Spellforce 2 Demons of the Past

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Spell­force 2 was released in 2006 and will be 8 years old by april. Nev­er­the­less, the third add-on of the series shipped a month ago. Talk about a long seller!

Of course I’m attached to SF2 because I wrote many parts of its engine back then. This time I was briefly involved to help the devel­op­ers include my attribute-less nor­mal map algo­rithm. The orig­i­nal SF2 did not have any nor­mal maps, and there­fore none of the orig­i­nal art assets comes with tan­gent space infor­ma­tion. This is an ide­al sce­nario to pimp up the visu­als with­out touch­ing the geom­e­try, sim­ply by mak­ing a shad­er change and adding nor­mal maps. Weit­er­lesen →

Slides of my FMX 2013 presentation on Physically Based Shading

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Edit 2019: I have con­vert­ed the orig­i­nal slides to PDF for­mat and also made minor cor­rec­tions. See this post for details. The down­load is at the end of this page.

I was kind­ly invit­ed by Wolf­gang from Con­fet­ti FX to speak at the FMX 2013 con­fer­ence about phys­i­cal­ly based shad­ing (with­in the scope of the Real Time Ren­der­ing day). Since I remem­bered the FMX as a con­fer­ence for visu­al arts, I made the pre­sen­ta­tion inten­tion­al­ly non-tech­ni­cal, for fear of alien­at­ing the lis­ten­ers. In ret­ro­spect, my guess was a bit too con­ser­v­a­tive, as there were quite a num­ber of pro­gram­mers in the audience.

Screen Shot 2013-04-24 at 14.53.58

Nev­er­the­less, here are the slides for down­load (with all notes includ­ed). The Keynote for­mat is the orig­i­nal and the Pow­er­point for­mat was export­ed from that and is a lit­tle bro­ken, so you should use the Keynote ver­sion if you can read it.

Down­load “FMX 2013 Slides PDF with Notes” 

fmx-11-revised.pdf – 9021-mal herun­terge­laden – 15,25 MB

Followup: Normal Mapping Without Precomputed Tangents

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This post is a fol­low-up to my 2006 ShaderX5 arti­cle [4] about nor­mal map­ping with­out a pre-com­put­ed tan­gent basis. In the time since then I have refined this tech­nique with lessons learned in real life. For those unfa­mil­iar with the top­ic, the moti­va­tion was to con­struct the tan­gent frame on the fly in the pix­el shad­er, which iron­i­cal­ly is the exact oppo­site of the moti­va­tion from [2]:

Since it is not 1997 any­more, doing the tan­gent space on-the-fly has some poten­tial ben­e­fits, such as reduced com­plex­i­ty of asset tools, per-ver­tex band­width and stor­age, attribute inter­po­la­tors, trans­form work for skinned mesh­es and last but not least, the pos­si­bil­i­ty to apply nor­mal maps to any pro­ce­du­ral­ly gen­er­at­ed tex­ture coor­di­nates or non-lin­ear defor­ma­tions. Weit­er­lesen →

Velvet Assassin on Mac (Patch)

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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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FlipCode is back

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Kurt has tak­en steps to revive Flip­Code.

Flip­code was a place to dis­cuss gamedev + algo­rithms with a unique flair and an out­stand­ing audi­ence, some­thing IMHO gamedev.net nev­er matched. I, too, was a reg­u­lar vis­i­tor, poster, and also con­tributed the odd arti­cle and an IOTD. Ter­rain engines bor­der­ing on 100k polys with­out HW T&L will be for­ev­er in the past, but the spir­it will live on.

Branchless Matrix to Quaternion Conversion

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(Edit: This arti­cle is a more in-depth write­up of an algo­rithm that I devel­oped around 2005, and first post­ed to Mar­tin Baker’s Euclid­ean Space web­site. That time was the height of the Intel Net­Burst archi­tec­ture, which was noto­ri­ous for its deep pipeline and high branch mis­pre­dic­tion penal­ty. Hence the moti­va­tion to devel­op a branch-free matrix to quater­nion con­ver­sion rou­tine. What fol­lows is the com­plete deriva­tion and analy­sis of this idea.)

The orig­i­nal rou­tine to con­vert a matrix to a quater­nion was giv­en by Ken Shoe­make [1] and is very branchy. There is a way to elim­i­nate these branch­es and arrive at a com­plete­ly branch-free and high­ly par­al­leliz­able code. The trade off is the intro­duc­tion of 3 addi­tion­al square roots. Jump to the analy­sis sec­tion and the end of this arti­cle, or con­tin­ue fist with the math bits.

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OpenGL 4.3

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I just got the news about the OpenGL 4.3 spec, which was released today, and is avail­able at http://www.opengl.org/registry/. The spec doc­u­ment has been reor­ga­nized and cleared up con­sid­er­ably and is a lot eas­i­er to fol­low than the pre­vi­ous spec­i­fi­ca­tions. New fea­tures include (ordered by impor­tance for my projects):

  • Queries for inter­nal tex­ture for­mat parameters
  • Debug out­put callbacks
  • Com­pute shaders
  • Tex­ture views
  • and oth­ers

I’m cur­rent­ly on a project where com­pat­i­bil­i­ty and scaleabil­i­ty is prime, so the first two fea­tures are very wel­come as devel­op­ment aids to make the code run robust­ly on a vari­ety of plat­forms. Com­pute shaders and tex­ture views are of course cool, but require the newest hard­ware, so they are low­er in my list.

