Hello, here is an update of what has been done in the last month for TV6.5, nothing much because of TV6.1 release that took still a lot of time to fix and get ready.
- Reflection effect wasn't perfect yet, because there was no clipping for the reflection rendering, which often led in weird polygons visible on the reflection. Using a clip plane is a annoying thing because its not well supported on Geforce's cards. So this would imply switching to Software Processing (6 clip planes are always available withouht T&L), but software processing to render big models etc.. would be a pain for the CPU, so it's not a good idea. Another idea has been to use an alpha test technique with TexGen to simulate a clipplane, but this can't work well because it would imply adapt every TV render to this, so too annoying.
But thanks to a post on DXDev mailing list, I discovered that there was a way to use the projection matrix to simulate one clipplane. It works well, just need to change the projection matrix, update it and voila, you get a clipplane for free! perfect for water reflection... only drawbacks is that as it changes the projection matrix, you can't use both projection matrices in the same scene, because there will be z buffer artifacts. So the reflected rendering must be absolutely done on a rendersurface, which was already the case (to use EMBM). I don't post screenshots of this, because they are essentially the same as before, but it works in all case now.
- Some more work on TVMesh, made a CompactMesh function, useful when you have a ton of groups in your mesh with same settings and you want to reduce it to one group only (often doable). This enables the "one group optimization system" which is used to render faster and have a better sorting algorithm (this will be used for minimeshs too of course).
- Actor system improved. Worked on the shader system for the Actor class. Remember I talked about the problems of shaders with lights and fog before, because the standard lighting/fog can't be used with shaders, you have to recreate the entire light system into your shaders. One shader for each combinaisons of light, fog and bone influence number, I have limited the numbers of shaders to 32 at the moment, they have support for max 1 dir lights and 4 point lights, which I think is enough for actors, the lighting manager will handle this and takes the closest lights. Moreover this is only vertex lighting for the moment, if you need pixel lighting, it will be 1 pass per light, so a little more annoying
. At the moment, shaders are precompiled in the code, and created when needed (via a precaching system). Made it work yesterday, was painful too. But now the base is here and adding more effects for actor is easy. I don't know yet if I will allow people to use their own shader for this, because else every optimization I have put in would be useless
- several bugs fixed in 2D, Atmosphere etc... minor
Anyway back to work on Actor...
