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Archive for the ‘News’ Category
I was looking to see if there were any new books out based on C++11. I didn’t find any, as its still early (Guess we’ll have to give it a year or two), but I did find these coming out next year. Thought I’d share.
Effective Concurrency in C++ – Herb Sutter – 28 June 2012
Speaking of C++ – Herb Sutter – 28 June 2013
C++ Programming Language – Bjarne Stroustrup – 28 January 2012
C++ Templates – David Vandevoorde & Nocholai Josutti – 28 August 2012
The C++ Standard Library – Nocholai Josutti – 28 April 2012
( Dates retrieved from www.BookDeposity.co.uk )
I’m personally looking forward to the new editions of the “The C++ Standard library” and “C++ Programming language”. Going by this though, I wonder just how much code will actually compile in VS when they do come out 
( assuming they are using C++ 11 )
Physically Based Rendering, Second Edition: From Theory To Implementation
Posted: October 29, 2011 in News
I picked up the second copy of PBR today as I like to keep my book collection up to date. I’m not the biggest fan of the book as I find it difficult to read and I dont like the approach they took of explaing how to implement such a tool, Im more a fan of having something simple that works at multiple stages of the process and building it up, as is done in “Ray Tracing from the Ground Up”, which is a much easier read. The new edition brings in new sections on Subsurface Scattering, Metropolis Light Transport and Precomputed Light Transport and some other stuff. They also made two quite big changes, one was to do away with the DLL module approach, which I agree with; it was needless complexity, but they’ve also introduced threading. I think this was a bad move to be honest, as again it adds a lot of complexity. I think these kinds of books should only focus on the problem at hand which is producing Physically Accurate Images, not producing Physically Accurate Images …FAST. I have threading in my RayTracer, and whilst it wasnt that difficult to implement, a lot of the code has to be changed/organised differently to accommodate it, which just makes the task all the more difficult when you’re first starting out. Unfortunatly its not something they could have just chucked in the appendix, as threading needs to be thought about from the very beginning, but I think it should have been left out.
I recieved my copy of Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 today and am slowly working my way through it. First thoughts are that its detailed, very detailed. The chapter on the rendering pipeline itself is probably worth the money. Before this I didn’t have much material on Directx API, my only resource was the SDK docs. Frank Lunas Books are also good, but lack detail, which is fair enough as they’re introductory books, where as PR&C is more of a reference manual …with some examples.
I think it’s going to end up being one of those books you’ll always have on your desk.
So apparently theres yet another Gems series being published, this time on Game Engine Design, Game Engine Gems. The first edition is being authored by Eric Lengyel, who wrote the very popular book Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics. I assume it will follow the structure of all the other Gems series, that being lots of tips and tricks chucked in by knowledgable people, generally from the Games Industry. Im not sure how this series will differ from Game Programming Gems, as that can be considered “Game Engine” related too. But I’m all for new books, so I’m not going to to complain. 🙂
“Game Engine Gems brings together in a single volume dozens of new articles from leading professionals in the game development industry. Each “gem” presents a previously unpublished technique related to game engines and real-time virtual simulations. Specific topics include rendering techniques, shaders, scene organization, visibility determination, collision detection, audio, user interface, input devices, memory management, artificial intelligence, resource organization, and cross-platform considerations. A CD-ROM containing all the source codes and demos accompanies the book.”
The new edition of Game Programming Gems has been released !
I’ve been reading up on DirectX10 lately, mainly from author Frank Luna, and his new book Introduction to 3D Game Programming with Direct 3D 10: A Shader Approach. I’ve always planned to convert my Rendering Library to DirectX10, as theres a bunch of neat stuff in there that I wanted to take advantage of, such as Texture Arrays and Geometry shaders. And then theres the whole not having to reset your resources. I know that this is going to be a huge task, as quite a lot has changed, meaning that I’m going to have to recode/reorganise a fair bit, but I do find DirectX10 a lot cleaner to work with, so its going to be well worth it. Lets see how it goes.
Up until now, I have been using the .x format by Microsoft, and the .obj format by Wavefront (I believe). Where .obj can be exported from pretty much any 3d app, and .x can be exported via plugins such as PandaSoft Directx Exporter. But I also wanted to see what else was open to me. The most obvious, and most powerful solution is to write my own exporter for either 3dsMax or Maya, but having no experience with their scripting languages, I wanted to take another route for the time being. So decided to take a look into Collada and FBX. Both of which seem to offer the same functionality, the only real difference being the way you work with their SDK’s, so I thought I’d try them both. First off, Collada has 2 options, Collada DOM API and FCollada, I didn’t really try FCollada, but spent a good few days with the DOM API, and managed to easily import my data. My only real problem, was that it was SLOW. Seeing as collada data is exported as XML, it’s quite expensive to parse. Now the idea with these file formats is not to actually use them for your games, as they generally contain a lot of extra information you don’t need, so its extra parsing that is simply not required. The idea is that you use them as an *intermediate* file format, from your 3d application of choice. You then write your own conversion code to convert them into your own custom format, that only contains the data you need, in binary format.
3dsMax -> ExportCollader -> output.dae -> CustomConvertor -> output.customGameMesh
And so converting Collada files to my own format is going to be a slow process, which is not a huge problem, as it won’t be done that often, but still, I wanted to check out FBX. Now I found FBX a lot cleaner to work with, as the example files and documentation is better in my opinion. And also, with FBX you have the choice of saving the files in either ASCII or Binary, which is an advantage. The library files are also a lot smaller, and so out of the two, im currently working with FBX.
Although working with these API’s is an option, it’s still an annoying intermediate stage, and the conversion process could be gotten rid of by just writing a 3ds Max Exporter in the first place, which as previously mentioned, is something I plan to do one day. Look, its a crazy dude made from orientation thing-a-ma-jigs dancing to some Primus!
When looking for ideas and inspiration, I generally turn to games like Crysis and Farcry, not only because they rock! with their graphical content, but also because they’re extremely dev friendly. All the developer tools seem to have been left in the published versions, which you can enable by running in developer mode. You can take a look here for a tutorials on this. And whats even cooler, is that you can run Crysis in PerfHud. So you can see exactly how its being rendered, by steping through it, or looking at the shader code and models. I like to use a lot of the data in Crysis, specially the textures. And then to tip it off, there’s SandBox, …for a complete bundle, what more could you ask for? …. Crytek ROCK !
wforl 