"Efficient Irradiance Normal Mapping"

Quote:
"Irradiance normal mapping is a method to combine two popular techniques, light mapping and normal mapping, and is used in games such as Half-Life 2 or Halo 3. This combination allows using low-resolution light caching on surfaces with only a few coefficients which are evaluated by normal maps to render spatial high-frequency changes in the lighting."

Now that sounds like it might work in combination with the virtual texturing surface caching idea!
Not sure about it's performance though, which is rather crucial.

You can find the paper here.

Random thought

Just had a random thought concerning game component object systems.

If the system is optimized to quickly add and remove components, then an event system could be realized by adding and removing components.
So instead of having a complex event system to send events between components, you would add a specialized component that performs or represents the event.
The component would then be removed when the event is processed.
Not entirely sure how flexible it would be, but it would sure be easier to optimize for cache and multiple threads.

Yes, this blog has been neglected lately, I'm going to give it some attention again soon (I hope).
Real life has simply thrown several projects my way which is taking all my time at the moment.