Lighting

So, if you can read this I'm on holiday without reliable internet access - so this post will have to suffice. It shows the progress I've made up to the time I started to pack. The light is unfortunately quite glitchy, and doesn't feature shadows, bump mapping or specular highlights.

Very basic multiplicative light.

Gen1:3
Charlie

Sponza Atrium

Here's a simple first-look at the engine. Currently it's showing the base texture and tangent-space surface normals of Sponza, a model used for tests (mainly lighting). The next step is to shift the normals into viewing space (using the transpose of the inverse of the transformation matrix, for reasons I neither understand nor need to), and use them to light the scene. This now works on GL2 (DX9-level) hardware, with ideas to extend to GL3.X (DX10) or GL4 (DX11) and add new features (re-building a high polygon count from a set of smaller points and a map - geometry shader).

Base texture

Tangent-space normals - the light blue colour represents (0.5,0.5,1) as a colour, which works out to (0,0,1) as a vector - the
"up" direction with respect to the surface. I have since fixed the out-of-place stone texture - a bug in the model, not in my code for once!

Still a fair way off actually lighting it - I need a way of quickly working out the distances between points amongst other things. At my current rate that might be done in a few days. Skeletal animation, a game engine, net code and sound system are a while off.

Come next Sunday, I'll be camping and so may not have internet access. If that is the case I'll have a scheduled post prepared. With any luck it'll feature working lighting.
Fuck wasps.
Charlie

Fixed glitches, Minecraft

First things first, I fixed the graphical glitches which were occurring in my last screenshot - the depth buffer hadn't been set up correctly. The renderer can now project and transform objects, and essentially also supports textures. Still to add are normals, displacements, scene manager, skeletal animation, blend shader and lighting - but the heart of the deferred pipeline is now fully functional, which is always nice. In a couple of days I might be able to get a copy running in a web-browser, this post will be edited if I manage.

Redness represents X axis, Green Y-ness, and Blue Z-ness. It's also possible to "fly" around the cube.

Secondly, I started playing Minecraft Classic for a bit, then fell a little in love with the game. I purchased the Beta at about midnight, and have been playing it solidly since. It's absurdly addictive, but also brilliantly simple, and the DRM-free, play-wherever, indie quality of the game makes it all the better. It's also written by one man, in Java and using OpenGL (exactly the same as that ^^).

Minecraft? More like mindcrack?
Charlie

Back in the UK

The timelapse and images promised are in the process of being uploaded, and I'm suffering from a fairly bad headache, so this will become a fully-fledged post tomorrow. Return in 18 hours. That's an order, soldier.

Edit: OK, so the above might have been an exaggeration. I have made the timelapse but it's suffered from compression or rendering glitches. I shall re-render in something other than AE in the near future and post back. This edit is mainly to show what little progress I've actually made on the game:

If you look carefully at the full-size image you might be able to see the cube-ness of it (the lack of more than one colour deprives it of any real "shape" as such). It might not seem like much but it is perspective-ly correct (only the most technical of terms for you dedicated readers), and so means that there are no maths-related errors, anywhere in my code. It's also the beginning of a completely deferred pipeline (which means that lighting complexity is independent of geometric complexity, which is a huge benefit for complex scenes with lots of lights).

Edit 2:
So I added some colour, and it turns out my maths might not be so perfect after all:

I appear to be missing a face.

Bugs shall be fixed and a basic engine shall be running by next post. If I stop being lazy.

That one picture warranted staying up until 5:43AM? YES!
Charlie

Menorca

I'm in Menorca right now, so I have little choice but to post this from my phone (and hence spend a medium-sized fortune doing so). The weather is beautiful, and the sky's incredibly clear so I'm going to upload some pictures and a time lapse of the night sky when data isn't costing me £1.50 per megabyte. This post shall duly be edited with large pictures when I have my home broadband connection.

In other news I've got a new graphics card (Radeon HD 6950, aiming to unlock to 6970 with a bios mod if possible). That gives me DirectX 11 and a fair amount of graphics power and memory. Useful for video editing and game. I've written a fair amount more, but still got a huge amount of work before anything is playable.

How long will a week's worth of YouTube subscriptions take to get through?!

Edit: Here are a few photos I took - the third actually features in the timelapse.

Because having a horizontal horizon is optional, right?

Charlie