geoman: Yes your culling concept is correct. You can get exact per/poly collision info, but you'll have to start splitting polygons to be very efficient. You could slightly generalize the concept...

Shouldn't there be some way to query what kind of support the device has in those types of cases (renderable pixel formats, etc.)? Automatic stuff like ChoosePixelFormat or whatnot could help (pick...

The problem with directly imbedding the declaration in the vertex buffer is that it doesn't allow you to reuse the buffer for other formats. The other issue with that (at least in the way they...

I haven't dealt much with VBO stuff. How is it different/better than D3D Vertex buffers? From what little I've looked at the spec it seems to have similar restrictions.... Perhaps it's a little...

Can anyone explain why depth peeling wouldn't work super well in games (it gives perfectly accurate results)? Is it because of the possible O(n) depth complexity? (which is normally more around...

Yeah, so I worked out a bit of the math, and I think that n = cross( skinned tangent, skinned binormal) will work, but it will distort the normal quite a bit (1/det(A)^2 I think...), so it would be...

Tangent vectors should work by transforming using the same matrix you use for position (same linear spatial properties...). Thus if you have a tangent vector, and a binormal, I think you should be...

Well, I haven't used derivatives extensively. They are documented in the GLSL spec starting on the page labeled 58 (64 in the pdf). To get the normal by using derivatives on the height map I think...

Yes, runtime calculation of normals from a height map is possible (especially using the derivative functions in GLSL), but it is way slower than just using a preprocessed normal map (libraries as...

Yeah, at least in HLSL you use semantics to identify which input/output register variables are linked to in pixel/vertex shaders, so there is no required link process.

Thus you can share shaders...

See santyhammer\'s post .

You can wrap it. But it seems like GL will remain C based for portability reasons and stuff.

You beat me to it :) . Hooray for extension semantics! :)

I haven't used cubemabs for shadowing at all, but even so here's my contribution:

Texture killing on the card that I'm using is very slow. Using saturate works wonders, but breaks when you get...

Sounds interesting, though I'm not terribly sure what you're talking about. And also, this begs the question, what does this have to do with graphics hardware?

It seems like providing an...

You can probably get an ok idea of this by looking at the msdn directx assembly level shading language specs (no, it's not exact).
shader reference

If you've got an nvidia card and would be...

I thought that SW:KotOR was an xbox game (and thus used DX)...?

Heheh, yes I have no problem with impelementing a level above the GPU on the CPU in order to more flexible vertex operations. However, the question was focused on offloading the CPU. That would...

Yes, you'd have to use a separate array, as the normals must be set to the face normals to use the degenerate triangle approach (not to mention you'd be store a TON of information you would never...

That's a lot of geometry duplication (and seems like extra processing too)... Go with the plane reflection if you can.

If it can be approximated as a plane then go with the perturb texture...

lol, wow, I can't believe I missed that (I read it, I just misinterpreted it...). Sorry guys. So yeah it would just be the multi-translucent layers that would be an issue. Cool....

Has anyone...

The only geometry clipping that occurs at all is clipping by planes which you can change by using states (I'm not even sure that it actually clips the geometry, it might just reject outside pixels or...

If it's not depth filling for transparent objects then how could it reject the case where an object is in front of a window for instance?

In a shadow mapping system, without depth information for...

Another good technique I've heard of for ambient approximation using a main light direction vector is hemispheric lighting gives you both sun and approximation to reflected light.

Yeah, for more than 4 texture elements, using more than 1 input texture, and using multiple element render targets should work just fine. In the end, making it so you can have an arbitrary number of...

You may want to ammend the description then... it says that you don't write the depth value with the shadow color (or at least that is omitted). If that is indeed how it works, then how would you...