Cool Link Stash, September 2012

From time to time I'm going to be posting a collection of cool links to gamedev-related stuff that I found on the internet over the last couple of weeks. This is the first post in that series.

Digital Filters

Introduction to Digital Filters is a free online book by Julius O. Smith III. It's a fairly easy read and serves as a great introduction to the theory. The main page of his site has some other cool online books too, in particular one on the Mathematics of the Discrete Fourier Transform.

smallpt

smallptis a Monte Carlo path tracer in 99 lines of C++ written by Kevin Beason. It comes with source and a cool presentation that explains all 99 lines in detail.

Calibrating Lighting and Materials in Far Cry 3

There were lots of great real-time graphics courses at SIGGRAPH this year. Unfortunately, I couldn't attend this year. However, most of the slides are online. Stephen Hill is keeping a great link collection to all SIGGRAPH talks. One talk that I liked in particular, is Steve McAuley's Calibrating Lighting and Materials in Far Cry 3 from the Practical Physically Based Shading in Film and Game Productioncourse.

Technical Links Collection

This is a large collection to all sorts of technical resources on the web, most of them game development-related.

JavaScript Resources

While searching for some ways to improve my not very leet JavaScript skills, I stumbled across this great site that has free online books for JavaScript (and some CoffeeScript) development for programmers of all skill levels. Pretty neat! Another good resource for the beginning JavaScript programmer is a blog post called How to Learn JavaScript Properly on the JavaScript.is(Sexy)blog. Apparently, it helped the author's 13-year old daughter learn JavaScript.

BananaBread

BananaBread is a first person shooter originally written in C++ and OpenGL but then ported to HTML5, JavaScript, and WebGL via Emscripten. It comes with full source code and is licensed under the BSD license. Pretty interesting. Runs in recent versions of Google Chrome and Firefox.

Rapid Game Editor

ZGameEditor is a visual editor for creating small-sized (as in kilobytes) games, demos, and screensavers using procedural techniques. It's also open source.

Windows x64 ABI

Rick Skorski has been posting an interesting, ongoing series on the x64 ABI on Windows over at AltDevBlogADay:

Mitsuba

Mitsuba version 0.4.0 has just been released. Mitsuba is an open source, physically based renderer that implements bidirectional path tracing. You can also browse the Mercurial source code repository.