Sunday, December 5, 2010

Updates for Sunday 5th December 2010 - Experimental Work

As well as actual work in live codebases, sometimes I like to do some experimental stuff. Sometimes this gets released, sometimes it doesn't, but overall it's useful for broadening my knowledge and experience.



This may not look like much but what you're actually looking at is particles generated on the GPU via a geometry shader (OpenGL). I had already made an attempt at this in the RMQ engine which needed to be abandoned as it turned very ugly very fast, but this one seems to work well. I haven't benchmarked it versus textured quads yet, as the GS code is quite crude (it's basically a copy and paste of the original C code); the initial objective was to just get something that worked.

I have to say that the OpenGL documentation here is horrifically poor. I've generally found this to be the case when it comes to shaders, but this particular instance is another level above (or should that be below?)

As soon as I tune it and determine if it's useful for porting to RMQ I'll probably put up a shot of it running in Quake.

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