn’t hurt! Go ahead! It’s up to you! At the moment I am at implementation stage and things seem that will work out just fine! Stay tuned…

The wait is over… Sylphis3D is open source!

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I just release the source to Sylphis3D! Check out the story at the Developer Network.

The wait is over! Sylphis3D is officially released under the GNU GPL ver.2 (with the classpath exception for those that need closed source solutions). The engine weights at around 45000 lines of source code written in C++ and Python.The source code can be obtained from the download page of the [sourceforge.net project page](http://www.sf.net/projects/sylphis3d). Latter on the source will be added to the subversion repository for easier access.The source code compiles under Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. The makefiles and sconsturct files, for compiling with GCC, are out of date. However the mapcompiler is up to date. The source would compile out of the box. Read the rest of this entry »

No Second Carnival of Game Programming

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It’s been a month since the last Carnival of Game Programming and unfortunately there is not going to be a second one. The number of submitions was low and I can’t publish a carnival like that.

When a critical mass of posts is collected we will have a second carnival… no fixed dates and dead lines…

Sylphis3D goes open source : BSD or GPL ?

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I think this is good news on the doorstep today! Yeap! After long thoughts I came to the decision to finally open the source code of Sylphis3D. This is going to be a big step for the development of the game engine and Read the rest of this entry »

HDR Procedural Skies

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The under development branch of Sylphis3D is going to support high quality terrain rendering. At the moment the terrain rendering code is in place and produces some very nice views! However the sky support was limited to skybox rendering. At first I thought I would just go for some HDR textured skybox. This was good until I reallized that it would be stupid to have an engine support realtime shadowing and lighting and have the outdoor areas with static lights, because of a static skybox. It was obvious that a dynamic sky was needed, so that day/night cycles can be simulated.

After a lot of experimentations and book studing about light scatering and stuff, we had results! Read the rest of this entry »

How to do good bloom for HDR rendering

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One thing that makes HDR rendering impressive is the bloom effect. In fact even if bloom is in a sense decoupled from HDR rendering, it is often confused with HDR. There are 3d engines out there that advertise bloom for HDR rendering, which is nonsense. You can have HDR rendering without bloom, and you can have bloom without HDR rendering. What makes the sweet, sweeter is the combination of the two. Actually if you present the average gamer HDR rendering without bloom, it will be hard for her to understand the difference between LDR and HDR rendering…

This means that you are going to need good blooming in your engine to really have that “WOW” thing coming out of peoples mouths. Before writing the Sylphis3D HDR rendering implementation I had read some articles about blooming but the results were never satisfactory. I’m going to present you here the method I used and that really makes a perfect bloom that is also faster to perform and uses less memory. Read the rest of this entry »

HDRR screenshots

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Here are some screenshots of the HDRR implementation in Sylphis3D. Sylphis3D is now capable of HDRR on video cards starting from ATI Radeon 9600 and nVidia FX5200 and up. (Yeap… no need for those expensive nVidia 6800 cards)… Read the rest of this entry »

Programmable GPUs and the programming method

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Working heavily on pixel shaders the last few days, I came to realize some facts about the current way of treating the GPUs and how that way is inefficient/impractical and really doesn’t allow us to fully harness the powers of GPUs. Read the rest of this entry »

HDR lighting… possibilities…

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The sillent blog the last few days is due to the heavy work going on in Sylphis3D… I have almost completed Read the rest of this entry »

OpenGL render to texture problems

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The time 1:52 in the morning and I just had those “OpenGL” moments again! It seems that the nightmare will never end. An other problem with RTT came up. As you know Sylphis3D uses the stencil shadow method, and therefore needs a stencil buffer. Now that I am implementing high dynamic range (HDR) rendering, I need to render the scene to a floating point framebuffer object and not on the screen… guess what… with OpenGL you can’t have a Read the rest of this entry »