Filler posts? Who, me?

I've been out all weekend filming (more over the next month - and no spoilers I'm afraid) so I haven't had much time to work on the engine or any other projects - though I have ordered the motor, charger and batteries for the quadrotor. The work I have done towards the game is mostly non-visual (i.e. importing 3D models, materials, user input, and animating colour transitions). I'll be finishing the model and material importer, and designing the renderer properly over the next couple of weeks.

CryTek know how to do lighting.

Once model importing is sorted (not too far off) the next big problem will be lighting. Lighting is easy in certain situations but next to impossible in others. Take the above image as an example (a model of Sponza Atrium, rendered in CryEngine 3). If you consider light as moving only in a straight line, then any covered areas would be completely dark. We know from experience that this is not the case, however - light is bounced off all surfaces, providing light to the covered areas. This is known as radiosity. Games like Half Life 2 pre-compute the radiosity but this method has limitations (most notably, the lighting is only valid when the sun is in one position) so increasingly games have started to handle more advanced lighting in real-time. There's still no "standard model" to speak of as yet - though there are some techniques in common between virtually all games. Advanced illumination like this won't be relevant in an RTS game, but I prefer to plan ahead and think about how features could be incorporated. 

Project size to date: 384mb

Charlie