In this episode of the Game Engine Tutorial (we’ll return to the editor next week) we are going to build a better terrain, but the emphasis is more on implementing some simple HLSL effects. We will cover: – Better terrain construction – Texture mapping – Multiple texture mapping – Directional lighting – Fog Better Terrain [...]

Before I get into the code behind the game editor, I wanted to post some information about how it works. I want to do this both to keep the actual tutorial shorter (because it’s looonnnnggggg right now), and to help you better understand what we are doing when we write the code itself. The editor [...]

One of the big features any useful engine needs is the ability to save its state and the state of its components to file. This is necessary for things like saving a game, but is more useful for things like saving a scene in an editor. C# provides two types of serializer. The first is [...]

In this tutorial, we will be adding a postprocessing system to our engine. A postprocessor is an effect (.fx file) that only contains a pixel shader. It takes the current frame buffer value and applies the pixel shader to it, applying effects such as blurs, bloom, and special effects. The post processor class is called [...]

In this tutorial we are going to create a component predicate, a class used to determine whether or not a component will be used for an action. This is useful for things like special drawing, for example when drawing shadows we only want shadow casters to draw when creating the shadow map. Side note: I [...]

In this tutorial we will be creating basic terrain from a heightmap. This is starting code for a more advanced terrain we’ll make in a later tutorial. This one has no efficiency algorithms or fancy drawing techniques like multitexturing and atmospheric scattering. The idea here is that you have a grayscale picture, and you generate [...]