@FrozenShade said: Latest screen: http://postimg.org/image/iupihh5av/Maybe my current code is not perfect, but at least it meets all the requirements and (according to few opinions) it generates the ‘mood’
It looks really great. If you are accepting input, I have a few suggestions though you may have already thought of them. I’ll hold my peace just in case. 
Edit: note: not input about the shadow technique itself but the scene and ambient lighting… baked in stuff.
Sure, please write here any suggestions.
But… there are no ambient light right now, only another point light that follows the player and is not casting the shadow. Eventually all the lights will flicker softly.
@FrozenShade said: Sure, please write here any suggestions. But.. there are no ambient light right now, only another point light that follows the player and is not casting the shadow. Eventually all the lights will flicker softly.
Random scene suggestions… this is what I would do if it were my scene (and it’s cool enough that I almost wanted to make my own)
-use a different texture for the floor even if it’s just a dirtier version of the walls.
-bake some ambient occlusion into the geometry… or at least the walls. Even just darkening the top and bottom of the wall texture a bit would help. If you go with dirtier floors then you could even dirty the bottom edge a bit.
-nitpicky stuff… but if you could find a way for your corners to align properly it would be better:
And I sort of feel like these comments may be too soon. You are clearly going to do a lot more with this since it looked like even the grate was made of stone and I suspect you will change that and many other things.
…but those are the things I first thought of when I got over my initial “wow”.
Those are only sketches with some default texture everywhere, so don’t worry, we will replace them.
We will keep walls flat but pillars will be more complex than now.
For now I’m implementing level editor which generates entire level in 3D world, we choose the size of the individual components and see how it all looks. Final models will come later.
Baked ambient occlusion is a nice idea, but in this case (dungeons are made of blocks, they are not static) it’s a bit hard to do. Of course we will try to make some tricks.
@FrozenShade said: Those are only sketches with some default texture everywhere, so don't worry, we will replace them. We will keep walls flat but pillars will be more complex than now.For now I’m implementing level editor which generates entire level in 3D world, we choose the size of the individual components and see how it all looks. Final models will come later.
Baked ambient occlusion is a nice idea, but in this case (dungeons are made of blocks, they are not static) it’s a bit hard to do. Of course we will try to make some tricks.
Some simple AO is not too hard even with blocks. At least at the bottoms and tops of the walls. I did it in Monkey Trap even on the floor and it doesn’t look too bad even if the floor AO is wrong in places.
I look forward to seeing what you do.
Is that my fault again or there is something very bad with the engine itself?
http://s10.postimg.org/adzxet709/3ddu22.png
1st thing: note the areas marked on red. There are strange shadow artifacts. The grate, the doorpost and the pillar are three different objects, on all of them we can see that bad effect. It’s on both, my own material definition and standard Lighting.j3md. I was trying with different edge filtering mode and shadow compare mode settings. My own material definition have different PolyOffset than the default lighting.j3md but it does not matter and artifacts are exactly the same.
2nd thing: yellow arrows points at different ‘light distribution’. The point light source is close to the wall, but the wall is the darkest object here.
I have tangents, normals, etc. Checked it twice just to not waste your time. It must be something different.
If it needs any shader modification then please, point me where to look at.
Is this engine usable for someone who is not the master in shaders?
Or… is there any shader’s master who might want to write some code? Nothing versatile, we just need few customs and some basic things working well.
1 looks very weird. Sure that’s a shadow artifact? I mean it does get away when you switch shadows off, right?
2 looks like your wall is a “cube”, light distribution is compute to vertices so it can look weird on very low poly objects when the light source is close. Try to subdivide your wall
Well it’s hard to tell just looking at the picture. could be z fighting issue or memory trash. what kind of shadow processor do you use? the renderer, the filter? Is that a Pointlight shadow processor?
It’s my own modified shadow renderer, just to pass nearest lights into post shadow, so shadows can be lighten up with other light. All lights are pointlights.
Here is the screen of the scene with default PointLightShadowRenderer: http://s18.postimg.org/o1u5j92rd/3ddu24.png
Note the influence of the second light. Removing that light does not change anything.
