Game player:  " d00d, teh framerate totally sux0rz! " Game developer:  " we are experiencing aliasing due to low sampling frequency along the temporal axis... " One of the many decisions that goes into making a game is whether...

So far I have written about aliasing in the context of rendering single images, but neglected to consider what happens when we string a series of images together, attempting to create the illusion of smooth motion.  Animation introduces the temporal...

Looking through my backlog of half written articles, I realized I have a couple more topics in my series about antialiasing , which I had entirely forgotten about!  Oops... Actually, though, today is a good day to finish this article.  Forget...

What a sad month for those of us who program computers. Take a moment to reflect on this paper , published in April 1960: No provision need be made for the user to program the return of registers to the free-storage list. This return takes place automatically...

A simple test Load the Silverlight 5 port of the XNA bloom sample (which you can find in c:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft SDKs/Silverlight/v5.0/Toolkit/Sep11/Source/Sample source code.zip/Xna after installing the Silverlight toolkit).  Run it, and...

One thing missing from the new 3D functionality in Silverlight 5 is an equivalent of the XNA Game class.  I previously wrote about how to provide XNA style Update and Draw methods in a WinForms environment .  What is the Silverlight equivalent...

Could this be the first ever 3D Silverlight game? My colleague Ito ported the rail shooter that he originally wrote for AppWeek 2010 to use the new 3D features in Silverlight 5 .  First get the SL5 RC plugin (if you don't have it already). ...

I have been remiss in not mentioning this on my blog before, but if you are an XNA developer who hasn't been paying attention to Silverlight 5, now might be a good time to start! A quick history: At the MIX11 conference in April, we announced...

(shamelessly stealing the title of a post by my colleague Aaron) In fact, why don't I let him provide the content as well as title: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2011/07/07/10184338.aspx

Recent silence notwithstanding, I'm still here, and will have more to say about aliasing as soon as I find myself less busy! In the meantime, check out this latest App Hub release:  http://create.msdn.com/en-US/sample/xnb_format This article documents...

My colleague Reza recently started a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rezanour .  He already has some good posts about vector math, and is a smart guy so I'm betting will be writing many interesting things in the future :-)

Back when multisampling first showed up, GPU hardware was slow, so triangle counts were low.  Complex curved shapes were approximated by a small number of faceted triangles, each of which was big enough to cover many screen pixels. This created an...

Alpha cutouts (where you use the alpha channel of a texture to determine the shape of a sprite or billboard) are the cause of many an aliasing problem. There are basically two ways to do alpha cutouts, both tragically flawed.   Alpha blended cutouts...

This is almost too obvious to be worth pointing out, but no amount of clever tricks like bilinear filtering and mipmapping will help if your input data is itself already aliased! Yet the example texture used in my previous post had nasty pixelization...

Aliasing can occur any time you resample a texture , for instance to scale it, rotate it, or map it onto a 3D model. Thanks to our friend the Nyquist threshold , the resulting problems get worse the lower a frequency you sample at, ie. the smaller you...

Multisampling is a compromise for people who really want to use supersampling , but can't afford it. The idea is simple: instead of increasing the resolution for all rendering, what if we do triangle rasterization and depth/stencil tests at the higher...

Supersampling is the simple, brute force approach to antialiasing computer graphics. In order to avoid aliasing , the Nyquist theorem says we must take at least twice as many samples as the highest frequency detail in our input signal. So how about we...

My previous post described how resampling a signal can cause aliasing problems. The worst problems occur when dramatically reducing the number of samples used to represent a signal, or when the source includes lots of high frequency detail. Specifically...

The math behind digital sampling and filtering is fascinating, complex, and full of arcane terms like Nyquist frequency . But I'm barely a good enough mathematician to understand it, let alone try to explain it here! This post is my attempt to describe...

I've been meaning to write about antialiasing for a while, but now I sit down to do that I realize I have too much to say for a single article. So this post is the introduction to a series. Antialiasing is one of the most important yet least widely understood...

"Source code" "Bedroom coder" "Can someone explain why this code isn't working?" "He's such a natural, he thinks directly in code" These are dirty, dirty phrases... code (kohd) noun A system used for brevity or...

There is a somewhat convincing argument that software design patterns are really just an attempt to emulate missing language features . Eric Lippert recently wrote a series of articles exploring how one might attempt to implement the "virtual method...

I'm sure you've all watched someone who doesn't know keyboard shortcuts struggling to edit a document. It can be frustrating how long even simple things take, and hard not to start shouting advice: ctrl+shift+right, ctrl+x, end, ctrl+v! But I occasionally...

Google's April Fool joke got me reading about why graphic designers hate Comic Sans so much. I can't help being reminded of one of my old college lecturers, a music theory analyst who once told a class I was in that " this composition was very successful...

Phrase:   "the black pit of despair" Definition:   When fixed timestep catch up logic fails to keep up with the target time. Usage:   " Yesterday the framerate was bad, but today it got so much worse that we fell into the...