Distant Spherical Area Light Sources
This is a small test post exercising math notation with MathJax in Hugo.
Very Fast, High-Precision SIMD/GPU Gradient Noise
A recently published article by Inigo Quilez on Voronoi Edges highlights the technique of shifting the co-ordinate frame of procedural algorithms to improve precision. This is a really important little trick that I felt was worth reviewing, as it provides huge benefits to world generation at a planetary scale.
Skeletal Animation Looping with Autocorrelation
This is a bit of a fun post highlighting how some simple maths can be used to create great visual results. With some basic statistics, we can create looping skeletal animations from an input data set that contains non-exact loops. A typical example is a motion capture sampled run animation: This is derived from the CMU Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database, which has been converted to BVH files by Bruce Hahne.
Quaternions and Dual Quaternion Skinning
For some reason I like quaternions. I fell in love with complex numbers back in school when I found out that they made more sense than real numbers. While it might not exactly be helpful to visualise quaternions as an extension of complex numbers, there's something in there that just grabs at me. Unlike previous posts, I've managed to update to D3D11 so I'll be discussing implementation details in terms of HLSL (Shader Model 4, as I also have a D3D10 dev machine).
An RPC Debugging Framework with Visual Studio
I used to love Sublime Text 2 (UPDATE: I'm now a Visual Studio Code convert). For me, it does nearly everything a modern C++ code editing platform should do and is constantly moving in a direction that is pleasing to the soul. I've worked with Visual Studio since 1998 for editing my C++ code, and I don't like it. It gets slower year on year, adds many features which are not helpful to your average game developer and consistently ignores our needs as a community.
Reflection in C++, Part2: The Simple Implementation of Splinter Cell
The first part in this series on Reflection in C++ gave a high level overview of many of the possibilities open to you when adding reflection to your games. In this second part I'm going to go into details and cover the system used to aid the rendering engine in Splinter Cell: Conviction (SC5). The motivation for the development of the SC5 engine was a clean break from the past. We were working with a very, very large code base that used Unreal 2.
Reflection in C++, Part 1: Introduction
If there was one job I'd love to do other than writing games it'd be writing compilers. This probably explains my obsession with the subject of reflection; a topic I've been hammering away at for almost 10 years now. Having written a few compilers in the past, it became glaringly obvious to me that reflection would be quite simple to add to C++ -- if you're willing to place some limits on it -- and that the language has suffered from its absence.