This is the second part of my shadow mapping tutorial (find part 1 here). I am going to discuss some of the issues of the shadow mapping technique as well as some basic solutions to the problem. I’m also going to attach a demo application, in which you can play around with some of the shadow mapping variables and techniques. I do have to mention that the demo was a very quickly programmed prototype. It serves its purpose as a demo application but I dont advise cutting and pasting the code into your own projects as a lot of the techniques used arent exactly optimal. Not to mention that I did take a few shortcuts here and there. Continue reading “DirectX10 Tutorial 10: Shadow Mapping Part 2”
Month May 2011
DirectX10 Tutorial 10: Shadow Mapping Part 1
I’ve had some downtime lately and seeing as I wrote a basic shadow mapping demo, I figured I’d write a short tutorial on the theory and implementation of shadow mapping. Shadow mapping is one of those topics that tends to get explained in a overly complicated manner when in fact the concept is rather simple. It is expected that you understand the basic of lighting before attempting this tutorial, if you want to learn more about some basic lighting models please read my lighting tutorial. The figure below shows a sample scene with a single light illuminating a cube.
How shadows are formed
Continue reading “DirectX10 Tutorial 10: Shadow Mapping Part 1”
Experiences with Interviewing So Far
So I’m currently looking for a job in the game industry, location and salary are secondary to the work at this point. I kinda just want to get out of South Africa and work on something cool. I’m still young enough not have to worry about supporting a family, stability or dealing with crunch time, I kinda just need a chance. I’ve spent the last few weeks sending applications, writing programming tests and interviewing. And to be dead honest, I’m kinda starting to lose a bit of faith in myself and my chances of landing an entry level game dev job without any game experience.
Now before I carry on with this post, I need to just say that I, in no way regret any of the interviews I’ve had, I’ve learned something from each and every one of them. It’s actually been kinda fun even though I felt like a complete idiot a couple of times (I tend to be really hard on myself). The programming tests were a lot of fun and one plus is that I’ve passed all the tests I’ve written. Continue reading “Experiences with Interviewing So Far”
Optimizing the A* algorithm
So I’ve recently completed my MSc thesis on video game pathfinding and I guess it’s a little weird for someone who spent the last year focusing on game AI and pathfinding to not actually spend much time blogging about it. I figured that I spent the time today and write a short post on optimizing the A* algorithm. The A* algorithm pretty much sums up video game pathfinding as a whole. Even advanced techniques like hierarchical pathfinding algorithm make use of A* in searching the various abstraction levels. So today I’m going to just discuss optimizing the algorithm, not a low level implementation but rather the some of the high level issues. I’m assuming that readers will have some degree of familiarity with the A* algorithm so I’m not going to waste time explaining it.
A*’s computational cost is primarily divided between two components, the heuristic function and the open list and so these are the components that I’m going to focus on. Continue reading “Optimizing the A* algorithm”
Taking Initiative 