Tuesday, May 08, 2007

NEED SHADERS?

In modern game development you'll most likely need to take advantage of your gfx card by using shader effects and in turn moving away from fixed-function pipeline techniques.

Thus, the need for hiring shader artists and or become one yourself -so as to create custom-made effects for your particular game or engine- just grows.

So, what to do? You can either do a google search -say, looking for free fx resources- buy some books that come packed with shader content -like the "ShaderX" series, hire a shader artist, and or build your own shaders by yourself from scratch or by modifying a pre-existing template (like the ones that come packed with the nVidia SDK 9.x/10).

Well, there's a new additional solution: "Shaders for Games" ... a site that should have been called "Shaders For Sale", instead ... check it out since these guys offer interesting HLSL shader packs at affordable prices.

The SM3 water fx screenshot looks great ...

UPDATE ON CRIMSON ENGINE

Codenamed "Vasculities", there's a new update of NekoCake's engine: "Crimson".

From the post: "... So far, ive completely rebuilt the screen system. Ive looked through Microsoft’s game state management sample and i loved the way they implemented some things (especially the transitions!). After playing with it a bit, it was clear id have to do a bit of retooling on my screen system, which ended up with me ripping out the whole screen system and starting from scratch ...".



Stay tuned!

THRUST INPUT SYSTEM

John comments on the new input core of his engine: "Thrust".

From the post: "... Thrust, unlike Xna5D, has recieved its own project folder for 360 compatible work and I am happy to report that the new input core is running on both Windows and the 360. So how does this new Input services work? I have decided to go much the same route as the new GUIManager by templating the main class, Ebi. When you create a new Ebi (Event Based Input) object, you pass along the type of an object that inherits from ControllerBase. This allows the Ebi object to instance your controller's code and use it ...".

Nice!