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 [...]
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 [...]
31
Mar
Fixed-Time-Step Implementation
Overview There are many topics covering the concept behind fixing your time step. Last time I read them was many years ago and having just re-read them I just realized they already cover about 50% of what I planned to cover, but while they do give implementations and explain certain concepts fairly well, people still [...]
03
Mar
General Game/Engine Structure
Overview The subject of how one should organize a game has been appearing a lot lately. Mainly these questions are focused on how to organize all the different parts of the game, such as the menu, the gameplay area, the bonus rounds, the story screens, etc. The most common proposal I see are switch cases [...]
15
Feb
DXT Compression Revisited
Pre(r)amble I made a previous post on a new method for compressing images into the DXT format. Various sources, including former NVIDIA employee Ignacio Castaño, agreed that the quality was not quite what it should be, and I began a more thorough investigation into why. Some of my test images also had a few bad artifacts [...]
04
Jan
iOS Support
A few weeks ago I purchased a MacBook Pro and later began the arduous process of porting the engine to iOS. My engine is organized into mini-engines, which are each their own projects (brought together into one master project) and build into separate libraries. The sound library, terrain library, physics library, etc. This keeps things [...]