Journal of Ysaneya

It's been many years since the release of the last video showcasing the seamless planetary engine, so I'm happy to release this new video. This is actually a video of the game client, but since there's little gameplay in it, I decided to label it as a "tech demo". It demonstrates an Earth-like planet with a ring, seamless transitions, a little spaceship (...

Finally, the long awaited ASEToBin 1.0 has been released !

ASEToBin is a tool that is part of the I-Novae engine ( Infinity's engine ). It allows contributors and artists to export their model from 3DS Max's .ASE file format and to visualize and prepare the 3D model for integration into the game.

This new release represents more or less 200 hours of work,...

Logarithmic zbuffer artifacts fix

In cameni's Journal of Lethargic Programmers, I've been very interested by his idea about using a logarithmic zbuffer.

Unfortunately, his idea comes with a couple of very annoying artifacts, due to the linear interpolation of the logarithm (non-linear) based formula. It particularly shows on thin or huge triangles...

Tip of the day

Anybody who tried to render to a dynamic cube map probably has encountered the problem of filtering across the cube faces. Current hardware does not support filtering across different cube faces AFAIK, as it treats each cube face as an independent 2D texture (so when filtering pixels on an edge, it doesn't take into account the texels...

In this journal, no nice pictures, sorry But a lot to say about various "small" tasks ( depending on your definition of small. Most of them are on the weekly scale ). Including new developments on the audio engine and particle systems.

Audio engine
As Nutritious released a new sound pack ( of an excellent quality! ) and made some sample...

In the past weeks, I've been focusing my efforts on the server side. A lot of things are going on, especially on the cluster architecture. But one particular area of interest is the procedural galaxy generator. In this journal, I will be speaking of the algorithm used to generate the stars and the various performance/memory experiments I...

In the past months, I've been wondering how to approach the problem of lighting inside hangars and on ship hulls. So far, I had only been using a single directional light: the sun. The majority of older games precompute lighting into textures ( called lightmaps ) but clearly this couldn't work well in the context of a procedural game, where...

Many people have been worried by the lack of updates recently. No, we haven't got lazy, in fact quite the contrary We've been awfully busy at work.

In this journal I'm going to review some of the recent work, without going too far into details. In a future dedicated update I'll come back more extensively on the recent server side...