EDIT: providing correct link
EDIT2: Is that possible to ‘just’ calculate the distance between fragment an light source and with that to light up the fragment? I’m trying to understand the .frag code, but so far I found that it’s a bit too complex.
I did some research. Check these screens: http://postimg.org/image/odwtyhqbz/
Here we have the point light moving from the left to the right. The value at the bottom of the screen means the light’s position. Wall is at 10, 11 means the middle of the corridor.
We can see that if the light is near the wall it can’t light it up in proper way. Moving the light to the center of the corridor slowly fixes the bug. So, it seems that there is a ‘required distance’ between the surface and the light. But why?
Also notice the shadow artifacts appearing on the grate door. On the last image the ‘shadowy thing’ appears on the whole doorpost.
Definitely I need an assistance with this, it seems that we have a ugly bug somewhere.
I also played with the #define ATTENUATION in Lighting.vert. Removing that line effects in lighting up the whole room… except the left wall! I think that this screen is important: http://postimg.org/image/afyihnd0l/
@FrozenShade said: We can see that if the light is near the wall it can't light it up in proper way. Moving the light to the center of the corridor slowly fixes the bug. So, it seems that there is a 'required distance' between the surface and the light. But why?
Because there aren’t enough triangles to interpolate properly. I think if you show the wire frame of the mesh it will be quite obvious that the wall has almost no triangles. And it’s more than distance that has to be calculated if you wanted to move the calculation into the fragment shader, you’d have to recalculate the angle to every point (view angle and light angle). It’s way better just to have more triangles, really.
Thank you, I’ll ask my team member to do even more triangles there. Never thought that flat surfaces need many triangles. I’ll provide the screen tomorrow.
For the shadow issue, I’d need a test case.
Something crossed my mind though, what happens if you move your light closer to the gate?
Hi. I make models for this game. Maybe this screenshots can help you. As I see low-poly meshes are not our problem (no matter if the walls are connected or not - vertex normals).
@nehon
http://postimg.org/image/bgu3bzyvz/ here you have few screens with the light in different distances to the gate. Bottom line, second value means light position in proper axis. Gate is at 8.0, the light is moving away from the gate.
Ok so that’s definitely zfighting…
You can try to play with the polygon offset.
I’m gonna try to reproduce the issue and see if I can find something.
Do you need our gate model? Maybe it is so specific that it would help you?
http://www.speedyshare.com/WgUrP/Door.rar
Just change the first line in the j3m file.
Changing poly offset does not take any effect.
After reading some book I learned some pretty obvious things about light calculation (normal, light direction, dot function etc…).
So, i started to play with these things, here are results: http://postimg.org/image/ai5rbwyd1/
It is far from perfection but a bit close to the effect that I want to have.
My ugly solution looks like that: (in lightComputeDiffuse, Lighting.frag)
//return max(0.0, dot(norm, lightdir));
float val = max(0.0, dot(norm, lightdir));
return (0.45 * val) + 0.50;
@FrozenShade said: After reading some book I learned some pretty obvious things about light calculation (normal, light direction, dot function etc...). So, i started to play with these things, here are results: http://postimg.org/image/ai5rbwyd1/ It is far from perfection but a bit close to the effect that I want to have.My ugly solution looks like that: (in lightComputeDiffuse, Lighting.frag)
//return max(0.0, dot(norm, lightdir)); float val = max(0.0, dot(norm, lightdir)); return (0.45 * val) + 0.50;
Seems you could get a similar effect just be ramping up the ambient. You are effectively making it so that there aren’t any dark shadows ever.
While you are reading, you should read about what happens to vec3 varyings as they interpolate over a figure and try to guess what happens when the vectors are nearly 180 degrees apart from one another (as they would be for the light dir for a very large untesselated surface with a light very close to it).
Again, try turning wireframe=true on for your material and posting a picture of that. Given your results, I think your wall is two giant triangles. Your graphics card can eat up triangles like nothing… especially as compared to what it would take to fix this issue in the .frag (per pixel) shader.