Yeah... I'm going to need you to rewrite all the light and material shaders.

With E3 coming up I barely have time for my hobby engine. Still playing around with comic look. About to get serious about fixing the deferred lighting with SIMD based tile rendering for box, point, and spot lights. But for now the same broken shit. People asked how horrible it currently looks, so a quick peek of a debug session.

Postprocess fun

I've been playing with using basic laplace edge detection to add more definition to the scene as a 'sharpen' style of convolution using inverse color. It could use some work, but I really like the effect. Not bad for pure image space I guess.

I wonder about modifying it so can be filtered per material. That would be pretty easy using a spare component out of one of the G-buffers.

HHmmm...

Found a new bug causing my colortargets to get cleared when I don't really want them to be. Likely due to be being 3am and I haven't wrote new buffer code yet. Parallel lighting on PC is going to fucking suck.

Here's an init prelight pass for a test character for fun. Not much to look at, but better than my 'oh shit' debug pink.

valfreyja alpha update

I keep retooling the demo code, and it's improving all the time. The next two major items are to merge my walkmesh/raytrace IK optimization code into bullet, and pick a deferred shading or prelighting techinique I can live with. That's right almost 90% bullet physics now, and my old physics library can file for early retirement. I need to write a bullet based character controller at some point. :(

I'm still waiting for my new workstation, and stuck on my backup to my backup with a NV6800 -- that means lighting is pretty much almost off. The new material system from freyja 10 is integrated, but I'm not using it much with my gimped card. I always seem to burn out a box while working on graphics code, and this time it was my main box that died a few weeks ago. I'm done with Apple hardware. I had to run Linux on it anyway to have descent graphics drivers, but I've heard a rumor Apple may be getting off their ass and looking into fixing their stack for OLG 3.2 -- don't count on it. :)

Since I often post from a tablet PC time to bitch about one:

I noticed HP finally made public the true successor to the tc1100 tablet PC -- the Touchsmart tm2. The only bad part is that the discrete graphics is ATi/AMD this time. Awesome a tablet PC with a GPU series plagued with horrible driver support for all major OS. I like to do more than 2D art on mine, so I'm going to pass -- it's not worth the hassle. It doesn't need to run mudbox or let me run my MRT code, but no way in hell I'm going to put up with stability issues and lacking OpenGL support.

Man...

Working as a PS3 developer sure eats into my time. I have some news about the freyja modeling project! The freyja 10 modeler I've been working on in private svn access will not be released to the public. Instead I'm reworking it as a game engine + modeler right now mainly for demo purposes for a game concept of mine.

The project just wasn't progressing the way I liked, and to be honest removing more and more features from version to version seemed counterproductive. The new format will focus on level editing using the mesh deforming brush and a new edge/box modeling pen interface kind of like sketch up. The old standards like touch-up animation and mesh editing along with various game model format plugins will remain. Hopefully I can release this as open source once I get to good state.

The current quality isn't much to show, since I'm still wrangling a few old codebases into one. Also I dumped some or parts of my old libraries in favor of SDKs such as Bullet and COLLADA. This makes it much easier to focus on the product at hand instead of reworking underpinnings all the time. Currently the UI is multicontext OpenGL gtk+ canvases driven by my Lua gtk+/gtk# wrapper for the editor and SDL in a single context for the game. My agl graphics layer abstraction remains pretty much the same as it was a few months ago.

With luck I can post some pics of my test scene once I improve lighting. Also I reclaimed the old mailing list to at least stop some spammers. ;)

Tablet interface anyone?

Finally, my project at work is so close to finally being complete for all regions. This is my first shipping PS3 title as a platform lead, so it's kind of exciting even if I'm pretty tired at this point. Hopefully, I can take vacation time soon. Speaking of which I have a new tablet PC for developing a new stylus based interface for freyja.

No screenshots of tomoe yet, since it's not much to look at... however I'm tempted to add metaballs or some other type of sculpting system now too. As you know when I get vacation time it means I get time to work on freyja. With luck I can get a prealpha released during that period.

Here's a photo of the login screen I hacked up from a few Monster Hunter fan art wallpapers and programmer level brush work and sensibility. I'm running Ubuntu 9.04 on a an HP TC1100. :)

Woah

I haven't been on my blog in a long time. Hopefully once this project at work is done I can get more work in on my Open Source projects. There is a C# and an all new Lua based plugin system already developed for Freyja that I want to release with much improved mesh editing and animation -- along with an all new backend and renderer. Some much requested things like improved viewport control ( resizing, layout, etc ) are in as well. I may have to change to a multiple context/canvas at some point soon. I even made a new tomoe based logo. The project will still be called freyja, but is going under a major overhaul finally. My personal game engine may or may not be integrated with it when I'm done.

Also it looks like I'll be moving to bullet based physics after all. I'll try to update more often at least. :)