I changed my surfel renderer over to use a pre-order traversal layout for the nodes, this generally gives better cache utilisation and I did see a small speed up from using it. The layout is quite nice because to traverse your tree you just linearly iterate over your array and whenever you find a subtree you want to skip you just increment your node pointer by the size of that subtree (which is precomputed, see Real Time Collision Detection 6.
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I just bought a copy of Physically Based Rendering, I've been meaning to get one for ages as it's often recommended and I thought it might be useful given my recent interest in global illumination. I'm also hoping to get a more formal background in rendering rather than the hacktastic world of real time.
The subjects covered are broad and it's very readable. It's my first exposure to literate programming, where essentially the book describes and contains the full implementation of a program.
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So I've been trying to find out a bit more about the iPhone's capabilities, this site has some good details. No shaders, roughly enough power for 15000 lit triangles @ 30hz. Not too shabby, I wonder about the power consumption and if certain hardware paths drain the battery faster than others. It would be nice to make something that people can play for more than 3 hours.
So the word on the street is that O2 are bringing out a pre-pay iPhone in December, I'm currently debating whether to wait for that or just get an iPod touch which you can still develop for using pretty much the same feature set.
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So I took a new job today, working for Rocksteady in London. Quite exciting, they use Unreal3 tech which I've always respected (and stolen ideas from). It's a big game title and technically I don't know what it is.. but it's a big franchise and should do well.
Plus working with friends in Kentish Town, s'all good.
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