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 »
Introduction In this tutorial, you will learn how to add sound to your game, using the FMOD Ex sound library. You will also learn about sound quality, and how to use FMOD for special sound effects, such as echo, reverb, low-pass filters and so on. Digital Sound Sound is stored... Read more »
Introduction Like physics, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is an incredibly complex field, and it's always changing. Some companies allocate entire teams to the subject to make their game provide challenging game play. So we can only hope to understand a few very basic concepts in this tutorial...... Read more »
Introduction In this tutorial, you will be introduced to game physics. This is an incredibly broad field, and quite complex too, so you'll really only get a teaser. This will however produce some pretty effects, which you will most definitely appreciate. Physics Many recent games use highly ...... Read more »
Introduction Before we continue with typical game related topics, you need to know a few more general techniques that will help you when you write your games. One of these techniques is file i/o. 'I/O' stands for 'input and output'. You are of course already performing file op...... Read more »
Introduction In this article we can put away our coding fingers for a moment and focus on an important feature of C++. It is portable and extendable! This portability of code is an extremely important feature of C++ - but it requires that we write clean, well maintained classes or... Read more »
Introduction If you are like me, you probably hate mathematics. For some strange reason, game development is full of it, yet many game developers consider themselves noobs in this area. It might have something to do with the fact that you get away with plenty of trial and error: once... Read more »
Introduction In article 9, you where introduced to the noble art of bitmagic. Here's a quick refresher: multiplying an integer value by (a power of) 2 can be done by shifting its (binary) bits to the left. Division is similar, except this time you shift to the right. So, a... Read more »
