Today, I want to show what a difference normal mapping for indirect lighting can make. By using orthonormal basis functions defined on the sphere, incident lighting can be evaluated for different directions depending on the surface’s normal.
One benefit of using a true radiosity solution for indirect lighting is that self-emitting surfaces can easily be simulated. In traditional lighting pipelines, emission effects are very local only, and mostly do not contribute to the global illumination at all, if not faked otherwise. I have recently added an emissivity feature to the demo, further showing what the technology is capable of.
At last, I can show what I’ve been working on for 3 months. It’s a real-time radiosity system which dynamically updates lightmaps with bounced, diffuse indirect lighting. Without further ado, here are some screenshots and comparisons with direct lighting approaches to see what a difference indirect lighting makes (click the thumbnails for a higher resolution image, and make sure that your browser displays them correctly, e.g. Firefox is unable to cleanly show the darker .pngs, but they work perfectly in Chrome):
Continuing from where we left off last time, this post explains how parent-child relationships are handled inside the task scheduler, and how streaming tasks can be split automatically by the scheduler.
In this part of the series, we will discuss Molecule’s task model in detail, and have a look at the underlying C++ code and some subleties we need to watch out for, as well as some unique optimization opportunities.
With multicore hardware becoming the norm in both PC/console-based gaming as well as on mobile platforms, it is crucial to take advantage of every processor core and thread being thrown at us developers. Therefore, it is important to build technology alleviating the task of writing correct, multi-threaded code.
In order to achieve that, this series will try to explain how to build a load-balancing, work-stealing task scheduler.
Everybody knows that writing correct multithreaded code is hard, even when using proper synchronization primitives like mutexes, critical sections, and the likes. (Ab)using the volatile keyword for synchronization purposes makes a programmer’s life even harder – read on if you care to know why, and help spreading the word.
A fast content pipeline is crucial for today’s engines, allowing the user to quickly iterate on features, assets, etc. Molecule’s content pipeline enables hot-reloading of every asset the engine understands (textures, models, shaders, …), while retaining blazingly fast loading times.
Whenever you’re baking signals into texture maps, there’s quite some issues to watch out for, regardless of the signal you’re baking. This post will try to explain issues I ran into while implementing a baking framework.
I’ve recently had the need for a simple ray-tracer since I started working on a precomputed radiance transfer (PRT) baking tool. There’s multitudes of sample code, implementations and SDKs available, so I wanted to share my findings after a bit of research.
Eventhough gamma-correct rendering is absolutely crucial in order to get good and realistic lighting results, many programmers (sadly) still don’t care about it. Today, I want to show how different the visual results of lighting in gamma-space vs. linear-space actually are, and what you can do about it.
There’s a horrible disease out there, and a lot of programmers – both junior and senior – are affected by it: Singletonitis. Please, let’s help stopping the plague from spreading further by reading and understanding this post.
Let’s face it, performance on modern processors (be it PCs, consoles or mobiles) is mostly governed by memory access patterns. Still, data-oriented design is considered something new and novel, and only slowly creeps into programmers’ brains, and this really needs to change. Having co-workers fix your code and improving its performance really is no excuse for writing crappy code (from a performance point-of-view) in the first place.
As it turns out, Gamasutra reprinted my #altdevblogaday article about quasi compile-time string hashing! It’s encouraging to see that things available in Molecule are getting more and more attention.
If there is one thing that’s completely banned from the Molecule Engine, it’s dynamic strings. I’ve always cringed at how many string operations and string-based look-ups where done in the last codebase I’ve been working with, hence I wanted to get completely rid of them in the run-time part of the engine – no exceptions.
Nowadays, with each platform (even mobiles) supporting some sort of SIMD registers and operations, it is crucial for every codebase/engine to fully utilize the underlying SIMD functionality. However, SIMD instruction sets, registers and types vary for each platform, and sometimes between compilers as well.
This blog post explains how a platform-agnostic SIMD implementation can be built, without having to port large portions of the codebase for each new supported platform.
In an earlier post, we discussed different methods of gathering keyboard input in Windows. Today, we will cover how multi-platform and multi-device input can be handled in a straightforward way, showing a very efficient implementation of the underlying parts.
After a bit more than three months of blogging, this blog has already managed to accumulate more than 3000 hits – thank you for reading, keep spreading the word!
Besides, I’ve recently been accepted as a writer for #altdevblogaday, so expect to see some technical articles there as well. My first blog post went live on Tuesday – I’m happy to be part of such a passionate community!
While other languages such as C# offer type-safe callbacks/delegates out-of-the-box, C++ unfortunately does not offer such features. But delegates and events provide a nice way of “coupling” completely unrelated classes without having to write a lot of boilerplate code.
This blog post describes a generic, type-safe implementation of such delegates and events using advanced C++ features such as non-type template arguments and partial template specialization, supporting both free functions and member functions alike, without any restrictions or dynamic memory allocation.
Building upon the low-level API introduced in an earlier post, we will take a look at the platform-independent high-level API today, which provides support for the things that are to be expected from a game engine file system.
Molecular Musings 