I guess it's been a while since the last update [grin] since then I've finally stopped being stubborn and I learned HLSL. It's a damn shame that I've aready spent months learning/writing at least 50 assembly shaders for my game, things from hardware skinning, post processing blooms, projective texturing, shadow maps, uggghh. I now see the light, I wish I wasn't so resistant to change lol. HLSL makes everything so much easier.
Also I fixed a lot of my shadow mapping problems the other day. I had come up with an elaborate dynamic-z-bias system to handle the z-fighting artifacts that come with shadow maps, and I read somewhere on GameDev, that you just need to reverse the culling order when rendering to the shadow map...and voila. Almost every artifact that was happening was solved. So I'm happy with that.
Today was my day off from "pumping iron", so I didn't have to go anywhere today lol...I'm coming down off one of those 15 hour work binges that we all love :-) If I wasn't so tired I'd elaborate on some of the other kewl shite I've added into the game.
I've been thinking of ways I could disrupt the skyline in the city, so I added the first "factory" into the game. I think the look is funny...since the whole city is peaceful looking, and clean. Now there are a few big factories throwing smoke up into the air :-)
I'm happy with the way the factory turned out. I still have to rewrite the bloom effect there are still some artifacts visible in these screens. I'll hopefully get that later tonight.
Note the retivly low-res texturing on the top of the first level has been redone in all other screenshots. It's interesting to note that I only use a single 512x512 texture for this ENTIRE building. I perform the tiling in the geometry. Poly counts are still very low, 2000 in this model...I'll post a wireframe below so you can see. All the detail geometry is removed in a second LOD model, so the framerates stay up.
//Another angle on the factory model.
//I like the way it looks.
//You can see some of the detail geometry near the windows in this screenshot.
//You can see a little bit of the water in this screen.
//I have 3 different methods of rendering water.
//#1 - Normal diffuse water, nothing special.
//#2 - Water with planar reflections, and bump mapping/distortion [Shown in these screenshots]
//#3 - Water with cube map reflections, and bump mapping/distortion
//Armored car, a factory in the background.
//Tearin' it up.
//Planar reflection water, I still need to add more distortion, and tweak it some more.
//Wireframe of the factory so you can see the detail geometry in the highest LOD level.
//Screenshot of the highest quality water, using a realtime cubemap. I don't think i'll include this in the release. There are a lot of issues with centering the cube map, etc. I might just have this lookup a static cube map, and have it be a lower quality water.
That's it for right now, hopefully I'll have some more updates this week. As usual comments are welcome....
- Dan
