Mediocre game technology

I often see people recommend the command pattern for implementing undo/redo in, say, a level editor. While it sure works, it's a lot of code and a lot of work. Some ten years ago I came across an idea that I have used ever since, that is super easy to implement and has worked like a charm for all my projects so far.

Every level editor already has the functionality to serialize the level state (and save it to disk). It also has the ability to load a previously saved state, and the idea is to simply use those to implement undo/redo. I create a stack of memory buffers and serialize the entire level into that after each action is completed. Undo is implemented by walking one step up the stack and load that state. Redo is implemented in the same way by walking a step down the stack and load.

This obviously doesn't work for something like photoshop unless you have terabytes of memory laying around, but in my experience the level information is usually relatively compact and seriali…

When I implemented bokeh depth of field I stumbled upon a neat blending trick almost by accident. In my opinion, the quality of depth of field is more related to how objects of different depths blend together, rather than the blur itself. Sure, bokeh is nicer than gaussian, but if the blending is off the whole thing falls flat. There seems to be many different approaches to this out there, most of them requiring multiple passes and sometimes separation of what's behind and in front of the focal plane. I experimented a bit and stumbled upon a nice trick, almost by accident.

I'm not going to get into technical details about lenses, circle of confusion, etc. It has been described very well many times before, so I'm just going to assume you know the basics. I can try to summarize what we want to do in one sentence – render each pixel as a discs where the radius is determined by how out of focus it is, also taking depth into consideration "somehow".

Taking depth into…

After finishing my framework overhaul I'm now back on hybrid rendering and screen space raytracing. My first plan was to just port the old renderer to the new framework but I ended up rewriting all of it instead, finally trying out a few things that has been on my mind for a while.

I've been wanting to try stratified sampling for a long time as a way to reduce noise in the diffuse light. The idea is to sample the hemisphere within a certain set of fixed strata instead of completely random to give a more uniform distribution. The direction within each stratum is still random, so it would still cover the whole hemisphere and converge to the same result, just in a slightly more predictable way. I won't go into more detail, but full explanation is all over the Internet, for instance here.

Let's look at the difference between stratified and uniform sampling. To make a fair comparison there is no lighting in these images, just ambient occlusion and an emissive object.


They …

It's almost a tradition for me to get grumpy on the last day of GDC, and even though I had a great week this year there are some things that I would like to shine some light on.

A lot of people seem to think of GDC as this cuddly, educational industry event, by game developers for game developers. It might have been in the beginning, but nowadays it is not. GDC is run by UBM Tech, a global, non-transparent corporation, organizing dozens of different conferences for profit. They don't care about the games industry, they care about making money. Every year the passes get more expensive and every year something is excluded. Since last year you don't even get free coffee unless you buy one of the more expensive passes (and as a side note they probably don't even pay for the coffee – look for that "sponsored by" tag).

As a speaker you get a free pass, a shiny tag on your badge and a couple of lunch boxes. That's it. They don't pay for travel or accomodati…

Here is a trick that I cannot take any credit for, but that I finally implemented. I remember reading about it online several years ago, but I cannot find the reference again (it might have been on mollyrocket), so I'll write up the idea:

Everyone uses hardcoded parameters sometimes because it's fast and easy:

float someValue = 5.0f;

Once you have a parameter in the code, it's likely that you sooner or later want to tune that into some kind of sweet spot. With a hardcoded parameter the process often involves recompiling and restarting (unless you implemented code hot reloading, in which case it still involves recompiling) many times to try out different values. A popular approach is to add some form of config file to get rid of the recompile step. Config files can be hot reloaded to also get rid of the restart step, but config files require some extra work for each parameter. You need to name the parameter, and you need to add it to the config file.

The idea of parameter h…

Ten years ago, I wrote my own C++ software framework and it was probably one of the best moves in my career as a software developer. It has been immensely useful for every little project I have done ever since, but adding bits and pieces and modifying it down the road has made the software quality slowly degrade. I'm half-way through a rewrite, not from scratch but a pretty serious overhaul. One thing I've spent a lot of time on is reducing header file dependencies to improve compile times. It is one of those strangely satisfying things that you can never really motivate to spend time on while in production. So far I've managed to cut the compile time in half (from 17 seconds for a full rebuild down to 9, so it really wasn't that bad before either), mostly by eliminating system headers.

A very accessible tool for this is actually GCC. Just add the -H flag and it will print out a hierarchical header dependency graph, including system headers. Using this I found out tha…

The last few posts has been about my new screen space renderer. Apart from a few details I haven't really described how it works, so here we go. I split up the entire pipeline into diffuse and specular light. This post will focusing on diffuse light, which is the hard part.

My method is very similar to SSAO, but instead of doing a number of samples on the hemisphere at a fixed distance, I raymarch every sample against the depth buffer. Note that the depth buffer is not a regular, single value depth buffer, but each pixel contains front and back face depth for the first and second layer of geometry, as described in this post.

The increment for each step is not view dependant, but fixed in world space, otherwise shadows would move with the camera. I start with a small step and then increase the step exponentially until I reach a maximum distance, at which the ray is considered a miss. Needless to say, raymarching multiple samples for every pixel is very costly, and this is without …