Lightning Engine

Memory Analyzer v1.0 demo

AD — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:30:22 +0000

Four months ago we’ve written about a new tool we are currently developing, for tracking memory allocations in real-time. Since then, the code has changed a lot. It has been cleaned up and improved, both memory and performance wise, and today we are proud to release a demo version of it. You can grab it [...]

Tracking Memory Allocations

JD — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 12:14:40 +0000

Inspired by a series of articles by Jelle van der Beek ([1-3]), as well as the implementation by Maciej Sinilo ([4]), we’ve decided to write an application for tracking memory usage and statistics of unmanaged applications. Its primary use would be to monitor the engine’s memory requirements and tracking down memory leaks. The prototype is [...]

Interactive editing of Virtual Textures

JD — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:46:12 +0000

Our first attempt on interactive editing of virtual textures. Watch in high quality (recommended) First some info about the video. The virtual texture size is 128k x 128k with a 256 x 256 tile. Tiles are generated by a second thread on demand, using software rendering. There are 3 different layers and one decal in [...]

Virtual Textures

JD — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:44:29 +0000

We’ve recently started searching for ways to optimize our terrain renderer. Our current implementation uses material splatting with user specified weights per material, as well as decals for extra details (e.g. roads, foot steps, etc.). For distant terrain we use a base layer, in order to minimize the amount of work required to render the [...]

Percentage Closer Soft Shadows

AD — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:52:58 +0000

One method for reducing the aliasing of traditional shadow maps, is to soften the edges. By using such a technique the alliasing problem of the depth shadow maps is less noticeable and the resulting image is closer to the real world shadows. Also textures with lower resolution can be used without noticeable visual artifacts. So, [...]

Parallel Split Shadow Maps

JD — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:08:58 +0000

Parallel Split Shadow Maps (PSSM) is a shadow mapping technique which tries to minimize shadow aliasing by splitting the view frustum into smaller regions, each one covered by a separate small shadow buffer, effectively distributing the shadow buffer resolution more evenly along the view frustum. For more details on how the algorithm works see the [...]

Shadow masks and stencil buffer optimization

JD — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 06:53:36 +0000

We’ve recently added shadow mask support in one of the render paths used in Lightning Engine, and i thought of testing how much does stencil masking helps performance. Shadow masks are screen sized textures containing the shadow term, and possibly attenuation calculations, for a light, for each pixel. Since they don’t contain color information, one [...]

First post (and hopefully not the last)…

JD — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:35:46 +0000

Hi We would like to welcome you to our web site. We are planning to post updates on Lightning Engine in this blog, so if you are interested in the engine, or real-time graphics in general we would like to hear your comments/thoughts. Thank you for visiting. The Lightning Engine Dev team