The fourth version of my DXT compressor is now available for release here. Texture addressing modes and new filters are the main additions this time, along with alternative command-line options to make it more compatible with existing tools. Changes: Added the Lanczos2 filter. Added support for BC4, BC5, BC6H, and BC7 formats. Improved quality of [...]
27
Mar
[Release] LSDxt DXT Compressor 3.0
The third version of my DXT compressor is now available for release here. Texture addressing modes and new filters are the main additions this time, along with alternative command-line options to make it more compatible with existing tools. Changes: Added quadratic and B-Spline filters. Added alternative commands (bc1, bc1a, bc2, bc3, f, g, clamp, mirror, repeat, wrap, reflect, [...]
24
Mar
[Release] LSDxt DXT Compressor 2.0
The second version of my DXT compressor is now available for release here. It now uses FreeImage to provide support for virtually all image formats, and uses a heavily optimized Squish implementation for better performance and quality. Changes: Normalizing normal maps is now correct. Changed the DXT conversion routine to use the Squish library. Added [...]
10
Dec
Basic Graphics Implementation
Overview When I first started this site I was originally planning to post about the construction of the engine along the way, what design decisions I made, and why. Now that I am restarting the graphics portion of the engine it is a good chance to do that. I won’t cover everything I do for [...]
05
Dec
Scene Graphs
Overview There are a lot of misconceptions regarding what a scene graph is, does, and how it is applied to the world of video games. For many years even Wikipedia took note of this confusion and mentioned the dispute within in the industry as to exactly what it is and does. This is probably largely [...]
29
Nov
State of the Engine
Since joining tri-Ace 2 years ago I have learned a lot about physically based rendering and from working on their in-house engine I have gleaned new ideas on engine design. Not only that but I was building off a previous iteration of my engine which was mainly based on DirectX 9, meanwhile DirectX 11 has [...]
06
Feb
Efficient Instant-Insertion Quadtrees
Overview This tutorial will present an efficient implementation of quadtrees. It is expected that you have at least a basic understanding of what quadtrees are and do, and if not you can read about them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadtree Although they improve performance in algorithms related to searching for visible objects or in detecting collisions for physics, quadtrees [...]
09
Dec
[Update] Personal
I wanted to avoid posting anything personal here at all costs, but it has been so long since the last update I felt I need to explain the current state of things so that people do not misunderstand that the project is dead. It is quite far from it. I am currently working on getting [...]
11
Oct
[Release] LSDxt DXT Compressor
The first version of my DXT compressor is now available for release here. The algorithm and comparisons are described here: DXT Compression Revisited Here is a list of the commands: -file <path> Input file to process. There can be multiple of these. -outfile <path> Output file for the last -file input. By default, if no output [...]
18
Aug
[Progress Update] DirectX® 11 and Reflections
It has been a while since I have posted, but only because my progress has recently been hindered greatly. A few weeks ago my hard drive fully crashed and I had to get a new one, reinstall both operating systems (twice), and a lot of software. I still haven’t installed everything. Then I went to [...]