Diary of a Graphics Programmer

This issue of the iPhone / iPod Touch programmig tips series focuses on some aspects of VFP assembly programming. My friend Noel Llopis brou...

To make my collection of normal map techniques more complete on this blog I also have to mention a special normal mapping technique that Ins...

I recently bumped into a post by Roderic Vicaire on the www.gamedev.net forums. It is h ere. Obviously there is no generic solution to handl...

Two days ago I commited a major Oolong update. Please check out the Oolong Engine blog at http://www.oolongengine.com I updated the memory m...

A christmas present: we just went public with "Programming Vertex, Geometry and Pixel Shaders". I am a co-author of this book and ...

Kyle Wilson wrote up a summary about how good middleware should be: http://gamearchitect.net/2008/09/19/good-middleware/ An interesting read...

Just realized that one of the projects I contributed some code to went public in the meantime. You can get the source code at http://code.go...

This is the christmas issue of the iPhone / iPod touch programming tips. This time we deal with the touch interface. The main challenge I fo...

This time I will cover Point Sprites in the iPhone / iPod touch programming tip. The idea is that a set of points -as the simplest primitive...

Eric Haines provided a home for the three ShaderX books that are now available for free. Thanks so much for this! Here is the URL http://tog...

This time we are covering another fixed-function technique used in DirectX 7/8 times: Matrix Palettes support is an extension of OpenGL ES 1...

My GDC talk was accepted. I am happy ... yeaaahhh :-)

A friend just asked me about how to design a shadow map system for many lights with shadows. A quite good explanation was given in the follo...

Here is an interesting post on Dual-Paraboloid Shadow maps. Pat Wilson describes a single pass approach here http://www.gamedev.net/communi...

Let's look today at the "pixel shader" level of the hardware functionality. The iPhone Application programming guide says that...

All of the source code presented in this series is based on the Oolong engine. I will refer to the examples when it is appropriate so that e...

Today I will cover the necessary files of an iP* application and the folders that potentially hold data on the device from your application....

I just happen to bump into a few slides on the new HLSL 5.0 syntax. The slides are at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Family...

Today's tip will deal with the setup of your development environment. As a Mac newbie I was having a hard time to get used to the enviro...

This is the first of a series of iPhone / iPod programming tips. Starting iPhone development requires first the knowledge of the underlying ...

As a MVP I was involved into testing this new Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform. They just published the first numbers http://msdn.mic...

The iPhone has a kind of SIMD unit. It is called VFP unit and it is pretty hard to figure out how to program it. Here is a place where you c...

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...