Just a quick entry to say that the scripting engine is on hold while I start a new game project. Just been playing around getting normal mapping and specular lighting working with a single omnidirectional point light.
The basic idea is a bit like the Grappling Hook game floating around the web, or the bat-cable in the Batman games, except you can attach the grapple to anything and the movement is physically based rather than just working as an animated teleport sequence. There's a capsule controller at the moment that can fire a badly rendered grapple line into any surface and is then pulled quickly towards the grapple point, detaching when you release the mouse or get too close to the grapple point with your momentum at the time conserved. Will hopefully get a video up once I've stabilised the controller a bit to get the idea across better.
But before that, I've been playing around with lighting effects as you can see from the horrible screenshot. Just a single texture and normal map being used there but the tech is in place anyway. I'm planning to look at cube-mapped shadows next, something I've been researching lately. I actually think it is going to be simpler to implement than the directional shadow mapping I've been doing before, since all I'll need to do once I have the cube map rendered is to compare the distance between the light and the world position in the pixel shader, rather than the complex projection required in a directional shadow map, but I'm sure I'll discover it isn't as simple as I think .
Can't quite see in my head how to do PCF on a cube texture. I guess you just vary the sampling vector by a certain amount, but I'm not sure how to figure out how much to vary it, since I used texel size in the directional shadow mapping I've done before when projecting onto a flat texture. I'm sure its well solved though and a bit of further research will turn up some answers, but will get the basic algorithm working first.
Plan is to support multiple lights but just have one light casting shadows I think. Don't really like the idea of having to render more than one cube map per frame, but may be absurdly fast since I'll just be rendering encoded depth to a RGBA texture. Will have to see.
Anyway, will write up a more interesting post on the shadowing and the new game when I'm in a position to. Thanks for looking in .