Cool Link Stash, February 2013

Graphics

Simon Yeoung posted a nice article on his blog on his implementation of voxel cone tracing.

NVIDIA posted a great article on their site on why to use pre-multiplied alpha called Alpha Blending: To Pre or Not To Pre. A longer, more in-depth treatise of the same subject was posted in 2006 by Tom Forsyth, a worthwhile read.

Steve McAuley has a short post on his blog that builds on a previous post he did on making the often used wrapped diffuse model energy-conserving. In this new post, he extends the formula to a generic wrapped diffuse model where an arbitrary power is used to soften the look a bit. His post is called Extension to Energy-Conserving Wrapped Diffuse.

Here's a nice blog post comparing NVIDIA's FX Composer to Unity when it comes to quick shader prototyping.

C++

Google released a C++ library called cpp-btree, which provides an STL-style implementation of B-tree data structures.

Another one of Herb Sutter's talks at C++ and Beyond 2012 got released on Channel 9. atomic Weapons: The C++ Memory Model and Modern Hardware is a two-part talk on the new C++11 memory model. This is a must-watch if you're doing any work on lock free algorithms. Great, in-depth talk.

Other

Decoda is a free and open source IDE for Lua with an integrated debugger. You can check out the source code on the Decoda GitHub repository.

After having done code reviews of the various open sourced id Software code bases, Fabien Sanglard is back with a review of the code of Duke Nukem 3D.