Well I finally got the first 10 of 30 weapons in-game...arg. I spent many hours double checking / rewriting the tangent generation code as I thought that's where the problem was. Then it turned out I was just passing in the wrong handle to my effect file...*shakes fist at fate*. Important thing is that I have weapons in-game now, plus level of detail functionality...so I can render 1000s of these essentially for free [if they were somewhat evenly spaced throughout the game world, not all within 25 feet of eachother].

The HDR allows me to do all kinds of lighting effects I couldn't before, like sharp highlights on the weapons...*contemplates adding bloom effect to weapon's metal*...naaah. Anyways I'll be tweaking the weapon shader to make it look even better.



And another screenshot of the vehicles...I fixed the shadow aliasing/resolution issues...*cough single 4096^2 shadow map texture for entire scene*, still on any modern card filling 4096x4096 texture w/a single instruction pixel shader should be nothing, especially since the city geometry is sitting in nice static vertex buffers. Well at least I still get 70+FPS @ 1280x1024, so it's not the limiting factor in the scene at least, there are 400 vehicles and 100 weapons in the world.



- Danny