Designing an effective and performant HDR implementation for my game's engine was another step that was complicated by the Xbox 360.  As a quick refresher for those who aren't experts on the subject, HDR is most commonly implemented by rendering the scene to a floating-point buffer and then performing a tone-mapping pass to bring the colors back into he visible range.  Floating-point formats (like A16B16G16R16F, AKA HalfVector4) are used because their added precision and floating-point nature allows them to comfortbly store linear RGB values in ranges beyond the [0,1] typically used for shader output to the backbuffer, which is crucial as HDR requires having data with a wide dynamic range.  They're also convenient, as this it allows values to be stored in the same format they're manipulated in the shaders.  Newer GPU's also support full texture filtering and alpha-blending with fp surfaces, which prevents the need for special-case handling of things like non-opaque geometry.  However as with most things, what's convient is not always the best option.  As with my shadows, I once again came up with a list of possible techniques and enumerated their pros and cons:

• Standard HDR, fp16 buffer
  +Very easy to integrate (no special work needed for the shaders)
  +Good precision
  +Support for blending on SM3.0+ PC GPU's
  +Allows for HDR bloom effects
  -Double the bandwidth and storage requirements of R8G8B8A8
  -Weak support for multi-sampling on SM3.0 GPU's (Nvidia NV40 and G70/G71 can't do it)
  -Hardware filtering not available on ATI SM2.0 and SM3.0 GPU's
  -No blending on the Xbox 360
  -Requires double space in framebuffer on the 360, which increases the number of tiles needed
• HDR with tone-mapping applied directly in the pixel shader (Valve-style)
  +Doesn't require output to an HDR format, no floating-point or encoding required
  +Multi-sampling and blending is supported, even on old hardware
  -Can't do HDR bloom, since only an LDR image is availble for post-processing
  -Luminance can't be calculated directly, need to use fancy techniques to estimate it
  -Increases shader complexity and combinations
• HDR using an encoded format
  +Allows for a standard tone-mapping chain
  +Allows for HDR bloom effects
  +Most formats offer a very wide dynamic range
  +Same bandwidth and storage as LDR rendering
  +Certain formats allow for multi-sampling and/or linear filtering with reasonable quality
  -Alpha-blending usually isn't an option, since the alpha-channel is used by most formats
  -Linear filtering and multisampling usually isn't mathmatically correct, although often the results are "good enough"
  -Additional shader math needed for format conversions
  -Adds complexity to shaders

My early prototyping used a standard tone-mapping chain and I didn't want to ditch that, nor did I want to move away from what I was comfortable with.  This pretty much eliminated the second option for me off the bat...although I was unlikely to choose it anyway due its other drawbacks (having nice HDR bloom was something I felt was an important part of the look I wanted for my game, and in my opinion Valve's method doesn't do a great job of determining average luminance).  When I tried out the first method I found that it worked as well as it always did on the PC (I've used it before), but on the 360 it was another story.  I'm not sure why exactly, but for some reason it simply does not like the HalfVector4 format.  Performance was terrible, I couldn't blend, I got all kinds of strange rendering artifacts (entire lines of pixels missing), and I'd get bizarre exceptions if I enabled multi-sampling. Loads of fun, let me tell you.

This left me with option #3.  I wasn't a fan of this approach initially, as my original design plan called for things to be simple and straightforward whenever possible.  I didn't really want to have two versions of my material shaders to support encoding, nor did I want to integrate decoding into the other parts of the pipeline that needed.  But unfortunately, I wasn't really left with any other options after I found there were no plans to bring the support for the 360's special fp10 backbuffer format to XNA (which would have conveniently solved my problems on the 360).  So, I started doing my research.  Naturally the first place I looked was to actual released commercial game.  Why?  Because usually when a technique is used in a shipped game, it means it's gone trhough the paces and has been determined to actually be feasible and practical in game environment.  Which of course naturally led me to consider NAO32.

NAO32 is a format that gained some fame in the dev community when ex-Ninja Theory programmer Marco Salvi shared some details on the technique over on the beyond3D forums.  Used in the game Heavenly Sword, it allowed for multi-sampling to be used in conjuction with HDR on a platform (PS3) whose GPU didn't support multi-sampling of floating-point surfaces (The RSX is heavily based on Nvidia G70).  In this technique, color is stored in the LogLuv format usinga standard R8G8B8A8 surface.  Two components are used to store X and Y at 8-bit precision, and the other two are used to store the log of luminance at 16-bit precision.  Having 16 bits for luminance allows for a wide dynamic range to be stored in this format, and storing the log of the luminance allows for linear filtering in multi-sampling or texture sampling.  Since he first explained it other games have also used it, such as Naughty Dog's Uncharted.  It's likely that it's been used in many other PS3 games, as well.

