ClemensKernBlog » Vergence

Summer Games University

Clemens — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:35:42 +0000

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. You can also watch my talk here.

Resource Handling

Clemens — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:09:42 +0000

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

Shadows

Clemens — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:17:43 +0000

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.

Disco Lights

Clemens — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:40:00 +0000

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

Asset redo

Clemens — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 12:31:26 +0000

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

Vergence SSAO improvements

Clemens — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:26:53 +0000

I am currently improving the visual quality and performance of the deferred rendering system for the Vergence Game Engine. Here are some shots showing the screen space ambient occlusion we use. A really good trick is to use a very small random texture (4×4 in my case) so you can blur out the noise easily. I use four blur passes with a simple depth weighted cross filter, which runs super fast. Varying the blur kernel size over the passes gave me a stable result without any visible noise artifact.

Next step will be view frustum culling (oh yes we don’t have the simple things ) and then hopefully get the multithreaded rendering system working. While profiling I recognized our HDR-Bloom is pretty expensive too. I will work on that later.

VrgStudio: First Steps

Clemens — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:42:04 +0000

I am currently developing a new Editor, called VrgStudio (was VStudio, I renamed it to prevent confusion with MS Visual Studio), for the Vergence Engine (more information here and here). Today I finished the first step, a Plugin and Message Passing System. Plugins are loaded as dll-files and communicate via messages. A Plugin can register callback-methods for messages, so basically it is a event system with a few extensions.

At the moment everything is running single-threaded, but concepted for a multi-threaded or even multi-process system. All in all, nothing fancy yet and nothing to show except a boring console window.

Next step is a basic GUI-Plugin: I started playing around with Qt, but still needs a lot of work.

Current lines of code: 2268 total, 2093 without comments

The Game-Industry is stealing my ideas

Clemens — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 10:50:32 +0000

I saw this presentation video of the new Unreal Engine 3 Editor yesterday:

http://g4tv.com/trailers/hdvideos/37413/Unreal-Engine-3-New-Features-GDC-2009-Trailer.html

The first thing I thought was: “Hey that tagging mechanism is exactly the same I was planning to do for the new Editor of the Vergence Engine“. I never publish my ideas, except a draft in google docs: “wahh google is selling my ideas”. OK whatever, tagging is a very common approach, so I can’t blame google or Epic for this

Anyway the new Unreal Ed has some really cool features. Check it out!