Clik here to view.
Blending Terrain Textures
One of the most common methods for texturing a height map terrain is with multiple tiling layers. These texture layers are stacked on top of each other and blended together to create the final...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Specular Color in Light Pre-pass Renderer
Light pre-pass and inferred lighting have some nice properties that make them popular alternatives to traditional deferred rendering. Like a deferred renderer, a light pre-pass renderer generates a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Eliminating Exporting in an Asset Pipeline
An asset (like a model) undergoes a number of steps from in the journey from an artist’s tool to real-time display in a game engine. These steps are known collectively as the asset pipeline. The...
View ArticleError Checking with Dynamic Typing
One of the common complaints in our office about Lua is that the use of dynamic typing means that most problems in the code aren’t discovered until run-time. Since the types of variables isn’t known...
View ArticleText pre-processing
Text pre-processing is a useful technique for adding features to systems that use text files as input. Probably the most common example of pre-processing is the C pre-processor. This is the mechanism...
View ArticleLua ‘local’ performance
The ‘local’ keyword in Lua is used to restrict the visibility of a variable in the Lua compiler, however it also affects how the code is executed by the VM. Ultimately this can have a significant...
View ArticleClik here to view.
First person view model rendering
In a first-person game, the player’s hand or weapon is often represented by a model called the “view model” in the terminology established by first-person shooters. One important consideration is that...
View ArticleLoose Grids
Spatial data structures are an important part of game engines, with uses in various systems such as collision detection, rendering and gameplay. Octrees, BSP trees and bounding volume hierarchies are...
View Article
