CodeItNow

I fixed a problem with the EXPECT_THROW macro (I had uploaded the wrong file). Also, I added the ability to stub out results for function arguments passed by pointer. I would recommend downloading the zip file to take a look since there were a few files that had to change this time. I added one new example to show the new functionality.

A couple of days ago, I stacked the random assortment of books I had lying on my desk at work, and for some reason I decided to take a photo. It’s a bit of a mixed bag of good and not-so-good books.

Every now and then I know I’m in trouble because I have to whip out the yellow maths book to remind myself of something that I have forgotten. I enjoy the challenge of reading the quaternions book, but it’s pretty hard to motivate myself to really get into that one.

My favourite at the moment is probably Real-Time Rendering (the latest edition which I have at home to be more specific), and my least favourite is probably Clean Code.

Clean Code seems to take the good ideas from other books (like C++ Coding Standards), and then adds some more which don’t make as much sense (I can’t think of a specific example off-hand). The customer reviews on Amazon.com are pretty good though. I definitely had an ‘uh-oh’ moment when I read the buzzword-laden full title - Clean Code: A Handbook Of Agile Software Craftmanship.

Well, there’s not much to report really. I’ve been spreading myself very thin recently, investigating a few different things, so I thought might be nice to post a status update.

Variance Shadow Maps

Yes, I’m jumping on the variance shadow maps boat. They look nice, they’re easy to implement, and have relatively small overhead over traditional shadow maps. I read the article in GPU Gems 3, which is also available here, and it was pretty easy to implement from there. It probably took me about 2 hours to go from no shadows at all to variance shadow maps. After a bit of tomfoolery to get rid of the light-leaking I ended up with the image below. I haven’t implemented any bias yet, so there are some errors there, but the VSMs appear to be working very nicely.

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