You might want to look into pixomatic... which I believe Mr. Abrash worked on until relatively recently. Its a very full featured software renderer and i especially love the small footprint - 255k lib + 4k alloc (just the vsd on the last AAA game i worked on took 640k just for PVS data and my compatriots thought that was a small amount of memory - using whole megabytes for trivia is not uncommon these days sadly)
there has also been work done to rasterise depth buffers using the PS3 SPUs - but not sure if there is anything public domain.
real-time 'software' rendering is not quite dead yet... :)
i'm generally of the opinion though that 'we' have lost a lot of knowledge. i taught myself C/C++ through quake 3 modding and the quake and quake 2 sources. this was invaluable coming into the modern games industry where the barrier for entry is now extremely low, and consuming megabytes or millions of cycles on trivia doesn't stop your game shipping...
real-time 'software' rendering is not quite dead yet... :)
i'm generally of the opinion though that 'we' have lost a lot of knowledge.
Yes, that is kind of what I meant. I know there are still people doing software rendering, and I know it's sometimes used to complement GPU based rendering. And there are interesting projects out there. So, not quite dead, and I'm not even going to say yet because I don't think it's dying at all, on the contrary.
Still though the "state of art" has by and large ignored software for so many years now, with almost all advances and techniques being primarily done on the GPU (sometimes with help from the CPU).
So I totally agree we've lost knowledge. I personally hope to regain that knowledge, maybe come up with something new, perhaps even push some boundaries... but we'll see. :-)
http://www.radgametools.com/cn/pixofeat.htm
there has also been work done to rasterise depth buffers using the PS3 SPUs - but not sure if there is anything public domain.
real-time 'software' rendering is not quite dead yet... :)
i'm generally of the opinion though that 'we' have lost a lot of knowledge. i taught myself C/C++ through quake 3 modding and the quake and quake 2 sources. this was invaluable coming into the modern games industry where the barrier for entry is now extremely low, and consuming megabytes or millions of cycles on trivia doesn't stop your game shipping...