Graphics Engine update progress....

I'm pretty much re-writing my entire graphics engine. I'm re-doing the sky system...right now I'm just rendering the atmosphere & fog. Though in a few days I'll have dynamic billboarded clouds, and the sun/moon implemented and casting light on the scene.

The new atmosphere is basicly just a bunch of 1D textures that I transition between smoothly that represent the different times of day. I've got 256 textures for the entire day, so it looks rather nice. I've got all kinds of things I'm going to implement to make the skys look awesome, it will be coming together in the next few days.

I'm going to rewrite the light rendering code. I'm going to use the same lighting system for everything including the sun, street lights, traffic lights, vehicle head lights, store signs, etc. All lighting information will all be rendred to a texture, and then down sampled and blured, and displayed over the scene...almost like a glow effect. I'm going to get started on this tommorow.

The real time shadows are going well, I'm pretty much done with them. I've still got to add dynamic shadows on characters/vehicles that are rendered using hardware skinning, this is just a matter of comgining the two shaders though. Right now everything looks great with static meshes. I'm basicly rendering to 2 2048x2048 shadow maps, one representing the entire city...one representing the players local area. It works out quite well.

Here's 2 screenshots of how the cities are looking at this early stage....btw I'ev still got to re-implement the glass transparency.

Back to work.

- Dan

Early, without fog:


Fog added:


Another screenshot showing the new fog/atmosphere