Anonymous Commenting Shut Down

Due to the volume of spam comments I've had to remove lately, I've set commenting to require an account for the time being. It doesn't have to be a Google account, any OpenID account will work (so you can even log in through Steam).

I hope one day soon I can have more content to add to this blog, but I at least want to prevent it from being overrun by spammers. I'm always reading the comments.

OpenTK Example - FBO / Render Target TV

Available on Github

This is a small example of how to use a framebuffer object (sometimes the output is called a render target, although that's more of a DirectX term) in OpenTK. There's a second camera in the scene with its position indicated by the arrow. What that camera sees is put into a texture and then displayed on a model of a TV.

This is also significant because it allows us to get the depth information of the scene. This allows us to create shadows later by easily determining if there is an object closer to the light (which would have a camera "seeing" from its direction above or in the scene), and darkening parts where that is true.

Controls:

• WASDQE - Move main camera
• UHJK - Move texture camera
• C - Switch between color view and depth view
• V - Toggle TV static shader on/off

Update on next tutorial/example

Here's an update on what I have planned next.

I wanted to jump right into shadows next, but I realized that there's a few prerequisites before we get to that. One of those is rendering to a framebuffer/texture, and another is getting a depth map from another camera. So, next up is handling both of those. In addition, cube maps would be needed to handle shadows from point lights, so that's another topic to add.

However, my job is going to be picking up soon, and these require a lot of changes to the existing code that would take a lot of time to make as another tutorial in the series. Like before, I'm considering doing examples instead of tutorials here on out, so we can cover more topics in less time. The examples would still break down the new stuff, but they won't follow the process of adding it to the previous topic's project files.

Here the TV screen is showing the view from a second camera (the second camera is at the arrow)

Here it is rendering the depth information from the other camera

OpenTK Tutorial 9 Part 3: Specular Maps and Attenuation

In the previous part of this tutorial, we added spot lights and directional lights. This time, we're adding specular maps and light attenuation.

OpenTK Tutorial 9 Part 2: New Light Types (Spot and Directional)

In the first part of this tutorial, we made it possible to use more than one light in a scene. In this part of the tutorial, we'll be adding two new light types.

The next (and final) part of this tutorial will add specular mapping and attenuation.

OpenTK Tutorial 9 Part 1: Multiple Lights

This will be the first part of our more advanced lighting arc. In this part, we'll allow the scene to have many lights instead of just one.

This next part will add two new types of light: spot lights that only shine in a limited cone, and directional lights that shine at a constant angle on the whole scene. A third part will add specular maps and attenuation, to make the lighting look a little more realistic.

Detecting Markov Bots on Reddit, my lazy way

I've been getting annoyed at the number of comment bots on Reddit that are clearly just a program running a Markov chain. If you're not familiar with Markov chains, the basic explanation is that it looks at all the comments and makes a list of what words came directly after what other words, and then goes through the list to find a string of words where each pair was found in that order in the real comments. There are other ones that use larger portions of the text and ones that could use more than just the comments on one post, but the Reddit bots don't seem to be those (Wikipedia has an article with a far better explaination about Markov chains). Sometimes this makes a decent looking comment, but other times it just makes gibberish. There's a whole subreddit, /r/subredditsimulator, where the only posters allowed are Markov chain bots trained on other subreddits. That's the only place I'd like to see them.