Archive for September, 2006

firesync

I finally got around to creating firesync, a file synchronization utility. I’ve been using (and testing) it over the past few days and so far I’m really happy with how it’s turned out.

I previously messed around with file synchronization when I created Doppler. Dopper didn’t quite live up to my expectations. It’s architecture and functionality was overly complex, and the result was a fairly unstable and bug-ridden piece of software. In contrast, firesync has a much simpler, or I guess I should say more structured, architecture, similar functionality, and is much more stable and usable.

One of my goals for Doppler that didn’t translate over to firesync was the idea that files should automatically be sync’d and, at the same time, the application should remain invisible and not interrupt the user’s workflow. The way I attempted to do this in Doppler was to compute an md5 checksum of the file and compare it to a checksum computed earlier (that was stored in memory). Putting the thread responsible for this to sleep for a few ms after a checksum was computed was my way of trying to maintain low CPU usage. However, there are 2 major problems with this approach. The first is that computing checksums require reading a ton of data off the hard drive and there was a very large and very noticable slow down in system performance (since the cache gets changed because your jumping around the disk computing checksums). The second problem with this approach is that even for a handful of files, it takes an increadibly long time before all the files are sync’d since the thread is going to sleep so much in order to keep CPU usage low.

firesync doesn’t compute checksums and only uses the file’s last modification date/time to figure out if one file is older than another. I was actually surprised at how fast I was able to get the last modification date/time, as well as other file attributes, (it looks like windows caches them) and it makes the sync operation very fast. In addition I threw the idea of automatic sync’ing and, consequently, low CPU usage out the window. However, given how fast you can get the last modification date/time, automatic file sync’ing might be something fun to try in the future.

Anyway, so far I’m really happy with firesync in almost every respect – interface, functionality, performance, etc. and I’m considering taking the lessons I’ve learned and doing a new backup utility, as Shoebox Backup hasn’t quite lived up to my expectations either; but that’s a while away, it’s back to game development work for now.

oh, and of course, a screen shot…


Zerospace lighting model

Work on zerospace has finally picked up in the past few weeks and a few days ago I posted the first screenshot in the zerospace blog. Not much to see as yet, just an background, starfield, and untextured model. However, I did put in some major work on the lighting system, which is visible in the screenshot (to a certain extent; the specular highlights are dull and, although they’re there, they’re only apparent when the model rotates).

Anyway, what I wanted to discuss in this post is the lighting model, since I think it’s fairly unique and it gives some amazing results.

Ambient
The ambient component is done per-vertex (i.e. all computations are done in vertex shader and color is interpolated over the face of the triangle) and consists of 7 directional lights hitting the model from various directions. It’s sort of an ultra-simplified version of ambient occlusion mapping.

Diffuse
The diffuse component is sampled from a 2d texture. This texture is a scaled down and heavily blurred version of the background texture (done offline; a heavy blur, such as the one required would be too expensive in the pixel shader). Scaling it down is simply a matter of performance, as the background texture is large (2048×2048). Blurring (I do a guassian blur) is a trick to get the diffuse lighting from a scene (this is a bit difficult to explain, I’ll try to do later in another post).

So how how is the texture mapped onto the 3d model? Spherical texture mapping! (see this article for an explanation). Note that the normal vector used to computer the texture coordinates is the the normal vector transformed by the world matrix (since I don’t want to texture map the diffuse lighting onto the 3d model in model space; this will cause the lighting to be “static” – i.e. when the model rotates the lighting values won’t change to reflect the change in orientation).

Specular
The specular component is is done per-pixel because per-vertex specular highlights usually look terrible (there are some other issues in general, but this was the main one for zerospace). For the specular lighting there is really only 1 light, a single directional light pointing down the z-axis. However, there are 8 view vectors and the specular computation is done between the single light and each of the 8 view vectors. I came up with this hack as I found that experimenting with multiple lights was more difficult than experimenting with multiple view vectors (different light vectors would cause either a too extreme or too weak specular highlight). Anyway, I do the specular computation with an exponent of 7, and I them multiple the results by 0.075 to dull the highlights.

One final note, the screenshot is no longer 100% accurate of the lighting system . I just found a major (and stupid!) mistake where I was multiply the ambient and diffuse components together instead of adding them. However, what I described above should stay the same, I just have to tweak some values to prevent the lighting from being too bright or too dark.

Also, on a more final note, this is not the complete lighting model for zerospace. Lighting from weapons, particles, etc. will also be taken into account.