Hello all! Time to tell a bit about what I'm doing right now. The last year Jaap and I have been working on a new engine for Davilex. When we started developing the new engine, Davilex wanted a generic engine for all titles, so we started developing a solid basis for such a generic engine. We developed a really cool scene graph manager, a software rasterizer and a hardware rasterizer, and we used that stuff for two projects: A garden design package, and an interior design package. For the last project, I even developed a lightmap compiler, so we had pretty cool lighting for our interiors. After these two projects, we wanted to develop the engine further towards a game engine, adding animation support and a visibility algorithm. Things went different though. After the interior design package, Davilex decided to start working on some cool new technology for a future game. We bought NetImmerse, wich basically has all the functionality that we already had, but in a more polished form; buying NetImmerse frees us from maintaining the basis, so we can work now on extra functionality. This is a Good Thing, although it's slightly disappointing to drop the original engine. About NetImmerse: I am now developing a visibility algorithm for NetImmerse, based on the technologies I described in some of my docs on this site. The algorithm is based on an adaptive octree (might be changed to a kd-tree in the future), and a modified c-buffer algorithm for occlusion testing. The algorithm is a 'plug-in' for NetImmerse: The architecture of NetImmerse allows us to use the new algorithm on top of the normal rendering pipeline, wich is, again, a Good Thing. This means that we don't have to merge any code when a new version of NetImmerse is released. I'm having a lot of fun with my new 'job'. It's far less 'basic', and I finally have the time to focus on more advanced stuff, while the NetImmerse team (NDL) provides us with a very solid basis. I'll try to update this techfile more often, with the problems I encounter and the solutions I come up with. Jaap is also doing very cool stuff; he's working on a cool lighting algorithm, that also can be plugged in the NetImmerse engine. A student is currently preparing the engine we developed for public release. Once it's ready, we'll let you know. :) - Jacco"
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