A nice touch by Nvidia to make to expose the new func­tion­al­i­ty as exten­sions on old­er hard­ware.

Cloud rendering and the relativity of whiteness

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Here are some philo­soph­i­cal and ren­der­ing-relat­ed ques­tions that I took home from the last vaca­tion. What’s the col­or of clouds? The stan­dard answer would be, white. What’s the col­or of snow? Again, white. Ok, then look at the fol­low­ing pic­ture, where the snow seems con­sid­er­ably whiter. This is the case in almost all pho­tos that I took.

There is an image on Wikipedia from the same gen­er­al area on which the bright­ness dif­fer­ence between clouds vs snow is even more pro­nounced. If you look at the direct­ly lit parts of the snow and con­sid­er it white (#ffffff), then the direct­ly lit parts of the clouds are at most 50% grey (#bbbbbb). Is that an evi­dence of air pol­lu­tion? Unlike­ly! (At least not in Tyrol).

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GPU Pro 3 has arrived

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I found my copy of the book in the mail today. I was a lit­tle sur­prised by the mod­er­ate size—other vol­umes of this series were just that: vol­umes! I think this one is about half the size than the pre­vi­ous tomes. By the way, this post is a shame­less plug because there is an arti­cle writ­ten by me in it. Thanks go to Wolf­gang Engel, the series edi­tor, and Christo­pher Oat, my sec­tion edi­tor, and CRC press for mak­ing it pos­si­ble! I will post some com­ments on the oth­er arti­cles when I read them through.

Edit:
I found one very good and com­pre­hen­sive arti­cle on data dri­ven engine design by Don­ald Revie. The ideas pre­sent­ed in there res­onate very well with the designs that I found worked well in the past, so this part gets a sol­id +1 from me.

(I end­ed up with a tri­ad of IRenderObject, IRenderGeometry and IRenderProgram, where the ren­der object would AddBatches() to a draw list, each of which refers to one geom­e­try con­tain­ing the mesh and one pro­gram for set­ting the ren­der state. For instance, a SpeedTree™ ren­der object would typ­i­cal­ly add three batch­es, one for each of the branch­es, fronds and leaves, where each batch would pair the spe­cif­ic geom­e­try with an appro­pri­ate pro­gram. The draw list is then sort­ed in one go via a gen­er­al 128 bit sort key, and the batch­es ren­dered in order. This sys­tem is gen­er­al enough that the UI sys­tem also can just AddBatch­es() to this list (so the UI sys­tem, as a whole, is just one instance of a ren­der object). In this case, the indi­vid­ual UI geom­e­try objects just rep­re­sent views into one big dynam­ic ver­tex buffer. I prob­a­bly want to explain this sys­tem in detail in anoth­er post.)

Anoth­er two very inspir­ing arti­cles so far are the one about geo­met­ric post­process antialias­ing, by Emil “Humus” Pers­son, and the piece about glob­al illu­mi­na­tion using a vox­el grid, from the teams at the Unis Koblenz/Magdeburg. I already read their ACM paper before and I think it is a viable method.

Various Mac tricks

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This is my per­son­al col­lec­tion of com­mand line tricks on Mac OS X that I found indis­pens­able. The list is far from com­plete, and may be added to in the future.

Show hidden files in Finder

> defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles true
> killall Finder

The first line sets the pref­er­ence for the Find­er to show hid­den files, while the sec­ond line restarts the Find­er so the set­ting comes in effect. As an alter­na­tive for the last line, select the Find­er in the Cmd-Alt-Escape pop­up and select “Relaunch”. I found this one on the Mozil­la knowl­edge base [2].

Delete all .DS_Store files

> sudo find / -name ".DS_Store" -print -delete

If hid­den files are enabled in the find­er, you will soon make con­tact with the infa­mous .DS_Store files that the desk­top ser­vice lit­ters around as you browse the filesys­tem. This is annoy­ing. Use the above com­mand to delete those suck­ers. The -print is in there just so you can mon­i­tor the progress.

Prevent .DS_Store files on network mounts

> defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Although there is no method to gen­er­al­ly stop .DS_Store files, at least you can pre­vent desk­top ser­vices from pol­lut­ing net­work mounts. Win­dows users on the same net­work will be glad! This trick is pub­lished in the Apple knowl­edge base [3].

Disable Spotlight indexing for a given volume

> sudo mdutil -i off /mountpoint

This com­mand will dis­able index­ing for the vol­ume under /mountpoint (for instance /Volumes/MyExternalHarddisk). Under MacOS X 10.5 and lat­er, it also deletes any par­tial index cre­at­ed up to this point. There is one caveat: The enable/disable infor­ma­tion is itself stored inside the .Spotlight-V100 direc­to­ry, so do not delete that, and be care­ful when back­ing up to anoth­er dri­ve. More infor­ma­tion is found in [1].

[1] The X‑Lab, “Spot­light tips”,
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html

[2] Mozil­laZine, “Show hid­den files and folders”,
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Show_hidden_files_and_folders

[3] Apple Sup­port, “Mac OS X v10.4 and lat­er: How to pre­vent .DS_Store file cre­ation over net­work connections”,
http://web.archive.org/…