As for OpenGLxxx, that means I can safely keep using GL2 for now. Maybe its time step to drop the ancient OpenGL 1997 way of thinking, and force myself with VBO's and using shaders for everything (as far as I'm not already doing that). But... upgrading is boring, so I might delay it a bit longer hehe.
Texture amount
Maybe Cg is still a bit behind with that then? I can save myself with 16 textures probably though. But having more allows some more flexibility, and less multi-passing in some cases maybe.
Uniform Buffer Objects
I don't yet understand the difference between c- and tbuffers (I thought tbuffers = texture-buffer), but in practice the parameters will be grouped together in the buffer, and the materialIndex does not vary per pixel normally. One object or one wall has 1 materialID normally.
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Setting up an UBO in GL is childsplay but... How the hell do I pass & use it in Cg?
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Last february, Cg released version 3.1 that supports UBO's. Now it's just a matter of updating my delphi header for the DLL :|
Deferred lighting
Thanks for the battlefield paper, awesome stuff. Also the tiled deferred rendering caught my interest (I hate it when you want to try 100 things at the same time). Little question about that... is it better to make a different shader for each possible lightcount ("shader_1lamp", "shader_2lamps", ... ) or is looping through a variable sized list totally ok these days?
As for Alpha-Coverage... I can ask, but it's better just to try it myself first
I can see why you have to take multiple samples along edges and light them individually, then combine them as one in the end. But the techniques/steps to do that efficiently are new to me. So again, someone knows a good (OpenGL) demo or paper on alpha-coverage?Thank you all!