Basic game structure is a topic that many people have trouble with, yet it somehow gets overlooked. In this lesson, I will show you exactly how to set up and structure code for commercial games. Read more »

Glow effects simulate the characteristics of a lens that suffers from light bleeding due to a high dynamic range. In photography, most cameras are set to use an average metering algorithm. The camera will analyze the frame and take the average exposure as the midpoint. Anything outside the camera... Read more »

When light bounces off a surface, it contributes to the amount of ambient lighting, or environment lighting we see. In a basic renderer, the amount of ambient lighting a surface receives is uniform, making it look rather flat. Ambient occlusion provides a more realistic shading technique by takin... Read more »

Refraction is the bending of light when passing from one medium into another. When light reaches your eyes, the objects appear bent or distorted in some way. You see this type of physical property whenever you stare at objects within water or when you look off to the horizon on a hot day and see ... Read more »

When compositing two or more images, you mix them together using some sort of blend operation. The common blending operation is to mix the foreground onto the background taking into account the alpha channels between the two. Read more »

When you view an image on your monitor, the RGB pixels that make up the image are altered in such a way to better accommodate human vision. Human vision is more sensitive to shadows then it is for midtones or highlights. Hardware manufactures account for this nonlinear behaviour by applying a pow... Read more »

Depth of field (abbr. DOF) is a region where subjects appear to be in focus. When a subject moves away from the point of focus, it begins to defocus or blur due to the physical nature of how light interacts with lenses (including your eyes) and projects an object onto a screen. Read more »

Shadow mapping is a hardware accelerated technique for casting shadows in a 3D scene. It has become the industry standard method for casting shadows due to its simplicity, its rendering speed, and its ability to produce soft shadows. This article will go over the shadow mapping technique as well ... Read more »

The purpose of this interactive shader is to demonstrate how you can use sepia toning, noise, film scratches, and vignetting to produce a classic looking film effect. This is a post-process effect, so you render your scene normally to a texture using a fragment buffer object and then operate on t... Read more »

In this article, I will show how you can load and animate models loaded from the MD5 model file format. In this article I will use OpenGL to render the models. I will not show how to setup an OpenGL application in this article. If you need to get a Read more »

As the first in a series of articles about popular shader effects, this article goes over the basics of 3D lighting through an interactive WebGL demo. You'll learn about the lighting formula using ambient, diffuse and specular reflection, light attenuation, and spotlight effects. This article wil... Read more »

The current state of the art in GPU-supported texture compression is a set of seven formats called BC1 through BC7. These formats are used by almost all realistic 3D games to reduce the memory footprint of their texture maps. This article will get under the hood of each of the seven BCn formats, ... Read more »

(Originally posted on reedbeta.com) In the screenshots in one of my posts on my blog, you'll noticed this readout in one corner: As you can see, even though Idyll is at a very, very early stage (it has no textures, only ambient and directional lighting), it still has a fairly complete Read more »

The resolution selection screen has been one of the defining aspects of PC gaming since the birth of 3D games. In this whitepaper and the accompanying sample code, we argue that this no longer needs to be the case; developers can dynamically vary the resolution of their rendering instead of havin... Read more »

(Originally posted on reedbeta.com) In game development (or programming in general) it’s not uncommon to have a situation where you’d like to let a user enter an arithmetic formula that your code parses and evaluates. For example, in a shader you might like to have an annotation that specifies how Read more »

Video games appeal to our desire to explore and interact with our environment, and adding real-world phenomena-such as fluid motion-allows game developers to create immersive and fun virtual worlds. Recently, physical simulations have become more realistic, but the simulations have largely been l... Read more »