Who's talking about renderer designs???I have been talking in the past few posts about posting the renderer design, which I am still planning on doing. I'm also kicking around the idea of writing an article and submitting it to GDNet about the design. It seems to me that there is actually very little information online about the various ways to design a renderer. Of course there is the Wild Magic engine available for everyone to use and learn from, but if you don't buy the books it is hard to actually see the design intent.
This makes me wonder if there are resources out there that actually compare and contrast the various designs. My personal design is intentionally versatile and upgradeable at some performance expense. An opposing example could be the doom 3 engine, which is extremely optimized for stencil shadow but isn't quite as flexible. It seems that nobody is really talking about what these differences are and why certain designs are better for different applications. What do you guys think? Should we start talking more about the pros and cons of different designs? The scene graph discussions fall into this category as well - there are different applications that could make good use of a graph as opposed to other data structures, but most discussions don't really go into depth about why.
So is anyone interested in a renderer design article? It seems that it would be a fairly large topic and take some time, but it could be (I think) very beneficial to newcomers to see why something is done a certain way. If you don't like the idea, I am actively looking for another topic to write an article on, so if you have any suggestions or possibilities (other than 10 things to do with geometry shaders Jack) I'm all ears!
