Lightning Engine

Goal: Calculate the sin/cos of an arbitrary angle.
Restrictions:

1. Should be faster than CRT’s sin/cos and faster than FPU’s fsin/fcos
2. The error should be kept to a minimum compared to the above functions
3. Double precision is required
4. Function should be in the form: double func(double), ie. no xmm regs passed to the function, result should be returned on the FPU stack and it should calculate only 1 angle at a time

For the rest of the post we’ll be talking about sin(). Calculating cos(), or even sincos() should be easily derived from the code below. The required changes will be described at the end of the post.
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Goal: Classify whether a batch of AABBs are completely inside, completely outside or intersecting a frustum (6 planes).
Restrictions:

1. AABBs are defined as (Center, Extent) pairs.
2. All vectors are Vector3f’s

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Goal: Calculate the Axis Aligned Bounding Box of a point list.
Restrictions:

1. Vertices as Vector3f’s
2. (Optional) Vertex list should be 16-byte aligned

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Goal: Multiply a batch of Vector3f’s with the same 4×4 matrix.
Restrictions:

1. ‘src’ and ‘dst’ arrays shouldn’t point to the same memory location
2. All pointers should be 16-byte aligned (see below for details on array sizes)
3. Treat Vector3f’s as positions (w = 1.0)
4. Matrix is column major

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It’s being a long time since we updated this little application. It seems that some of you still try to use it (and some of you have problems with it) so we decided to upload the latest version to see if some of those problems persist. If you want to try it out immediately, head to the project’s page and download the new version (yes there is a whole page dedicated to this little tool if you haven’t noticed!). Otherwise, keep reading to find out what’s new in this version.
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It has been over 18 months since our last post, but we are still here. Unfortunately some real life obligations prevented us from posting updates on the engine or anything on that matter. We’ll try to fix that for 2011!

So, we wish you all a happy, healthy and productive new year. And Keep Coding.

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 right now or you can continue reading, in order to become familiar with its features.
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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.
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Our first attempt on interactive editing of virtual textures.

Watch in high quality (recommended)
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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 terrain. Here I’ll talk about our attempt on virtual textures, the difficulties we’ve encountered and how we are planning on integrating the technique into the engine.
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