080108 / First Post of 2008

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As probably can be guessed by the lack of blog posts, I've been too busy with other stuff, like getting ready for the 2008 art show season, and getting out the sixth release of my Darkroom Tools for Photoshop.

Back to Linux and Windows Development

Avoid it as much as I would like, it is about time I need to re-setup a Windows XP machine for development purposes. Luckily this time I won't need Visual Studio or Cygwin, thanks to the great work of the MinGW team.

PS3 + Ratchet and Clank Future Tools of Destruction

Got a PS3 and Ratchet. Was impressed at what Insomniac managed to do with their 2nd PS3 title. A lot can be gathered about their engine from the Insomniac R&D Page. Probably the most striking graphical aspect of the game, is how they "created" lighting simply by how the artists produced different environment maps on all the static geometry. This in combination with the static precalculated lightmaps and fragment shader displacement mapping (seems to be the case), is simply awesome and damn fast.

Creativity limited purely by available time and deadlines, it will be interesting to see how they evolve the engine and make better use of the SPUs in future games. The use of a rigid body physics engine to handle moving of boxes and debris was cool. The unconventional use of always view aligned billboarding for the tree leaves was also interesting. I'm guessing these are drawn using the game's particle engine, but still might have been used in the static geometry's occlusion database. One thing I'm wondering about is why mobyes couldn't use the same environment mapping as the static geometry. Perhaps this was on purpose so it would be easier to find all the dynamic interactive parts of the levels?