Today I gave a presentation at the first Summer University at the HdM. The last two days, Andreas Stiegler talked a lot about engine architecture, gameobjects and making everything ready for multiplayer games. I talked about how to connect a render pipeline to the engine and also about deferred rendering and lightprepass renderer. You can watch the slides here:
Or download as pdf. As soon as its ready you can also watch my talk at events.mi.hdm-stuttgart.de
Last week, I started working a bit on the Resource Handling of my engine. So first of all, I fixed the asynchronous loading mechanism (there was a lot of evil threading stuff in it). Hopefully it runs smooth now. After that I implemented a feature that I call “hot-swap resources”, which means I can switch any resource at run time. For Example, I edit a texture, save it and go back to the engine and the texture gets reloaded automatically, no need to close and restart the engine. This also works with any shader, material or mesh file. Reloading is also asynchronous so you won’t notice any lags. Pretty cool stuff I think 
First of all, happy new year to everyone.
During the last weeks I started implementing shadows for the sun light. This is the result:
Currently I use a regular 2k shadowmap with a 12 tap random disc PCF. You can see some noise artifact at the shadow borders. I tried a blur pass on it, but the result looked even more ugly.
Here it is, the first shots with multiple lights in nice colors… Christmas time! Also note the slight depth blur in the second shot…
still no shadows 
Originally, my plan for this week was redoing the scene graph of the Vergence Engine. But meehhh, programming all the time isn’t that fun. So I did some modeling this week. More precisely redos of older models (the old tire was made by Kai). Here are a two comparison renderings:
And finally the 3ds max 64bit exporter is working and has a unit converter now
