Recent content by corysama

I did the shadow map implementation for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for the Xbox 360 and PS3. The engine was a mostly-straighforward DX9 forward renderer. We experimented with perspective shadow maps and dual-paraboloid maps, but settled on parallel cascade directional shadows and...

This doc and one other I can't find were the basis of a full-screen post processing system I worked on that worked out very well. That doc explains how to use a tricky GS setup to copy 8 bits from the Z buffer to the alpha channel of the render target. That's useful for blending in fog and...

Let's talk a bit about the GS. The weakness of the GS is that it can only read 1 texture and it has a very limited blend equation. So, you can only do match linearly in a equation like (((A op B) op C) op D). Those parens are cruel and unforgiving. The strength of the GS is that it can...

Through a private channel I have been asked for advice by someone currently working on their own, new PlayStation 2 game engine. If I'm going to take the time to write this stuff up, more that one person should read it. So, I'll post it here. I am very, very far from the world's greatest...

The PS1 has hardware support for quads. I bet the devs were handed textures that were designed for rectangular sprites on the SNES. So, they did the most straightforward port possible. Looks like the "3D" house is composed of billboards. It would look a lot more solid if it was fully modeled...

Segment tracing for faster implicit surface rendering

GPU-Based Run-Time Procedural Placement in Horizon: Zero Dawn is also amazing.

The Hellblade (1) Dev Diary series was really great. BTW: If you like stuff like that, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ I post so much there that the original subreddit creators made me a mod and I've pretty much taken it over.

Ray Guiding for Production Lightmap Baking https://research.activision.com/publications/2020-01/ray-guiding-for-production-lightmap-baking

With the Dreamcast (and most other systems) the CPU does not need to do poly-by-poly work to send geo to the GPU. The CPU just points the GPU at clumps of polys to draw as a batch. The CPU does do some work to make sure that batch is worth trying to draw (determine that it's probably visible...

That would be difficult. The PS2 could handle more raw, basic, simple polygons than the Xbox, but only after a whole lot of work and constraints to appease the hardware. It also technically had more fill rate, but again with a whole lot of constraints. The Xbox had a stronger CPU and a much...

The VU1 was set up to do all of the geometry and animation work to prepare triangles for the rasterizer. I'm not sure what the plan was for the VU0. But, I think the idea was basically "What if we added another VU to help out the CPU with math-heavy work?" The problem with the VU0 was that...

There are 5 processors involved in PS2 graphics: The EE (CPU) which does normal CPU things. In this case it's job is to do high-level culling of whole batches of polygons. So, decide to draw the whole batch or skip it. Batches to be drawn are linked into a queue of instructions for the VIF...

https://www.gamedevs.org/ "a list of the papers and articles that I have collected over the years on various topics relating to game development."

It's far more important for developers that the performance be consistent rather than occasionally better. No doubts. No arguments. Don't wave budget in front of me and tell me I shouldn't ever depend on it being there. Just give me some hardware I can understand so I can max it out.