One benefit of using a true radiosity solution for indirect lighting is that self-emitting surfaces can easily be simulated. In traditional lighting pipelines, emission effects are very local only, and mostly do not contribute to the global illumination at all, if not faked otherwise. I have recently added an emissivity feature to the demo, further showing what the technology is capable of.
At last, I can show what I’ve been working on for 3 months. It’s a real-time radiosity system which dynamically updates lightmaps with bounced, diffuse indirect lighting. Without further ado, here are some screenshots and comparisons with direct lighting approaches to see what a difference indirect lighting makes (click the thumbnails for a higher resolution image, and make sure that your browser displays them correctly, e.g. Firefox is unable to cleanly show the darker .pngs, but they work perfectly in Chrome):
Continuing from where we left off last time, this post explains how parent-child relationships are handled inside the task scheduler, and how streaming tasks can be split automatically by the scheduler.
In this part of the series, we will discuss Molecule’s task model in detail, and have a look at the underlying C++ code and some subleties we need to watch out for, as well as some unique optimization opportunities.
With multicore hardware becoming the norm in both PC/console-based gaming as well as on mobile platforms, it is crucial to take advantage of every processor core and thread being thrown at us developers. Therefore, it is important to build technology alleviating the task of writing correct, multi-threaded code.
In order to achieve that, this series will try to explain how to build a load-balancing, work-stealing task scheduler.
Everybody knows that writing correct multithreaded code is hard, even when using proper synchronization primitives like mutexes, critical sections, and the likes. (Ab)using the volatile keyword for synchronization purposes makes a programmer’s life even harder – read on if you care to know why, and help spreading the word.
A fast content pipeline is crucial for today’s engines, allowing the user to quickly iterate on features, assets, etc. Molecule’s content pipeline enables hot-reloading of every asset the engine understands (textures, models, shaders, …), while retaining blazingly fast loading times.
