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Showing posts from August, 2014

BOSSMODE and Particle Shadow Maps

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Hello brothers and sisters, I bring you news of video games. BUT FIRST! The particle shadow maps must be seen. VIEW THEM.  VIEW THEIR SPLENDOR. This video is long, but it is not required to watch the whole thing. ok. time for  BOSSMODE BOSSMODE is a game that is all boss fights. It's also networked multiplayer. I'm trying to make a game that is a cross between raiding in WoW and Shadow of the Colossus. You move around by applying a torque to a cube. And when you shoot microcube death primitives, it also applies a force back to you. Use this to your advantage. The engine is basically done so now it's on to ~content~. Which is boss fights. Which is allllll self contained game design. isn't this great? is this awesome y/n?

Who wants to see some shadowed particle systems?

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Awww yeah, I made some neat particle systems with volumetric shadowing! This first one uses the technique here:  http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/samples/5_Simulations/smokeParticles/doc/smokeParticles.pdf The hardest part of this was definitely implementing a GPU radix sort. My recommendation: don't. The hard parts are always, always in the details (calculating those local offsets, I know right). Particle Shadow Mapping Because the technique above is kind of bad with multiple viewing angles (note that I don't pan all the way around the particle system here), I ended up implementing a different technique:  https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/BAVOIL_ParticleShadowsAndCacheEfficientPost.pdf Particle shadow mapping is rendering the particle system into a 3D texture and then using a compute shader to propagate the light transmittance though that 3D texture. This one is a lot more stable and also probably faster. It still requires sorting for the fina