Real Time Graphics Asg10

Check it!

You see that crazy transparency on the blue spheres as they get close to the wizards face?  Yeah, I totally did that.  You can too, the arrows move all the spheres around, but now not the floor!  As you get closer to the floor it gets pretty transparent, I went a little overboard with the effect so you can really see it happening.

This assignment was kind of a tricky one.  I had a lot of problems with the depth buffer and what to do with it.  First I trying to copy the texture back to the actual DirectX depth buffer, which triggered an invalid call error.  I was on an airplane back from Montreal while doing this so googling the problem was kind of impossible.  Eventually I realized there was no reason to actually do this, since we can just sample from the texture.  Additionally, when to set the render targets and where to set them back had me staring at a beautiful black window for some time.

Here's what my depth buffer looked like by the way, and right afterwards is the actual depth buffer.

The biggest problem I encountered was something I didn't even think was a problem with mine until right before I solved it.  Other Jason was having this weird problem where only part of his spheres were showing up and when moving the spheres they went crazy.  My spheres weren't rotating and I had never moved the meshes, only the camera, so I just assumed mine worked and spent my time trying to solve his problem.  Turns out we were updating the meshes positions after we did the depth pass, which obviously you don't want to do.  We were just calling update on every mesh first thing in the draw loop, but since we added the depth pass before that loop we didn't think to move the mesh update above it.  Luckily I figured it out right around the same time I realized it was even a problem for me.  :)

One thing I kept wondering while working on this assignment was how when implementing the wobble technique we were told that games only ever do that effect once.  I figured this was because writing the entire screen to a temp buffer, then copying that over and manipulating it to make an object look like its effecting the background is really costly.  But sort of do that a second time in this assignment with the depth buffer (although we never copy it back) and we definitely do it again in the next assignment with the GUI stuff.

Anyway, here's the code.