Gamefest presentations and other links

Christer Ericson points out in a recent blog post that Microsoft has uploaded the Gamefest 2008 slides. These include a lot of relevant information, especially in relation to Direct3D 11. Christer’s post has many other links to interesting stuff – I particularly liked Iñigo Quilez’s slides on raycasting distance fields. Distance fields (sometimes referred to as Euclidean distance transforms, though that properly refers to the process of creating such a distance field) are very useful data structures. As Valve showed at SIGGRAPH last year, they can also be used for cheap vector shapes (the basic form of their technique is a better way to generate data for alpha testing, with zero runtime cost!).