August 19 2008.

The new and improved Real time rendering book has just been released (around Siggraph time). Please see how it can benefit you after the jump.

April 21 2008.

For those who couldn't be present at last GDC in San Francisco, Crytek GmbH allow you to make it up by reading their slides online. The sujet du jour was what defines a next gen effect and how they succeeded in creating that characteristic Crysis look throughout the game. They also have some slides on how they implemented the SCRUM software engineering method halfway through their project. Read more after the jump/link.

March 26 2008.

In the wake of the controversy that shook the game industry about its employment practice, discussions about quality of life and hiring practice now abound. It took a few very public voices such as the Ubi Free (virtual union of Ubisoft employees), or more recently the very publicized EA_spouse (Erin Hoffman a writer who was married to a then EA programmer) to shun the light on those practices.

March 10 2008.

Microsoft today announced the immediate availability of the March 2008 update of their DirectX SDK. The major item is the inclusion of the Direct3D10.1 bits that allow developers to take advantage of new hardware features on supported graphics cards. Are also included improvements to XACT/XAudio, a better support of Visual Studio 2008, additional samples and white papers. More details after the jump.

March 3 2008.

A few weeks ago the GDC or Game Developer Conference was held in San Francisco. Like everytime for GDC sponsored presentation took places. NVIDIA was present at the conference and took some time to talk about the latest techniques in real time rendering on modern GPUs. If you want to learn about skin rendering, fluid simulation, advanced GPU debugging and tools then follow the link after the jump.

August 1 2006.

Crytek were at Siggraph this year to detail some of the new techniques they've imagined for their new game Crysis. It was an interesting session with a lots of useful tidbits that we're sure to see appear in more engines in the following months and years.

April 29 2006

After answering several time very similar questions on web forums, you usually get tired and don't always come up with an answer that really educates people.

The one that was always coming back is the one about Z-buffering artifacts, missing objects and the like. So instead of rehashing incomplete answers ("Move your near plane farther"), I'd rather have a comprehensive answer people can refer to and if they're really interested they can take a look at the math to better decide themselves. So it's not really your typical FAQ as it doesn't answer a question and probably gives you more than what you asked for.

July 31 2005

A lot of water passed under the bridge since Outcast and Commanche appeared, drawing us a picture of what seemed the future of graphics. Their engine featured a voxel terrain, a 2.5D representation that made detailed landscape possible on machines that were still struggling with polygons.