Saturday At Play

More Sunshine

Apparently we are getting sun tomorrow as well as today, which is a rare thing for us Welsh-bound souls at the moment so I'm hitting the 'outdoors' every day so far. Right now I am still recovering from a BBQ, and will probably enjoy more sunshine Sunday too!

As promised, I did find time to fire up the PC to do some extra work and once my email was cleared out a had a few gems to play with. Rather that blog about my own coding, I wanted to highlight two DBP coders who will be influencing and perhaps contributing to the Reloaded effort.

Darkest Occlusion

I have just put the finishers on a new Dark Occlusion installer update which takes the current DBP coded system over to a DLL, which means more speed and more security.  I gave the demo a quick run, and boy is it fast. I was going to use the Intel Software Occluder but it's DirectX 11 and will take some untangling. The new Dark Occluder is a serious contender though, and I will be looking at it closer in the days to come:

I plan to run some tests to see how it handles object limbs, and/or large small objects which is what FPSC will throw at it when occlusion is required, but I have a feeling it will fly along very nicely in terms of performance. I gave it 10,000 objects to occlude and it sped along at over 300fps ;) Nice!  If you want to learn more, check out the current version here:

http://www.thegamecreators.com/?m=view_product&id=2311

Shameless plug I know, but when your DBP projects start to get into the 'thousands of objects' territory, it's time to bring in the big guns!

Darkest Lighting

I also checked out a link from a blog comment and was impressed with what I discovered at the other end. Evolved is a name many DBP coders will recognise and respect, and he continues to dazzle with his latest Advanced Lighting demo.  Check out his site and the excellent technologies on offer here: http://www.evolved-software.com/advancedlighting/advancedlighting

Right now my plan is to write my own unified shader system to combine many of the effects you would expect from Reloaded, by Evolved has produced a great module which seems to do it all. If you have to check out just one of his demos, try the 'Materials' once where you can roam about an interior brick scene. Check out the depth of field, parallax mapping, dynamic shadows and metallic surface shader. All top draw!

Signing Off

I am very careful when it comes to other coders copyright and approvals, so I won't be able to just copy their code and stick it into Reloaded.  Once I have a play, and if it's a good fit, I will tentatively approach the authors to see if I can 'compliment' Reloaded with their excellent technologies.  I am sold on the visuals of the Advanced Lighting and the speed of the Occluder, but like most things in coder land, many planets have to line up before things start to work.