My actual shader implementation was helped along quite a bit by Christer Ericson's blog post, which described how to derive optimized shader code for encoding RGB into the LogLuv format.  Using his code as a starting point, I came up with the following HLSL code for encoding and decoding:

 // M matrix, for encoding
const static float3x3 M = float3x3(
    0.2209, 0.3390, 0.4184,
    0.1138, 0.6780, 0.7319,
    0.0102, 0.1130, 0.2969);

// Inverse M matrix, for decoding
const static float3x3 InverseM = float3x3(
    6.0013,    -2.700,    -1.7995,
    -1.332,    3.1029,    -5.7720,
    .3007,    -1.088,    5.6268);    

float4 LogLuvEncode(in float3 vRGB)
{        
    float4 vResult;
    float3 Xp_Y_XYZp = mul(vRGB, M);
    Xp_Y_XYZp = max(Xp_Y_XYZp, float3(1e-6, 1e-6, 1e-6));
    vResult.xy = Xp_Y_XYZp.xy / Xp_Y_XYZp.z;
    float Le = 2 * log2(Xp_Y_XYZp.y) + 127;
    vResult.w = frac(Le);
    vResult.z = (Le - (floor(vResult.w*255.0f))/255.0f)/255.0f;
    return vResult;
}

float3 LogLuvDecode(in float4 vLogLuv)
{    
    float Le = vLogLuv.z * 255 + vLogLuv.w;
    float3 Xp_Y_XYZp;
    Xp_Y_XYZp.y = exp2((Le - 127) / 2);
    Xp_Y_XYZp.z = Xp_Y_XYZp.y / vLogLuv.y;
    Xp_Y_XYZp.x = vLogLuv.x * Xp_Y_XYZp.z;
    float3 vRGB = mul(Xp_Y_XYZp, InverseM);
    return max(vRGB, 0);
}

 
Once I had this implemented and worked through a few small glitches, results were much improved in the 360 version.   Performance was much much better, I could multi-sample again, and the results looked great.  So once again things didn't exactly work out in an ideal way, but I'm pleased with the results.

Having just been badly upstaged by MJP's post, I reckon this might not be too interesting except for a few RTS/AI enthusiasts. Anyway...

In a recent discussion on RTS AI, Matias Goldberg pointed out the quite ancient text The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Since I've been fostering an RTS pet project for years now, I decided to get a copy and it turned out the best $4.95 I probably ever spent (ISBN10 0-486-42557-6).

Obviously it's not a cookbook for writing RTS strategies, but after a first read I can definitely see how various stratagems and axioms could be used to construct a clever AI. In fact, I'm amazed how many clear cut rules of thumb Sun Tzu puts forward that could be readily applied. These however may only serve to highlight the limited scale on which popular RTS games play out.

Food for thought at any rate.

On my favorite GameDev forum a lot of threads seem to be popping up from beginners worrying that getting started in game development, even as a hobby, is Hard. Lacking anything really useful to talk about at the moment, I thought I'd write up some points about this.

Get your feet wet

When you're just starting out everything seems hard and no amount of reading is going to do you much good until you sit down and just take a shot at it. Don't worry if you don't create an AAA game on your first try or even when you hit a wall and don't know how to continue (I'll get back on that). The key is, you've at the very least got some basics down and tried out various things that did or did not work. Congratulations, you've now learned something and are no longer a n00b.
 

The best language   

Please stop worrying about what would be the best programming language, please! If you even vaguely know how to code in some language, just stick with that unless you feel you absolutely need to move to another language since it offers something you really can't live without. Programming languages may all have their pros and cons (in no small part due to the libraries they'll allow you to use), but getting bogged down learning hard language X isn't going to help you create your game. Most coding skills you aquire carry over pretty well and should make it a lot easier to learn other languages anyway. And though it may be a fact that language X is the current industry standard,  should you really care about that now?
 

Getting into the industry

Or rather, do you really want to be in the industry right now or in the near future? It's a nice dream to create games for a living and certainly worth hanging on to, but when you're just getting started you really shouldn't be worrying about the industry too much. Just have a go at creating some games or at least coding some fancy things to get a feel for it. Then if coding games really turns out to be the carreer what you want, you will still have plenty of time to brush up on industry standards and how to actually get in there. In the meantime, you'll have a bit of a portfolio layed down which just might show off your experience and passion better than stating you know language X. Here's a little anecdote.

Getting stuck

So you went and started coding your game, but you've hit a wall. That's ok, it means you have something new to learn. Research the problem, ask around on forums and try to get it working. Even if it turns out you've created a monolithic unwieldly behemoth of a program or that something's deeply flawed in your approach, you'll at least know to avoid it in the future and you can start fresh with your newly gained knowledge. But chances are things aren't this bad and you'll have learned how to solve the (perhaps common) issue.
 

Well, that about covers it for now. I'm sure more ramblings will be forthcoming