Diary of a Graphics Programmer

Tomorrow is the day. Midnight Club Los Angeles will launch tomorrow. This is the third game I worked on for Rockstar. If you are into racing...

I follow all the discussions about the future of game hardware with talks about Larrabee and GPUs and the death of 3D APIs and -depending on...

I bought a new S3 Chrome 440 GTX in the S3 online store. I wanted to know how this card is doing, especially because it is DirectX 10.1 comp...

Just bumped into an old interview I gave to Gamedev.net. I still think everything in there is valid http://www.gamedev.net/reference/busines...

I got a new notebook today with 64-bit VISTA pre-installed. It will replace a Desktop that had 64-bit VISTA on there. My friend Andy Firth p...

I spent some more time with the Light Pre-Pass renderer. Here are my assumptions: N.H^n = (N.L * N.H^n * Att) / (N.L * Att) This division ha...

[quote]As far as I can tell from this discussion, no one has really proposed an alternative to shader permutations, merely they've been ...

Following Matthias Grundmann's invitation to join forces I setup a Google code repository for this: here The idea is to have a math libr...

Now that I had so much fun with the iPhone I am thinking about new challenges in the mobile phone development area. The Touch HD looks like ...

I just posted a forum message about what I consider an ideal shader workflow in a team. I thought I share it here: Setting up a good shader ...

Calculating screen space texture coordinates for the 2D projection of a volume is more complicated than for an already transformed full-scre...

Just found a good tutorial on how to setup a Gauss filter kernel here: OpenGL Bloom Tutorial The interesting part is that he shows a way on ...

I was on SIGGRAPH to attend the "Beyond Programmable Shading" day. I spent the whole morning there and left during the last talk i...

So I decided to increase my relationship to iPhone programming a bit and bought an ARM assembly book to learn how to program ARM assembly. T...

More than three years ago I wrote a PostFX pipeline (with a large number of effects) that I constantly improved up until the beginning of la...

Just read that John Carmack likes the iPhone as a dev platform. That reminds me of the fact how I started my iPhone engine Oolong Engine in...

I was looking for a simple way to deal with different specular values coming from different materials. It seems that one of the most obvious...

I really like Michal Valient's article "Stable Cascaded Shadow Maps". It is a very practical approach to make Cascaded Shadow ...

I am thinking a lot about Crytek's Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) and the idea of extending this into a global illumination term....

So the Light Pre-Pass renderer had its first public performance :-) ... I talked yesterday at UCSD about this new renderer design. There wil...

I setup a google code website with one of my small little side projects that I worked on more than a year ago. To compete in graphics demo c...

I am really excited about this. This is the second game I worked on for Rockstar and it is finally coming out ...

Here is the official way to do it: http://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB They use // 0.4125 0.3576 0.1805 // 0.2126 0.7152 0.0722 // 0.0193 ...

I spend three days last week to port the Oolong engine over to the latest iPhone / iPod touch OS. http://www.oolongengine.com My main develo...

Whooo I am finally accepted! I have access to the iPhone developer program. Now I can start to port my Oolong Engine over :-)

I just came accross some cool links today while looking for material that shows multi-core programming and how to generate an indexed triang...

In June last year I had an idea for a new rendering design. I call it light pre-pass renderer. The idea is to fill up a Z buffer first and a...

Just setup a dev environment this morning with the iPhone SDK ... overall it is quite disappointing for games :-). OpenGL ES is not suppor...

So I was thinking about the next 1 - 2 years of graphics programming in the game industry on the XBOX 360 and the PS3. I think we can see a ...

Just read the FAQ for Android. Here is the most important part: ----------------- Can I write code for Android using C/C++? No. Android appl...

So I decided to test the gDEbugger from graphicREMEDY for OpenGL ES. I got an error message indicating a second hand exception and there was...

I ported the San Angeles Observation demo from Jetro Lauha to the iPhone ( www.oolongengine.com ). You can find the original version here ht...

I renamed my iPhone / iPod touch engine to Oolong Engine and moved it to a new home. Its URL is now www.oolongengine.com I will add now a 3r...

There seems to be an on-going confusion on how to animate normal maps. The best answer to this is: you don't :-). The obvious problem is...

My friend Dean Calver published an article about raytracing that is full of wisdom. The title says it all Real-Time Ray Tracing: Holy Grail ...

Heavenly Sword stores HDR data in 8:8:8:8 render targets. I talked to Marco about this before and saw a nice description in Christer Ericson...

Here is one interesting normal data idea I missed. It is taken from Christer Ericson in his blog: One clever thing they do (as mentioned on...

Normal data is one of the more expensive assets of games. Creating normal data in Z Brush or mudbox can easily make up for a few million dol...

Renderer design is an interesting area. I recommend starting with the lighting equation, splitting it up in a material and light part and th...

Here is my take on how a good meta-material / material systems should be written and how the art workflow works: I just came across the late...

Evaluated several open source engines: Ogre: the architecture and design is not very performance friendly. The usage of C++ makes the usage ...

I am lately into iPhone graphics programming. The interesting part is that the iPhone uses a PowerVR chip similar to the Dreamcast. Most of ...