<story><title>Supreme Commander – Graphics Study</title><url>http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/06/23/supreme-commander-graphics-study/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>test1235</author><text>This blows my mind - how many years of programming must you have under your belt before you can even comprehend writing something like this?&lt;p&gt;Are these established methods that you can google and pick up anywhere, or is there a lot of experimentation going on to see what works?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>outworlder</author><text>Not exactly years of programming. But years of studying computer graphics, as applied to games.&lt;p&gt;I bet I could show this article to myself back when I started CompSci and be able to comprehend most of it. But I was a Gamedev.Net addict, tried my hand at competitions and tried to write my own 3d engine. At some point, my mathematical knowledge became the bottleneck.&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of established methods, you can pick a lot by reading SIGGRAPH, but that&amp;#x27;s too heavy early on. If you are truly interested, you should start by learning how to put simple 3d geometry on screen. Then, when trying to figure out how to make things look better, you&amp;#x27;ll naturally gravitate to learning what you need.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, it is much easier to start, since we have WebGL and all you need is a browser and javascript. On the other hand, shaders are now a mandatory part of the rendering pipeline, so you need to learn those.&lt;p&gt;When trying to apply these techniques in real games, there&amp;#x27;s indeed lots of experimentation. And many times game developers come up with novel techniques. See papers by Valve, for instance.</text></comment>
<story><title>Supreme Commander – Graphics Study</title><url>http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/06/23/supreme-commander-graphics-study/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>test1235</author><text>This blows my mind - how many years of programming must you have under your belt before you can even comprehend writing something like this?&lt;p&gt;Are these established methods that you can google and pick up anywhere, or is there a lot of experimentation going on to see what works?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; mindblowing, although it does require a chunk of maths. It&amp;#x27;s only really the shadows that are complicated. And yes, it&amp;#x27;s a stack of established methods which have been built up over decades. SIGGRAPH is a good place to start, and there are open source 3D engines (including the ID software ones) to refer to.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Mindblowing&amp;quot; are the demoscene people who fit this (or something more complex with procedural generation) into 64k or 4k binaries.</text></comment>