Velvet Assassin on Mac (Patch)

I just got news that Vel­vet Assas­sin has been port­ed over to the Mac and is avail­able on the App Store! How­ev­er, I was not at all involved in the Mac port and I don’t know the devel­op­ers who did – it came as a sur­prise to me as to any­one else in the for­mer team. Here is a direct iTunes link: (Edit, no longer avail­able as of 2021, unfortunately).

Shader Bug on ATI graphic cards

Unfor­tu­nate­ly there is a shad­er bug with ATI graph­ics chips.  It hap­pened to me while try­ing it out on a 2011 iMac with an ATI Radeon HD 5670. I got reports from friends that this is not a prob­lem of the Mac port itself but it hap­pens on PC too. The prob­lem is relat­ed to ATI chips with dri­vers that are new­er than 2010 or so. Here is a screenshot:

Screen shot 2013-01-11 at 04.09.06

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The Blinn-Phong Normalization Zoo

It is good to see how phys­i­cal­ly based shad­ing is final­ly gain­ing momen­tum in real time graph­ics and games. This is some­thing I have been advo­cat­ing for a long time. Devel­op­ers are spread­ing the word. I was espe­cial­ly sur­prised to learn about Call of Duty: Black Ops join­ing the club [1]. Even a slick 60 Hz shoot­er with no cycles to spare can afford to do PBS today!

This leads me to the top­ic of this post, the nor­mal­iza­tion of the Blinn-Phong spec­u­lar high­light. Why am I writ­ing about it? It came to my mind recent­ly with the cur­rent batch of pub­li­ca­tions from peo­ple adopt­ing phys­i­cal­ly based shad­ing mod­els. This got me check­ing the maths again and I com­piled a list with nor­mal­iza­tion fac­tors for dif­fer­ent shad­ing mod­els, giv­en here in this post. I would also like to elab­o­rate a lit­tle on the mod­el that I wrote about in ShaderX7 [2]. Be aware this post is a large brain dump.
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