Nothing visual to show i'm afraid but this week I've been looking at managing spaces and transform between them. Often we define a space as a tranform and a parent space, so first I was looking at scene graphs and matrix stacks as they are both ways of managing these contexts. I like the flexibility of a graph but I dont like scene graphs as they want you to shove all you objects into them. I want something more lightweight which only manages spaces, from here on out called the space-graph.

So half the week was spent putting together the basic internals of the space graph and coming up with way to work with it. General user experience stuff. But then I started thinking about how this would be on the gpu.

Now we cant (and shouldnt) pass all this shit up to the gpu, we only want the transforms we need to use. But working with spaces directly is rather nice so I start by assuming I could do that and how I would code if this was true. It was quite nice to be able to add spaces to positions and then define blocks inside which points would be implicitly cast (transformed) to the correct space. Basically I want to add static checking for spaces. To do this means tracking how spaces and such are passed around the shaders so I need some kind of flow analysis.

So that's what I've been doing for the last day and a half. I have basic value tracking in my varjo shader compiler now. It still doesnt handle conditionals or loops yet (which are the hard bits) but I expect to have this nailed in the next few days.

Right thats all for now. Sorry this is a shit write-up but I forgot I was doing these everyweeks so this is damn rushed. Check out more at http://www.techsnuffle.com

Last Edited on Mon Nov 09 2015 04:31:35 GMT-0500 (EST)