Back in 2002, I started my first job in the games industry at Climax Studios in England. I have to admit, I didn’t know very much about game development at the time. Don’t get me wrong, I’d been writing little 2D games, and messing around with rubbish particle systems at home, but it was nothing like what I was about to get involved with. Despite my inexperience, somehow I did enough to pass the interview, and I was offered a job as a junior programmer. As seemed to be typical…
Category: Graphics
Nothing To Report
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…
Materials
A while back, I wanted to improve the material system I was using in my engine at home, since at the time, I had just just one fixed material type. I had to specify three textures for each object I wanted to render: Diffuse, Specular and Normal. If I didn’t want specular, I had to use a black specular texture. This was barely OK for very simple things, but soon I wanted more… I’m not really going to mention anything about the lighting in this article, since that’s still a…