Dev Diaries are back ! (for now :p)
Now that the prerelease is done. Time to improve some things.
For example, Actor specular ! Currently, there was no way to do specular in our vertex lighting in Shader mode. It was only working in Blending Mode (which uses T&L from the card directly).
So my goal today was to reintroduce a simple specular lighting in the internal shaders of actor vertex lighting. Nothing really special but it had to be done.
However,the main problem here is the max instruction count of the vertex shader ! vs1.1 isn't enough to allow specular lighting on 1 directional light + 4 point lights on 4 bones. So unfortunately Actor specular will only be available on VS2.0, and will fallback to no specular on VS1.1.
Here is the result :
Left = managed lighting using blending mode
Right = shader lighting using fast/shader mode :
http://www.truevision3d.com/devdiary/specularonactor.jpgAlmost matching
My shader is even a little better because it removes the specular when there is no diffuse contribution, this way you don't find weird specular white color on sides not lit.
On another note, I've added two other functions for TVAI : FindNodePathEx and FindGridPathEx, that just returns respectively node indices and gridx/y list, instead of a TVPath. Can be useful
P.S : A comprehensive documentation about all the license stuff will be available around this weekend ! Some setup fixes are planned too, we've identified at least 5 of them for now !
