Big steps

So, I've made some pretty big leaps forward in the game programming: 

First half of edge detection

For the anti-aliasing, I decided to use a method pretty much exactly as used in STALKER - so far, it's only detecting edges via the surface normals, but soon it'll also use the depth buffer, to ensure that all the edges are "caught" (look at the pot on the left - its edge hasn't been detected because the change in surface direction between the two surfaces isn't great enough. Once all the edges have been detected, it's a simple and quick step to blur them and so cheaply "fix" aliasing.

This step is a post-processing step, as is SSAO. I've also started to implement SSAO, though it needs configuring for the scene, and the blurring step is still not yet complete - it has to take into account depth, or the shadows will "bleed" onto bits they shouldn't. The final steps are exposure and colour correction - colour correction I've already done, but in lower-quality versions, and exposure is still in the works (fixed exposure only works at the moment).

I also wrote most of the intersection tests, which are going to form a fairly important part of the physics system, level layout and rendering optimisations. The overall plan is that every object in the world will be given a "bounding box", and quickly checked against the feature in question (for example, for checking if an object is visible, it's checked against the viewing frustrum, or for physics, a ray representing the motion of an object can be checked against anything it's likely to collide with). This can be optimised by including all objects in a "tree" of bounding boxes, where each bounding box node completely contains all of its children, so if the parent is outside the area in question,all of its children can be quickly eliminated.

The framework for a download and resource manager have been started - allowing files to be queued and made to download or update, and for resources no longer visible to be unloaded completely to save graphics memory.

I also tidied up the controller code somewhat for Windows - it can now get the proper analog values, and detect the type of controller and battery level (and interestingly, also the type of battery in the controller) of Xbox controllers. Almost completely pointless but cool nonetheless.

Finally, a teaser, most likely for next time:

No clues as to what this is for yet, but it should be interesting...

14500+ lines of code now, 333 TODOs listed.
Charlie