Rendering in games can be a complex topic, different approaches with their own tradeoffs are available, new techniques arise, others fall out of fashion… Studios using in-house engines need to make choices that will fit the type of game they’re aiming for. It can be very …
At my day job I get to optimize several games for the Nintendo Switch or the NVIDIA Shield , some of them using Unreal Engine 4 . While UE4 is very powerful and offers a large selection of knobs to balance visual quality and performance …
The Metal Gear series achieved world-wide recognition when Metal Gear Solid became a best-seller on the original PlayStation almost two decades ago. The title introduced many players to the genre of “tactical espionage action”, an expression coined by Hideo Kojima the creator of the franchise. …
If you use sprites with transparency in your game — and you most likely do for the UI at least — you’ll probably want to pay attention to the fully transparent pixels of your textures (or should I say “texels”). Even with an alpha of 0, a pixel still has …
DOOM pioneered fundamental changes in game design and mechanics back in 1993, it was a world-wide phenomenon which propelled to fame iconic figures like John Carmack and John Romero … 23 years later, id Software now belongs to Zenimax , all the original founders …
Part 1: Dissecting a Frame Part 2: LOD and Reflections Part 3: Post-Effects Post Processing Effects Post-effects are performed once the scene has been rendered, to enhance, fix artifacts, change the mood… We saw in Part 1 how a few post-effects were applied, like …
Part 1: Dissecting a Frame Part 2: LOD and Reflections Part 3: Post-Effects Level of Detail If there’s one domain where Rockstar outperforms the competition, it’s when it comes to LOD . The world of Los Santos exists in so many different versions …
The Grand Theft Auto series has come a long way since the first opus came out back in 1997. About 2 years ago, Rockstar released GTA V . The game was an instant success, selling 11 million units over the first 24 hours and instantly …
If you’d like to read my article about the breakdown of Supreme Commander rendering process on dead tree, you can find it in the latest issue of the Hacker Monthly magazine. <td style="width: 33.9%; vertical-align: top; padding: 0; padding-right: …
Two years ago, I released Exp3D on Google Play, a fast-paced space shooter I had been working on during my free time. To celebrate this anniversary, the entire code of Exp3D has now been made freely available …
Total Annihilation has a special place in my heart since it was the very first RTS I played; it was with Command & Conquer and Starcraft one of the best RTS released in the late 90’s. 10 years later – in 2007 – …
When it comes to self-learning Japanese, you can read books, watch Japanese TV with the JP subtitles on… However if your level is just beginner or intermediate, you’ll often hit some kanji you can’t read, some words you …
2015/03/12: Back online after Reddit and Slashdot killed my bandwidth with 30,000 visits in the last hours. Followed by HN . 2015/03/11: Update with comments from Matthijs De Smedt . The original Deus Ex is among the most critically …
2022/12/15 Update: with IRKit cloud officially shutting down this firmware can avoid your device turning into a brick. More discussion on this GitHub thread . IRKit is a device really fun to play with. After writing a custom initialization guide and a web solution …
I previously wrote about the IRKit device and how to set it up from a basic webpage. The setup guide was handy as a proof of concept, but I was still lacking a way to organize efficiently all the IR commands I recorded from …
Recently I got my hands on an IRKit device . It’s a pretty neat tool to control several devices remotely by sending IR signals. I use it to control my TV, air-conditioning, light, sound system… It is fairly cheap compared to the competition (65$ on Amazon …
Beam Waves is a live wallpaper developed for Android. Try it on now your phone! It’s my attempt at designing a 100% procedural wallpaper, lightweight and running at 60 FPS. Waves of light dance on your scren, drawn at native resolution while using as little …
It was high-time to make some change to this website. I hadn’t touch its design since 2007: back then the web was all about “XHTML 1.0” and “CSS 2”, it was the good old time where you would prefer a GIF over a PNG just to make sure your images …
I have been working on a small space shooter game in my free time. It took me quite a bit of time, given that I had to take care of most of the tasks by myself: engine programming, 3D modeling, texturing, effects, scripting, gameplay… The game …
When I migrated one of my desktops from Windows XP to Ubuntu Feisty (7.04), my 5.1 speakers that were working really great with XP were now only outputting in 2.1 mode. Prejudices about the lack of hardware support by …