Salutations!
I've been busy lately, coding my secret project (I won't be sharing any real info on it just yet, at least not until I have developed it further) and I had to learn a variety of nice and interesting programming tricks to make it run at an acceptable FPS rate while still looking pretty.
First of all, since the project involves a lot of geometry and many lights, I used a Deferred Rendering method as described by Catalin Zima's excellent article. The first project prototype was done in XNA 4, but since then I have begun using SlimDX and decided it would be better suited for my needs. While I can certainly understand why they were implemented, XNA's profiles (HiDef and Reach) don't really fit my needs, as I have to use multiple render targets, but the project does not necessarily require a DirectX 10 compatible video card. What I ended up doing is using SlimDX's Direct3D 9 implementation. Additional benefits of the change include some impressive speed gain.
I have also figured out how to do proper Frustum Culling (not very impressive, but I never knew any serious 3D programming before I started this project, so I count it as an accomplishment), and failed at creating a working implementation of Occlusion Culling. I don't exactly understand why, but I'll get it sorted out eventually. For now, the performance is acceptable with the game running at 1000-1200 FPS on my PC with a GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card, and 60-70 FPS on a friend's laptop running some sort of Mobility Radeon HD, so I'm concentrating on adding new features to the engine and making sure things work before I start optimising it any further. GPU Gems 1 or 2 has some sort of an article on this, but I'm not sure it applies in my particular case.
I'll need to learn a whole lot more if I ever want to complete this project, but it's a very good idea and I'm just not going to let it go to waste.
Anyway, I'm done boring you for today!
Cheers
