Recent content on Thomas Poulet
Last week, a client hit me with a seemingly simple request in Unreal. Validating texture size and tri count is nice, but some of our blueprints have complicated setup, and we must ensure that they are setup right. The problem is as follows: imagine you created a Blueprint class in the editor, called GizmoBase . You then inherit from this Blueprint to create specialized Gizmos like GizmoFoo and…
Anno easily ranks among my favorite franchises. I still have fond memories of building beautiful medieval cities with dense waterways in 1404 and its Venice expansion. That was followed by Anno 2070, with its dual‑faction setup, world council, and an entirely new dimension with underwater biomes. When the team at Ubisoft Mainz announced Anno 1800, I was thrilled. Pairing the Victorian era with the…
You are making a game. You have this idea for a fantastic physics-based character controller. You can already imagine your cool character zooming around the map, but for now what you see on screen is only a physics-driven mess. I know how you feel, I’ve been there. We are going to discuss some of the tools we are using to develop our upcoming physics driven title. This article is not a…
Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) is a flight simulator released first in 2008 as a successor to the Lock-On series by Eagle Dynamics. It features a wide range of ultra-realistic planes and helicopters to choose from and engage in various combat scenarios. The game offers a very high level of realism in the avionic systems with a design philosophy where every switch and dials are simulated. During…
Ni No Kuni 2, released at the beginning of this year, march 2018, is the second installment in a series of Japanese Role Playing Game, developed by Level-5. Seven years after the Japanese release of the first game, the player is once again dropped in a magical world inhabited by anthropomorphic creatures living among humans. The first opus, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the white witch, was a joint…
In electronics, if you want to visually interact with your user there is plenty of choices available. LEDS, LCD, dot matrix displays, OLED screens, etc … But wouldn’t be cool if our inexpensive piece of kit could play with the big boys and use the same tech. Can a cheap microcontroller get something on a computer monitor using the VGA standard? “But driving a VGA screen on an 8MHz microcontroller…
This is a follow up to the first article available here . In the previous part, we discussed the chronology of a frame, and how a bunch of coordinates translates into a vibrant world, full of mysteries. In this part, I will go over several other aspects that could not be seen in the first frame. Texture Blending In a time where games can easily reach the tens of gigabytes (and sometimes even the…
Introduction The Witness came out in 2016, and for me it was a real blast from the past, from when I was spending countless hours on point on clicks games. The Witness was giving me that sense of being lost in a world without knowing what I was doing, nor why I was doing it. A feeling that I first experienced in the Miller brothers’ games, Myst. The Witness drops the player in a world…
I realize now that this should have been added right when this article was first published: I provide no safety warranty regarding the approach described here. Electrodes provides a direct, low resistance path to your skin (and its content), be very careful how you use them and only try to reproduce this experiment if you know what you are doing. Introduction In the context of a recent challenge I…
Movie Barcode is a thing that always excited my curiosity, but for whatever reasons I never actually tried to generate one myself. Few days ago reappeared on r/dataisbeatiful a thread about movie barcodes, as I was looking for a new python project I decided to take a shot at it. This post-mortem will be divided into two parts, the first one about frame preparation and the second one about color…
Introduction During the rendering process, you will need to sample points over a designated surface. In this first part (meaning there will probably be a second part covering other shapes) I will try to detail sampling on unit disc and hemispheres. All the examples are generated with two million samples. Uniform? There is two kind of sampling, uniform and non-uniform. Uniform sampling guarantee…
Introduction This week is a double chronic one, since I did not publish it last week. It is quite heavy on math but I tried to keep it as simple as possible by breaking every steps into simpler ones. I’m having great fun writing these chronicles, writing the process that usually stays in the shadow. I’m also hoping that you’re having as much fun reading them. Renderer Shadows Last week I…
Introduction Quite a busy week on a professional point of view, I didn’t get as much free time as I expected. That’s why this chronicle might feel a little bit empty. Without further ado, let’s proceed! Renderer Shadows Shadows, or at least hard shadows are easy to compute. You only need to know if you can “see” the light source from your current “position”. As you can see on the above…
Introduction After few weeks messing around on this project, I eventually convinced myself that writing a devblog is the best way for me to stay committed. I will try during the process to explain my technological choices as well as giving some theoretical clues. Please keep in mind that I’m not an expert in computer graphics, thus my choices might be confuse or incomplete. Feel free to send me…