Okay above you see rough and blurred. The rough pass uses a single sample against the depth buffer. Those bloody pixels are a result of the resolution of the shadow map.
Many people will tell you this but whenever you have a problem try to visualise it. This can be applied to almost everything (except cases where visualisation is a constraint, think advanced maths and quantum). So above you see the debug frustum.
Wooot! Progress, the shadow is low quality due to PC card limits. I need to add some bias to avoid flicker, and smooth off the edges to get soft shadows.
So climbing into bed last night I got a great idea. Debug the Light ViewProjection matrix by using a camera with the same matrix. Well you know how I managed to knock together that skybox so quickly. Well I dug into it…. YIKES.
Full Screen shadows almost done. Had to run. Just caught last bus home. Some weird filming on the lot. More tomorrow.
So after a lot of thought and planning yesterday I set about implementing soft shadows using shaders tonight. Sadly this meant I needed to re-haul the entire scene manager and packer to support texture swapping, and effect management.
Well lighting & shadows are a complex bag of trickery and maths. Basic Lighting is simple. Take a book outside into the sun now rotate the bugger around and throw it.
Day & Night Cycle. Woot! Not only did I get a pretty awesome Sky-Sphere in place but I also managed to knock up a day/night cycle. I also cleaned up the shaders and have global lighting in place. Found an awesome tut, and manage to knock the shader up from that.
AAAARGH!!!! Really slow progress, here are some of the hurdles I’ve been hitting. Baking Shadow Maps in 3D Studio Max while maintaining the UV (a bad tangent). Confusion between ActiveTransform and Transform. Renamed them to WorldTransform and RelativeTransform. Broken input needed fixing.
We as human creatures build are not naturally paid up members of society we need to be shuffled and bounced by the Brownian motion of society mixing our thoughts and desires with others to build our humanity. In short killing monsters doesn't make us level hugging strangers does.
I work hard to keep this blog *clean*. That has come to mean a lot of things to mean, mostly it means silence. My mind overflows with things I want to pour out to the world and as sad as this may seem I have learned over the years that to truly express yourself you must be your own editor.
Timer Needs fixing. Okay so I knuckled down and played the demo a bunch of times. Focusing once again on the combat. I kept forcing myself to envision this or that but in the end it just didn't feel "fun". The Instant Manipulation thing makes sense but feels light and tacky. The game needed weight.