I was planning to do a demo this year; all by myself (except music). However, after playing with Blender a bit it became clear that I am really not a 3D artist (not Blender’s fault, of course) – what a surprise :)

Now a crazy thought: do a 64 kilobyte intro instead?

Yeah, I know, one pretty unsuccessful try already was there 3+ years ago… But still: I need a musician that could use Farbrausch’s V2 synth, some clever ideas/design/code and there it is. There’s a hope that I have actually learned something in these 3 years, you know :)

By the way, this bzhykt intro produces really abstract visuals on my computer right now. Something was messed up in there…

Released this HDR with MSAA demo I was talking about earlier. Here it is: aras-p.info/projHDR.html. I can also add that this St. Anne’s Church is a pretty complex beast :)

I’m doing a small HDR demo for fun. Nothing fancy – linear gamma, Reinhard’s tone mapping and whatnot – everyone does that. But the thing I made so far does not even look good! :)

I’m trying to support both HDR and FSAA at the same time on ordinary DX9 hardware (no Radeons 1k) by using RGBE8 rendertarget for the main scene. It’s all okay so far.

The most difficult task right now is making it look good. Once I have that I’ll post the results.

Richard “legalize” Thomson (the organizer of Pilgrimage demoparty and DirectX MVP) just told me: he has done a 2-minute analysis of our demo engine dingus as a “wild demo”. It took 3rd place in wild demo competition at Pilgrimage’05!

That is pretty funny. I never knew it has so much sourcecode inside! :)

After taking a break, I already want to do something programming-related in my free time. What should I?

On the unrelated note, I’m doing a Oracle and XSLT related project at work. While Oracle stuff I’m dealing with really sucks, XSLT isn’t bad at all. Sure, it’s not “programming” that I’d love very much, but the whole concept is very powerful.

Maybe XML isn’t such a bad thing afterall, especially once you start doing funky things with XSLT and XPath. I still love the quote “XML is a giant step in no direction at all” though :)

As always, here’s a thought that’s more about demo-engines than about game-engines; and mostly dealing with graphics stuff.

Some folks add whatever gfx effects/techniques they use to “the engine”. Quote from Plastic:

We’ve also added a couple of new features like <...> wireframe/particle shader.

Now, I don’t have a problem with that, but what strikes me is that for whatever reason our engine doesn’t have any effect/technique in it. Zero shaders, no shadowmaps/PRT/refractions/whatever.

The obvious disadvantage of our approach is that for each demo I basically write the shaders and “effects” from scratch (ok, copying them is also fine). There’s no central place where, for example, a Gaussian blur postprocessing filter or shadowmaps rendering code is stored.

On the other hand, that means (nearly) complete freedom for each demo. In each prod I can tweak whatever I want and implement completely different rendering techniques. For example, in.out.side demo is quite different from Visual Gaming viewer or Xplodar FEM demo, yet they all share the same underlying “engine” (read: bunch of code).

Still, what I’d like to do is have “somewhat stable” stuff gathered in one place. I don’t tweak my basic lighting functions, standard postprocessing effects or shadowmap sampling patterns that often :)

Finally I’ve put the MeshTexer tool online, with some documentation, the tool itself and some sample data. Basically, it takes a mesh with unique UV mapping, a normalmap and a tileable texture, and “wraps” the texture (nearly) seamlessly onto the given model. Well, the truth is that it just projects the texture onto the model from several sides, weighting by normal.

However, it worked like a charm during in.out.side demo production. Paulius has written whole texturing workflow here – the tool was used to generate base material textures, material blend maps, gloss maps etc. Later these were hand-painted in “strategic” places and combined into final textures.

Enjoy!

Watched some new&old demos in the last couple of days. Here (when there’s a link to Lithuanian page, the ‘download’ looks like ‘parsisiųsti’):

Rapid Eye Movement by Matt Current. Now that’s unreal; technically simple but excellent composition and creates a very strong feeling. The similar feeling I only remember from The Planet by mfx. Also, I think the concept of “rapid eye movement” (i.e. the phase of the sleep) is done very well. I want to (be able to) do this!

Aether by mfx. The first time it didn’t leave me very impressed. However, I recommend watching it for the second time. Fascinating, though I can’t say what exactly.

Old ones with a very strong music: A Significant Deformation Near the Cranium by kewlers and Coma (on the dance floor) by Cocoon. I want that music :)