I’ve recently been spending a lot of my time working on projects based on the G3D Innovation Engine by Morgan McGuire. I personally learned how to program using unix development tools, so I’m used to using the command line for everything, and Makefiles are the build tool I’m most comfortable with. G3D, being a research game engine, primarily for graphics research, has had to focus on Windows-based development for a number of years now.
Today, NVIDIA announced a new program to help game developers effectively use NVIDIA hardware called GameWorks. The thing that excites me the most about GameWorks is the inclusion of Optix in a program that directly targets game developers. Optix is a ray tracing environment developed by people I know from my studies at Utah that has previously been used to help develop rendering engines for design and production environments. This recent announcement means that the important global illumination features that work more naturally in ray tracing will be more readily available for game developers.