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 [...]
08
Jun
[Progress Update] BRDF’s, Cell Shading, DirectX 10, Windows x64, and More
Although I have not posted any updates for a while I am no slouch. Of course given my .MAP tutorials that are still in progress it is clear that I am still working. But that is really only the tip of the iceberg. I left DirectX 10 behind long ago but have recently been catching [...]
14
Aug
3D Performance Tips
Overview This article will cover a lot of tips that can be used to speed up any 3D graphics system. Bottlenecks To understand why something makes your system faster, it is best to understand what makes it slow. An accurate table of which have the largest impacts can’t really be made because it depends [...]
23
Jul
3D Graphics Overview
Overview L. Spiro Engine at the time of this writing supports DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 11, and OpenGL. OpenGL ES and the Nintendo Wii and PlayStation API’s will be supported. It uses Phong (per-pixel) shading rather than Gouraud (per-vertex) shading and is entirely shader-based (necessary for DirectX 10 and DirectX 11). The shader language [...]