As an update, I inform you that I’m pasting the license on the source files and getting the release ready. I’m going to publish on the sourceforge site where the Sylphis Generalized Triangle optimizer is published at the CVS. The engine is going to be hosted using SVN. Maybe there will be downloadable versions too, but I’m not sure yet. So get your SVN clients ready…
… until then happy Easter people!!
The last days I’m spending most of my time considering open source licenses and what would be the appropriate license for Sylphis3D. I must say that it is a very brain-melting procedure. I can see now why I could never became a lawyer!
I initially started considering two licenses, the GPL and the BSD. These are both approved open source licenses by the FSF. GPL is the defacto open source license today and has proven its value. Most of open source software today is released under the GPL, including Linux. The license was proven to be able to protect and empower the freedom of the software, by forcing code to be contributed back to the original GPLed software. The BSD on the other side is a more liberal license. Requires for the adopters of the code to make no more than to mention the code that was used. They are not required to release their code back. This is looked upon by some open source people because it allows closed source projects to benefit from open source, without ever contributing back. The classic example here is the Windows operating system that used the networking stack of the freeBSD operating system; no code was ever contributed back by Microsoft.
The problem with GPL is that it is not an easy solution when it comes to 3D game engines. A GPLed engine Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Yesterday I upgraded the Stackless Python used in Sylphis3D. Until now I was using version 2.2. This was a bit outdated since the latest Stackless Python was 2.3. I was quite happy with 2.2 and had no problems at all, so I wasn’t considering to upgrade. But now that 2.4 Read the rest of this entry »
If you are interested in the licensing program for Sylphis3D you better check out the http://www.sylphis3d.com.
