Intersection

I have decided that I will stick with doing my own intersection code. I need to have a code base that I can reuse as I want, and don't want to be tied to the physics API. So I will just grind it out and get it done. Yesterday I took an exam for my OS class, so I should have a little bit of free time for a couple of days.

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

It seems like this is destined to be the next full screen glow style effect - it is a complete post process that can be added on without much additional work (as long as you have access to the depth information of the scene) and has been publicized to death since Crytek discussed it in the siggraph discussion. Out of curiosity, I did a few searches for information on this topic and didn't find a whole lot. So, I decided that I am going to investigate the technique and see what it is all about.

I have a basic understanding of how it works, but I would like to get to the low level details and see what makes it better or worse. My typical method of operation is to investigate a topic like this, then do an article on the topic to share what I have been able to find. Also, whenever I have done an article for gamedev, I try to provide an effect file that implements the technique so that people can quickly start to use and play with it. Since the ShaderX6 article, I created a small demo code base (alright, its only three files but it is compileable and runs well...) that I will be using for future articles. Hopefully this will let me provide a nice interactive demo program for people to try out in addition to just an effect file.

First, I need to do some research...