I was trying with greater values for SSAO but in my team’s opinion those are the best.
I may be wrong but screenshots of my depthbuffer will give you nothing, screenshot will have 8 bit per channel, my depth buffer is (as far as I remember) 32 bit.
the sharp edge is because you have an 8bit height map. So you only have 256 different possible height values. resulting in those “stairs”. Blurring the image is a way to avoid it but you also loose a lot of details. I pushed a change recently that allows to load luminance16f dds files:
1 channel 16bit float texture, with plenty precision. IMO the best format for height map. (since we don’t support 16 bit pngs)
I’m placing lights together with objects (torches, magic missiles etc) inside their controllers, and register them in my light rendering processor.
For wide range and ‘heavy’ (shadowcasting) lights I have a special algorithm to enable/disable them. I don’t care about lights attached to magic missiles and monster’s auras - they are not casting shadow and they are often very close to player because such lights are effect of combat.
Monster’s light is new one, but I found a very smart way to cull it - I’m disabling it in controlUpdate and enabling in controlRender - which is called only when the geometry needs to be drawn.
It is not July’s release yet, but I was playing with terrain a tiny bit.
I was interested in textures and performance, so I creted a 2048x2048 terrain to test how it behaves.
The results are quite ugly now, and the FPS is low, but actually it is rather promising: the hills have nice curvature, and the the perfomance is OK despite the test is not optimized at all.