So I've spent most of today working on these headlights. I had to write a new shader for this effect, basically [reflections + luminance texture + diffuse texture + skinning] all into one shader for the night time vehicles. It's actually pretty fast compared to the shaders I run during the day, which use the 4x4 percentage close filtering on the shadow maps.

I'm happy with the way the headlight effect turned out. I disabled streetlights in these screenshots; also the previous inaccuracies still stand, regarding the buildings luminance maps, etc. So the building windows still look funky. I've got to go through and fix that up, as well as the other few bugs in these screenshots.

For these screens, I made all vehicles into Police cars because I was using the police car texture to refine my ability to generate luminance maps/textures for the vehicles. I pretty much got it down now, so time to get this implemented for all 30 vehicles.

Keep in mind, the transitions from day>night->morning are COMPLETELY dynamic.

//Headlights are implemented now, for the vehicles.


//You can see headlight-lighting influencing entities is approximated.


//Tasty.


//The lighting is properly cast onto walls, etc. I use projective texturing to make it possible to have 100s of lights in each scene. As well as 'luminance maps' for light sources.


//Close up


//There are 100s of vehicles in the city, so I had to make the algorithm scale well.


//Driving on the grass


//From behind the vehicle, while driving


I've got a million things to work on, so I'm going to get back to it.

- Dan