LordHippo

I think in 5 years gamers will use consoles, as they've used them for over 20 years.

Mirrors Edge uses a completely static lighting, according to the DICE's presentations. They claim to use a realtime GI in BF3, but I couldn't find a way to test it myself. Maybe unreal4 can do GI in realtime, but it's not out yet

As far as I know, the only realtime GI that actually works, is the one that Crytek has implemented. There are some papers describing it, and you can find it in NVidia DirectX samples including source code and the papers. But this method is not being used in any real game, even in Crysis2. But maybe you can find a non-global solution for your specific problem.

Nice work! The whole particle thing is going to be great. I really like it Hope to see the final thing myself and have a chance to play with it soon.

I think this is the way LE does terrain texturing.

"fragcolor" is what you're looking for.

There is a good talk about animation driven locomotion in GDC12. You can find it in the free section of gdcvault. But I think driving the character's position completely from animations is not a good idea. Cause you know sometimes artists and designers does not have the same interests

Loading 1 instance of all your models and textures is a good idea, only if you have no memory constrains. Also FreeEntity decreases instance count of that entity by one, and when the instance count reaches zero, the model will be freed completely. So the next time you load that model it will be loaded from the hdd. So your only way is to hide that instance. BTW, you only can load a model or texture in the main thread. You can load one instance of all your models in the loading of your scene, then load any instances you want each frame. But it has no obvious benefit over loading them all at once.

Cubemaps can be rendered in realtime. I remember someone posted a sample about it. As I've mentioned, you need a low-res cubemap to get a glossy look. So just simply render a low-res cubemap, something like 32*32 and assign to your glossy mat.

Many developers are using assembly in their game engines' code. But it's not "100 times" faster or anything near that. But it's a must to get some parts of the engine done.

Use a low-res cubemap to get the glossy look.

you can read that with glRead command I think. It reads a range of pixels from the buffer.

It's probably because you're not loading or assigning a texture, that post processing shader is using. So the font texture that was assigned previously for text rendering, is used by the shader.

LE2 just has some parts of the runtime side of a game engine. It simply offers NO offline side. So if you're ready to complete it and make your own game engine, use LE. if not, go for Unity or UDK. Or you can wait for LE3 and see if it has the offline side of an engine.

GPU based particles, using geometry shaders.