Mipmap Quality

So mipmaps are often blurry and artists think we are bunch of morons making their awesome artwork so blurry.. :-) You know, most of the time we see lower mips all the time in the game. It depends on camera settings, but I found it's very rare that we see highest mip in most of the games out there.

PIMPL Pattern - Me No Likey

I haven't used the PIMPL pattern so far. I remember reading about it once long time ago, but was just not convinced it's something I want.

Goodbye XNA, Hello SharpDX

I've been using XNA since the beginning. I liked this platform a lot because it allows me to write something that runs both on PC and Xbox 360. And it is even possible to monetize your games on Xbox 360 Indie Games channel. However, the importance of XNA games on Xbox Live turned out to be very minimal, and MS changed XNA a lot to support Windows Phone 7.0. From that moment, (XNA 4.0 I believe), XNA became somewhat awkward. PC and Xbox 360 became second-class citizens, i think.

Another Useless Meeting

I don't remember exactly, but I think it was a presentation on how Apple works internally. A few key points I thought cool:

01. What is Shader

Definition of Shader The very first question I used to get in my class was "what the heck is shader?" Looking back, I also asked this same question when I heard about shader first few times, but no one was able to give me the one sentence explanation that made sense to a noob like me. I eventually figured it out, and I think the following sentence is the easiest way to define what shader is.

00. Introduction

This book is a collection of lecture materials I developed and used to teach a shader programming course at the Art Institute of Vancouver between 2007 and 2009.

[Slides] Relic's FX System

I totally forgot to share this. It's presented at KGC 2012 by my ex-coworker, Daniel Barrero. I had to nag him enough to prepare this.. so I'll take a tiny bit of credit :)

SSD height-based fade-out effect by ttmayrin

I just heard from a Korean game developer, ttmayrin, who implemented Screen Space Decals in his engine and he loves it. The only problem he had was how the decal border was too obvious because my implementation used in Space Marine lacks any smoothing effect.

Screen Space Decals in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

As I promised, here are the slides I presented at Siggraph 2012. It's about Screen Space Decal technique I developed for Space Marine

Joining Square Enix / Eidos Montreal for....

Today, my ex-student & friend, Friso, asked me why I'm not saying anything about joining Eidos Montreal on my blog. I guess I was just busy dealing with the slowest moving company and finding a new place in Montreal. Now those things are kinda under control, so let me break the old news.