tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-151751272011-07-07T19:32:53.920-04:00Articles on all sorts of programming topics. A sane view on game programming and the tech world.Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.comBlogger111100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1140484839262906852006-02-20T20:20:00.000-05:002006-02-20T20:20:39.266-05:00

Geomipmapping is a fairly well known technique at this point. It's a relatively easy algorithm to implement, and provides extremely good results on medium-sized terrain. It is, however, somewhat more difficult to implement optimally, and the original paper leaves out a few important things, like how to deal with cracks in the landscape or how to compute errors for actual terrain data. There also

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1140482901415547102006-02-20T19:19:00.000-05:002006-02-20T19:51:56.546-05:00

So I guess this blog flared up briefly in the fall and died almost immediately. I'd like to bring it back, and to do things right this time. I'm shooting for bi-weekly updates, which seems reasonable. (Ignore the fact that I am competing in the Collegiate National Taekwondo Championships this week, and then flying down to Redmond for an interview with MS next week.) As for content. I'm not

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1125000061589142952005-09-20T12:00:00.000-04:002005-09-20T12:26:21.506-04:00

Alright then, it's finally time to look at Q3's rendering. Everything that's rendered in Quake 3 can be categorized as follows: Those of you who are familiar with Q3 BSPs will notice I skipped curved surfaces entirely here. I don't even want to go near those things right now. BSP -- Specifically, brush models. These convex hulls form the majority of the static level geometry. Models -- Pretty

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1126740744659573092005-09-14T19:29:00.000-04:002005-09-14T19:33:30.500-04:00

Ok, so apparently a few people are still watching and waiting, and I gotta say I appreciate that, it's heartening. In any case, I needed two things before continuing -- Quake 3 and Visual Studio (the reason for not having the latter is a bit of a long story). I have both and so I promise that I will continue now. I can actually do Q3 builds now, which helps considerably. Expect stuff soon. And to

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1125151112182399702005-08-27T09:57:00.000-04:002005-08-27T09:58:32.186-04:00

I just wanted to let anyone know, in case you're waiting for part 3, that I'm still alive. A few "real life" things going on at the moment, you know. In any case, it'll probably be monday before I get part 3 of the Q3 stuff up. But I promise it'll be a good entry.

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1124917307444610882005-08-24T16:56:00.000-04:002005-08-24T21:46:48.303-04:00

I had previously said that I was planning to cover the rendering architecture in part 2. I even wrote up a draft. Problem is, it isn't any good. I tried to describe both the architecture and the code at once, and ended up doing a miserable job of both. So instead, what I'm going to do (presumably for part 3) is to cover the high level rendering system, which has been publically known for several

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1124556455445422582005-08-23T11:34:00.000-04:002005-08-24T17:48:36.036-04:00

In case you're not aware (for example, you may have been living in a cave where the only internet is dial up access to a 3 month old backup of the google cache), the Quake 3 source is available for download, under the GPL. My initial impressions are good, given that when I looked at Q2 back in the day, I very nearly gave up hope of ever accomplishing anything. Things are for the most part well

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1123708228175947522005-08-10T16:43:00.000-04:002005-08-13T01:22:01.736-04:00

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the basic structure of our resource management system. Now, we're going to implement the core class of our system, the Handle. You might want to go back and review the responsibilities behaviors of the handle class, which I discussed in part 1. Remember, the real power of this design is contained within the handle class. It's the object that is moved around

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1123520064193924222005-08-08T12:38:00.000-04:002005-08-10T17:37:38.946-04:00

This is the first in a series of posts to build a reference counted "resource" management system for your game/graphics engine. First of all, what defines a resource? For our purposes, there are several conditions that determine what can be used as a resource: It can be used by multiple clients, and needs to be reference counted. Most of the clients of these objects do not need raw pointers

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1123429438302856302005-08-07T11:26:00.000-04:002005-08-07T21:19:06.233-04:00

Ok, so the real reason for this blog -- technical discussion. It's sunday morning, and I'm bored, so I thought we'd start with something mundane and ordinary. Suppose you want your game to work on both Windows and OSX (as it stands now, not the crazy Intel-OSX boxes that will be public in a few years). One of the biggest issues with doing this, apart from the usual problems of OS specific code,

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15175127.post-1123364074738673472005-08-06T17:15:00.000-04:002005-08-07T01:12:11.793-04:00

First of all, huzzah for the grand opening of Element 61 blog. Yay. Now that that's out of the way, on to the good stuff. It broke recently that Microsoft would not be supporting OpenGL in Windows Vista (codename 'Longhorn') or some such thing. A lot of information is still missing, but this is about as much as we have to go on in terms of facts: This information came from the OpenGL BOF held at

Prometheumhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15068823656296597678noreply@blogger.com2