Sundog Blog

SilverLining is featured in this month’s issue of Develop, the popular UK-based game development magazine. You’ll find us in the middleware feature; in addition to our half-page ad, we’re also featured in the section on “specialized middleware,” and quotes from Sundog Software’s founder, Frank Kane, are sprinkled throughout the feature. You can read it online for free - check it out! (And consider subscribing, it’s a nice magazine.)

A big welcome to our European visitors checking us out from the article, and thanks to Vizerra for helping us out with the screenshots featured in it!

We just released version 1.971 of SilverLining, featuring support for OpenGL 3.2 core contexts, new features to blend clouds into the sky better and eliminate popping, much better memory usage, visual enhancements, and bug fixes. Go get it from our download page.

The new SilverLiningOpenGL32 renderer supports “core contexts” for OpenGL 3 that do not support backward compatibility. This new renderer completely eliminates the fixed-function pipeline for OpenGL, and only uses core functions in the OpenGL 3.2 specification plus certain extensions if they are present. We continue to support the SilverLiningOpenGL renderer which runs on anything going back to OpenGL 1.4. See the new OPENGL32CORE option in Atmosphere::Initialize, as well as the new OpenGL 3.2 sample project included in the new SDK.

SilverLining 1.971 also includes new methods you can use to fade clouds out with distance, making them blend seamlessly into the sky. If you’re upgrading from an earlier version, you’ll want to pay closer attention to the value you pass into AtmosphericConditions::SetVisibility(), and clouds now fade out as they approach this distance. If SetVisibility() is set too low, your clouds may look too fuzzy and ephemeral.

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We owe a debt of gratitude to one of our customers, 3DreamTeam, makers of Vizerra. During the development of Vizerra, we worked closely together to help refine the look of SilverLining to match the realism of their virtual landmark tours. The results of this collaboration were dramatic.

They’ve posted an article on their blog about it, with some interesting “before” and “after” screenshots that show you just how far SilverLining has come along over the years. Check it out, and give Vizerra a download - its graphics really are jaw-dropping.

Version 1.963 of SilverLining now includes libraries, samples, and project files for Microsoft’s new release of Visual C++ 2010. You’ll find the new libraries under the lib/vc10 directory of the SDK, alongside the libraries for Visual C++ 6.0 (vc6), Visual Studio .NET 2003 (vc7), Visual Studio 2005 (vc8), Visual Studio 2008 (vc9), and GCC for Linux and MacOS – all of which we’ll continue to support.

Version 1.962 of SilverLining, available now from our download page, eliminates all third-party DLL dependencies. This simplifies the distribution of an app linked with SilverLining, and gets you up and running that much faster when doing an initial integration.
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SilverLining 1.96 is now available from our download page. This release makes it easier to integrate SilverLining with existing game engines, by abstracting away its asset management and memory management. Combined with our existing support for plugging in new renderers and a highly portable cross-platform code base, SilverLining is now more versatile than ever.
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Version 1.952 of SilverLining is now available from our download page. This new revision adds the methods Atmosphere::Serialize() and Atmosphere::Unserialize(), which you can use to save and restore SilverLining’s complete state to any STL iostream. This is particularly handy not just for saving conditions to disk, but for handling device reset events in Direct3D 9 – when you lose the device, you need to delete and re-create the Atmosphere object, and these methods make doing so a lot easier.
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Sundog Software has authored two chapters in the new book “Game Engine Gems” – “Physically Based Outdoor Scene Lighting” and “Physically Realistic Skyboxes”. If you’re at GDC, you can get a sneak peek at it at booth #1843! Order one now from Amazon.com.

SilverLining 1.95 is now available from our download page. This new version has much better support for high-dynamic range applications – you can now toggle HDR mode at runtime using Atmosphere::EnableHDR(). This will disable all tone mapping and gamma correction, and draw to your floating point framebuffer in raw units of kilo-candelas per square meter with 128 bits of color precision. We’ve also introduced a lens flare effect, support for legacy compilers (Visual C 6.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2003), visual quality improvements, and bug fixes. We’ve also moved to GLSL shaders from Cg for OpenGL developers, which improves our compatibility with ATI hardware. For DirectX developers, we’re now linking against the August 2009 DirectX SDK.

SilverLining 1.94 includes a new “custom renderer” sample project, illustrating how to tie SilverLining into your own rendering engine directly. You no longer need to let SilverLining render directly via OpenGL or DirectX; you can wire our drawing calls directly into any engine you’d like now. This opens up possibilities such as using SilverLining as a numerical engine on console platforms.
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