Hello all,

I would just like to thank everyone at this website and on the forums for helping me grow as a graphics programmer. It's been a long time coming, but now I think I want to post a picture and get some feedback regarding the scene.

Some things I will note

The shadows are a little bit off (Still working on 'em)

The HUD can use improvement (anybody have ideas ;) )

The brief case holding flash's items still need some work

Anyhow, I love HONEST opinion's! So any feedback I'll gobble up!

-Marcus

I'll repeat some things already said by others, but that just mean that it really is something to focus on first.

So, there are two main things to improve, in my eyes - textures and lighting.

Textures are very repetitive. I don't know how do you generate the world, but it seems to be not built in something like 3ds max/Maya/Blender, but rather made from "blocks" directly in the application code. If you are rendering the walls from separate blocks, each covered with a full texture, you could maybe try to make multiple variations of each kind of texture (bricks, grass...). That would require some clever work with an image editing SW, thought ;) Or try to change the rendering code to be able to use one larger texture spanning more blocks. Or use multitexturing - as Nik02 suggested. There are many ways.

Lighting. It's everyting very blue :) And very dark, even for a night scene. I would make bigger contrast between dark and lit areas.

I see a big problem in the lamps - they produce too little light around them. The top of the lamp is also oddly lit very strongly from one side.

And with a night scene like this, with multiple strong sources of lights, you really should consider making all the lamps cast shadows. It looks very "fake" when a source of light (lamp) casts a very storng shadow from some other source of light (Moon it is, I guess?) which however clearly is weaker. Similarly with the tree on the last image - the tree is close to a lamp, but cast shadow almost towards the lamp instead of away from it - that's not what a human brain would automatically expect.

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, lighting has been the most single aggravating thing I've dealt with yet.

Maybe I can make the directional diffuse light a little bit more bright (not so dark blue)

Or at least as Tom said, make the contrast between the point lights and scene bigger.

I was planning on reworking those stone-hedgy things (Even I don't know what they are)

As of now they are defined directly in code and give off a voxel style graphics (which I'm trying to avoid)

So maybe if I actually pipe them through a modeling software (Like Blender) I can get a more pleasing result

If I go the multi-texturing route I'll have to make the textures seam-less (Make them tileable) and still look good

The point-lights should be within the top part of the lamp, I still have to get to that.

Now, Regarding the HUD. I was thinking of actually using normal mapped geometry for it

(I like the idea of only having it appear when the user interacts with it)

I'm glad everyone recognizes it's night time and the light is from the moon. (That is an improvement!)

I was thinking of maybe placing a camera at the point-light and have it's lookAt, face down (-y) and render that to the depthBuffer, any ideas regarding that would be awesome

Ambient Occulsion, might be my next milestone ;)

So i'll work on lighting (including the point-lights, and texturing first.

Then i'll mess with the HUD

Then maybe ambient occulsion.

Also, how would I go about doing the emission (I've seen other games that have done it, like a sphere of light around the top part of the lamp)

And the bloom?

Also, my monitor is very bright, maybe it's time to break out the CRT!

-Marcus