Status June 2010

June 17th, 2010 | Posted by Michael in DirectX | Programming | XNA - (0 Comments)

Hi all, not dead. Apologies for the lack of updates, I am in the process of finishing an internship required for my university course, and it is a challenge to find good time to tackle some XNA issues and write posts. I am currently working on Directional light shadows for my engine, I have cascaded … Read more

[LPP] Ambient Lights

April 2nd, 2010 | Posted by Michael in DirectX | Programming | XNA - (5 Comments)

Ambient lights are used in modern games to fake the indirect illumination that exists in the real world. By adding a generally very weak light to the scene, we can avoid the 100% black shadows that really should not exist, all at a very low cost compared to proper indirect illumination or baked ambient light … Read more

Shawn Hargreaves just posted this: http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar/archive/2010/03/12/reach-vs-hidef.aspx I suggest you have a read through it if you are interested in the kinds of things I post on this blog, especially the Light Pre Pass technique. One of the key parts of Shawn’s article are the changes that will be made to Render Targets, and the bucketing … Read more

Light Pre-Pass Round 2

March 11th, 2010 | Posted by Michael in DirectX | Games | Programming | XNA - (9 Comments)

Those who have been following this blog know that I wrote an article about implementing a Light Pre-Pass renderer last year. Since then I have made numerous improvements and fixes as I have tried the system over different PC configurations. This time around I will be including those changes into the implementation, and also releasing … Read more

An update on LPP + Sample

February 21st, 2010 | Posted by Michael in DirectX | Programming | XNA - (1 Comments)

Hi everyone, first of all apologies for the delay. there has been quite a lot going on in my life, but I am working hard on getting the sample done. This time around I wanted to make sure I had a sample ready to go with the article, especially since the article will focus on … Read more

Rewrite of LPP Article Planned

December 12th, 2009 | Posted by Michael in DirectX | Programming | Xbox 360 | XNA - (2 Comments)

I recently went about making the current Light Pre Pass system run on the XBOX 360, and had to fix some issues that appeared there. As a result, the next article to go up will be a rewrite with all of these fixes included. I should also be able to provide the sample code at … Read more

A Note on Sample Code

December 1st, 2009 | Posted by Michael in Programming | Website - (0 Comments)

Just a quick note about the sample code download for the current Light Pre Pass tutorial, and probably future tutorials. I am in the process of cleaning up and commenting the code, and hope to have it out really soon. I am to have a complete tutorial with all the information on the page, however … Read more

NOTE: This article is now obsolete. An up-to-date sample and article can be found at http://mquandt.com/blog/2010/03/light-pre-pass-round-2/ In this part I will cover how to implement the basic form of the Light Pre Pass renderer, with support for point lights, and the basic Blinn-Phong shader, including Albedo texture support. As this article is fairly advanced in … Read more

Light Pre Pass Implementation Ready

November 16th, 2009 | Posted by Michael in DirectX | XNA - (6 Comments)

  As you can see, it is rendering correctly, and now I can begin writing about the implementation. Just have to clean some code, maybe improve one or two things. I hope to begin the article series (the previous entry was an intro) after my final exam on friday.

Light Pre-Pass in XNA [Part 1]

November 13th, 2009 | Posted by Michael in DirectX | Programming | XNA - (0 Comments)

This is the first part of the article I began writing not too long ago. Unfortunately university assignments and exams halted my progress, however as I am almost done, I thought I might as well put up the first part, and then add more as I get them done once my exams are finished. I … Read more