Tech demos - undisclosed game

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

In this thread I plan to release tech demos of a yet to be named game. :wink:

I’ll kick off with a small soft-lighting demo, which runs in realtime on a crappy video card. The scene has 256 dynamic lights and 16384 static lights. The geometry is infinitely thin and is (therefore) only visible due to changes in shade in the neighbouring pixels. There’s roughly 16 hours of work in this puppy.

512×512 217 KB

This is my first attempt at uploading anything serious to YouTube, so the video is bad, and the audio is worse. I didn’t even make the audio fade in & out. Please bear with me while I look for (better) video editing tools.

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The background music was purely accidental, Fraps just grabbed my streaming radio :persecutioncomplex: 8)

#2

That is quite pretty, looking forward to more.

#3

I don’t usually like that shadow effect (looks pretty horrific in Monaco IMHO) but that looks very cool. Probably because it’s really subtle.

#4

We’ve yet to plug it into an actual griddy sort of map and see how it all looks. I think it’ll look ok in the end. It’s going to be a strange mash up of 8 bit retro and modern GPU shader effects.

Cas :slight_smile:

#5

After changing the algorithm to allow some shortcuts (sharper shadows in some edge cases), it’s
no longer using the GPU resources exclusively. :slight_smile:


http://indiespot.net/files/shadowmap-2.png?v=3

The previous algorithm used 512 dynamic lights and 16384 static lights, the new algorithm uses 32 dynamic lights and 256 static lights, with similar results, by faking the penumbra instead of simulating it with scattered light sources.

http://students.guild.bham.ac.uk/astrosoc/Website_Version_2/site_images/Umbra01.gif

#6

Resolution?

#7

The resolution is 512x512 at the moment - but with the high framerate, there is no reason to keep it small. Except ofcourse the puppy-games graphics style, where a pixelated look is a bonus (I really get even more money when I reduce the resolution!)

Next thing up is a lightmap grid, where lightmap instances are pooled.

Culling of entire groups of occluders is already supported, making it a tad faster.

#8

To disagree with PaulCunningham, I’ve always been a huge fan of this type of shadow effect.

I have planned several games in my mind that use something very similar to this, I am looking forward to see the direction this goes in.

Keep up the great work!

:yawn: ooooooh

edit: Seems the emoticon more like a ooooh ahhhh awwww then a ‘yawn’ in my opinion…

#9

It looks very good !

Can you please explain a bit how you’re doing this ? How do you fake the penumbra ? you’re using a texture with a kind of gradient ? ( as described in Orangy tang’s article ). Do you use shaders ? lightmaps ? For the static lights, you render them only once and store the generated lightmap ? If it’s like that, it doesn’t use too much memory to store them ?

Sorry for all the questions but as my game is using the same kind of lighting, I’m very interested in the subject :slight_smile:

#10

The video looks neat! Can’t wait to see more :slight_smile:

#11

This is awesome ;D are there any tips you could give for making something similar? (I actually really want this in my current project…)

#12

Looks great, impressive performance.

Dynamic shadows add so much ambience and atmosphere to a game.

Do you use one or many pre-made images for the soft shadows (the penumbra)?

#13

I used a modified version of the Penumbra texture that was provided at:
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics-programming-and-theory/dynamic-2d-soft-shadows-r2032

I got rid of the transparancy, and I wonder why it’s even there… we need nothing but greyscale (more or less intense shadow).

#14

Because at the time I was compositing the shadows into the framebuffer alpha, and doing it all with FF pipeline. A no-alpha greyscale version makes sense if you’re doing it with modern render-to-texture and shaders.

#15

That explains it :slight_smile: I also cleaned up the texture a bit. It has some jagged edges along the diagnal and a weird gradient along the right side.

#16

Great creepy atmosphere. My guess would be it involves zombies ;D

#17

Zombies are for the unimaginative. :point:

#18

True that. Hmm, how about blood-sucking undead pixies?

Anyways, I’m looking forward to see what comes out of this :smiley:

#19

Holy crap, it was you who wrote that article! :o

#20

I like the softer shadows of the first screenshot more, but with the performance gain I’d say the second screenshot is darn good.

Mike