With the end of the year quickly approaching, it looks like a special project that myself and several others will be (hopefully!) completed before 2009. Its a community project that will be available to everyone, so I can't wait to see how it is received... You will most certainly hear about it when it is released, but you can check back here from time to time and I'll be sure to post about it.

Next Challenges
I have been working on several different different shadowing mapping techniques over the past few weeks. It is surprising how many different papers have been written on the subject, but it also shows that there isn't an optimum solution yet. I have a few ideas of how to extend some of the more prominent techniques, which I will hopefully be able to work on in the coming year.

Hieroglyph 3
I have been planning on switching work back to my new engine, and it is finally time to do so. Hieroglyph 2 is D3D9 based, and there are several benefit to using D3D10 that I want to start using so the choice is fairly simple. I originally designed Hieroglyph 3 to be a more plugin based engine, and I fully plan to support D3D9 and D3D10, and once the API is officially released I will be adding a D3D11 renderer as well.

Each of the renderers will have the same material/render view system that I have described in the past, but will offer the various features of each API for implementation of different effects. It will be a lot of work, but I am ready to make the transition...

More details will follow on activities as they materialize!