Overview DXTn is a type of image compression whose decompression is hardware-accelerated, which means you can send the same amount of texture information over the bus to the graphics card for a much smaller bandwidth fee since it does not need to be decompressed before the transfer. This makes DDS files using the DXTn compression [...]
27
Oct
Procedures for Safe Coding
Overview One of the things every programmer learns as he or she gains experience is how to avoid mistakes. Each time you make a mistake, you surely consider a way to avoid that mistake next time. As you gain experience, you start to discover practices that can help you to avoid a lot of mistakes. [...]
19
Sep
Style Guidelines
Overview I have been seeing a lot of questions lately about style. Ironically, a lot of people have in the past asked me to make a style guide. The reason I have refused for so long is because people can’t handle a style different from their own. It is such a personal subject for some [...]
07
Sep
Unity 3D
Yesterday I met the CEO and co-founder of Unity 3D, David Helgason. We have a mutual friend—Brett Seyler, who used to work at Garage Games/InstantAction and made the Torque game engine, but joined the Unity 3D team a few years ago. We talked for quite some time and he had his senior staff give me a [...]
10
Aug
Multi-Language Support/UTF
Overview Support for complex languages such as Chinese is crucial, and to avoid bugs and to provide the best support possible for exotic languages it is best to support them from the beginning, tempting as it may be to just use ASCII strings to get fast results so you can move on to the juicy [...]
23
Jul
A Humble Start
I started the engine January 2011 from scratch. There was a lot of groundwork to be laid before any visible result could be obtained. In order to support all of the target platforms I wish to target, I had to make an entirely new shader language (L. Spiro Shader Language). Since my engine is entirely [...]
06
Jul
Introducing L. Spiro Engine
I am L. Spiro. Welcome to my site. I live in Tokyo, Japan, and I make video games and video-game engines for a living. I was a developer on Ghost Recon 2 Online, 187 Ride or Die, Catz 5, Dogz 5, Imagine Happy Cooking, Ready Steady Cook, Leisure Suit Larry Beach Volley, HOT PIXEL, After [...]