So, I have this shiny new GDNet journal just sitting here unused, which seemed a bit of a waste. I guess I'd better try and find something interesting to fill it with. I've added a small section of resources to the header of my journal (hopefully it looks as beautiful under other browsers as it does under FireFox, I haven't the time to check it right now). If anybody has any additional resources they think I may be interested in then let me know!

Right, now that's out of the way I have to ask myself what vaguely gamedev-related stuff can I talk about that people might be vaguely interested in reading (vaguely)? Unfortunately at the moment the answer is not a great deal, but hopefully it won't be like that all the time. I start a new job tomorrow, so I might be able to talk a little about that in the future but for now I'll waffle on briefly about the long term mod project I've been involved with for a while now.

Most of you have probably moved on from the original Unreal Tournament. After all, we've had two sequels already and a third is imminent. There is a small but not insignificant group of people however that still love the original Unreal and, lacking a decent platform to create single player adventures amongst the newer tech., rely on Unreal Tournament to create Unreal themed single player mods. One such team is led by a good friend of mine and so I offered my services.

While my activities for this mod team have been many and varied recently I've been concentrating on one specific aim. In order to increase publicity I've been developing a screensaver to showcase some scenes from our first map. Sounds simple doesn't it. Well, it is. And it isn't. The design of the screensaver calls for zooms over static screenshots. This is fine, but in order to avoid pixellation we need very large screenshots. As a result I've taken the source to the utglr renderer written by Chris Dohnal and hacked in GL_EXT_framebuffer_object support to allow me to capture screenshots at 2048x2048 resolution. Unfortunately anti-aliasing doesn't appear to work with framebuffer objects and my card can't cope with higher than a 2048x2048 resolution, so I shall probably have to try and freeze the timer or convince the renderer to render the same frame multiple times so I can render a larger screenshot in multiple passes and downsize it without suffering motion artefacts. The fact that the UT engine is inherently a software engine and I only have access to the front-end rendering subsystem, after T&L, complicates matters.

?nigma