Les Imbroglios d'Alexis Breust

The ray-tracing world - known to generate photorealistic images - is at our door. It's there, waiting for real-time 3D engineers to fully understand what it can do for them. In this series of articles, I'll describe my adventure to integrate this powerful new tool within my existing engine.

At 60FPS, you get 16.6ms each frame. I give you 6.6ms for your CPU stuff (updating the state of your world), which leave me with 10ms for rendering. If we want to ray-trace things, that's not a lot, we'll need to make clever concessions.

This is a first part of a series of articles. Let's start concretely and make a pass computing the ambient occlusion.

I was sure that the pimpl design pattern was an interesting thing. It was made so that one can hide compile-time dependencies to the end-user, allowing faster compile times.

However, as you know, pimpl starts with a p. And that's the big issue: pointers. So having a nice API implies memory fragmentation and cache misses? Surely, no!

Let me present you the Aft pattern, a pimpl with no p!

Everyone with little experience will tell you: if you want to program your own game engine, C++ will allow you to get the performances you need. Indeed, C is missing high-level quality-of-life features, and there are no other practical choices.

Well, that state of mind is changing among game developers.

Let's focus on why C++ is slowly digging his own grave.

When you want to draw a big 3D scene with lots of contents, you want to minimize the number of draw-calls. One of the very first technique to implement is called Frustum culling, which consists of removing things that the camera cannot see.

This is the first part of a series of articles on 3D scene optimizations. More to come!

Ever now and then, I find myself looking for a way to log an enum. Fun fact is, even if it is easy to actually log it, it is hard to maintain. Having to keep a switch instruction in sync with code content, or generating a new file during a pre-build step, is not exciting. We can do better, right?

J'entends régulièrement, à l'approche d'un spectacle, des remarques du style :

Je ne me sens pas prêt pour ça.

Et je dois dire que ça m'arrive souvent de me dire ça aussi. Mais, l'improvisation étant un domaine risqué par nature, et le public le sait, pourquoi continuer à craindre une catégorie particulière ou la peur du ridicule ?

lava's render engine (namely magma) is meant to be recent standards efficient and, secondly, innovant. For the end-user, the renderer details are completly hidden. This small article explains what's behind an experimental renderer: the deep-deferred render.

lava uses multiple design patterns, but any usage of those are driven by two core principles:

• do not show more than needed ;
• keep performances in mind.