Pretty lights

The first order of business today was to work with Paul to get some cool glow maps in. Here are some mockup examples. Check out the lights (bright yellow parts). When we change the lighting direction, you notice that the lights are still lit. It gives the cool "There's someone inside" look.

So now, with all these maps, we're going to have to come up with a standard way to draw these sukka's. I think I'll hook up the .fx files again now that we have a little time. It'll make the code cleaner because we don't have to worry about setting all the render states. The .fx file will handle that for us. Plus, we've got some fixed lighting and just a few star lights. I've got to figure out how to pass the lighting into the .fx file.

After much labor and frustration, I think I finally have it. The only way I could do it with just VertexShaders is to do a 3 pass render. Check this out:

Pass1: Modulate the texture color with the diffuse lighting to give us a "lit" model. Notice the brightness differences.

Pass2: Combine the results of the first pass with a straight texture blend of the decal color. Now we have a lit ship with the decal colors blended in.

Pass3: Finally, add the light map.

Here's the lightmap in action:

There's still more tweaking to be done. I'd like to flatten out that specular look. Also, if you notice, with each pass, we get a small framerate drop. It hope this doesn't kill low end machines. That's the next test. Take this off a Radeon 9800 and try it on my lowly GeForce4 440 Go. Another thing to do is make a high end technique that uses pixel shaders for the high end graphics cards. I'd also like it if anyone can help me get this down to 1 pass. Not that I'm getting the hang of it, I may be able to, but it's iffy.

Tomorrow I'll incorporate this ship along with this .fx file into the game. We'll see how it plays with others.

If anybody wants to help trying to get this down to 1 pass, please mail me: joe@stardock.com