raysan5

CUSTOM GAME ENGINES: A Small Study

A couple of weeks ago I played (and finished) A Plague Tale, a game by Asobo Studio. I was really captivated by the game, not only by the beautiful graphics but also by the story and the locations in the game. I decided to investigate a bit about the game tech and I was surprised to see it was developed with a custom engine by a relatively small studio. I know there are some companies using custom engines but it's very difficult to find a detailed market study with that kind of information curated and updated. So this article.

Nowadays lots of companies choose engines like Unreal or Unity for their games (or that's what lot of people think) because d

dwilliamson

So the technique is called Shell Mapping and I got the basics from:

Interactive Smooth and Curved Shell Mapping
https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2007/JESCHKE-2007-ISC/

The technique as documented starts with Geometry Shaders which is a really bad idea so I kept things simple and did all the pre-processing on the CPU when meshes were imported. These days I'd look at doing it on-demand in a Compute Shader. Preprocessing steps are:

1. Parameterise a heightmap for your mesh.

TheRealMJP

// The following code is licensed under the MIT license: https://gist.github.com/TheRealMJP/bc503b0b87b643d3505d41eab8b332ae

// Samples a texture with Catmull-Rom filtering, using 9 texture fetches instead of 16.
// See http://vec3.ca/bicubic-filtering-in-fewer-taps/ for more details
float4 SampleTextureCatmullRom(in Texture2D<float4> tex, in SamplerState linearSampler, in float2 uv, in float2 texSize)
{
    // We're going to sample a a 4x4 grid of texels surrounding the target UV coordinate. We'll do this by rounding
    // down the sample location to get the exact center of our "starting" texel. The starting texel will be at
    // location [1, 1] in the grid, where [0, 0] is the top left corner.
    float2 samplePos = uv * texSize;

jboner

Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
----------------------------------
L1 cache reference                           0.5 ns
Branch mispredict                            5   ns
L2 cache reference                           7   ns                      14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock                           25   ns
Main memory reference                      100   ns                      20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy             3,000   ns        3 us
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network       10,000   ns       10 us
Read 4K randomly from SSD*             150,000   ns      150 us          ~1GB/sec SSD

rygorous

// half->float variants.
// by Fabian "ryg" Giesen.
//
// I hereby place this code in the public domain.
// 
// half_to_float_fast: table based
// tables could be done in a more compact fashion (in particular, can store tab2 in low word of tab1!)
// but something of a dead end since not very SIMD-friendly. pretty much abandoned at this point.
//
// half_to_float_fast2: use FP adder hardware to deal with denormals.