News
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Shadow of a doubt - part 2
In part 1 I mentioned the problem of shadow stability when using cascading shadow maps, or really any shadow mapping solution where the shadow map moves along with the camera frustum. I didn’t really go into detail with the solution though & since its fairly involved I thought...
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Shadow of a doubt - part 1
You might think that realtime shadows are a largely solved problem. Most games have them, and for the most part they look great - but this hides the fact that aside from some recent advances in realtime ray-tracing (RTX etc.) the state of the art for realtime shadown...
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Jupiter Jazz
One of the main areas where I was never satisfied with Junkships procedural planetary generation was the generation of convincing looking gas giants and cloud systems on earthlike planets. I got some initially passable results by tweaking simplex noise, and adding some approximations of vortices as described here,...
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My god its full of stars
It has been a long time since I last worked on generating procedural star fields, but I was never particularly happy with the result that I came up with in my first attempt so when some time presented itself I decided to revisit the problem to see if...
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How to properly distribute DirectX in an installer
I see threads all the time where people complain about game installers that have DirectX install wizards that pop up mid install, or about the size of the end user redistributable bloating their game installer. I understand why this is a problem, there’s lots of advice and documentation...
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Porting to Directx 11 - A Code Odyssey
Well its finally done. Junkship and the MGDF framework has been fully ported from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11, and while it wasn’t something that I can say I particularly enjoyed at times – I can see in hindsight that the pain endured was worthwhile. Along the way...
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Timing is everything
According to Donald Knuth We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil Now this seems like sage wisdom, and its wisdom I agree with, however in practice I’ve found that if you begin a project without...
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Beachballs in space
Heres a quick post on how I elaborated on a technique I first saw used by Paul Whigham to simulate whirling vortices on gas planets. I wont go into huge depth explaining the technique as he has already done a great job of doing so, but essentially the...
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Constants are changing
As you may have noticed, I finally got around to updating the site to reflect the new aims for the Junkship project. Junkship is no longer an attempt to create a hybrid JRPG space opera game. While these types of games will always remain dear to me, they...
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Asteroid blues
Its been a while since the last blog post, however it doesn’t mean that nothing has been happening - quite the opposite, the amount of ongoing work has left no time to keep the blog up to date. I really should try and keep the posts coming on...
