Lightnings and render techniques

Yet another update:

* Introduction of material techniques
* Lightning bolt effect
* Surfaces can now custom shadow material instead of default. Just add technique with the name "shadow" to the base surface material (see palm_bark or palm_leaf in default.lib for example)

* [fix] Vegetation shadows
* [fix] Fixed bug with display modes
* [fix] Bounding boxes of some objects were invalid

* [example] Lightning bolt

The most important thing is the first point i.e. material techniques. Now material doesn't directly contain RenderPass objects but instead RenderTechnique's (similar to DX FXs or OGRE for instance). For now technique is just a simple object but I plan to use it for some materials LOD later on and yet it helped me to solve some problem with shadows casted by objects animated using vertex shaders (see palm_bark material for the example of custom shadowing routine).

By default the first technique is set as active (i.e. one used in rendering) but you can change it using Material::setActiveRenderTechnqiue(RenderTechnique* _technique) or providing index.

There are besides some fixes of course and addition of new example (lightning bolts) and new effect lightnings. You can see it in action below:



and below:



There are still some tweaks to do but in general it is working ok. You can read about the algorithm on my blog. I also recently provided detailed description of Virtual File System there.

A lot of changes

- very basic sound support (using FMOD but it is sufficient to provide simple wrapper to use something else)
- it is now possible to listen to collision events
- night vision effect
- improved bump mapping effects
- added some mixing comments

- [fix] it is no longer possible to add two child nodes with same name
- [fix] factories are no longer registered in enumerators in constructors... that was just foolish!
- [fix] engine is started after displaying config window... not before
- [fix] static shadows fix
- [fix] fixed bug in thermal vision effect
- [fix] many minor bug fixes

- [example] user can now control SSAO effect in SSAO sample (for me radius ~0.2 and range ~50.0 looks best)
- [example] sound example presenting use of much more than 3D sounds... check it for some interesting nGENE features :)

Virtual File System support

From now on nGENE Tech has Virtual File System built-in. To ease building resource files there is provided a command line tool named ArchiveBuilder.exe (you will find it in the nGENE/bin/release folder) which typical usage is as follows:

Usage: archivebuilder [directory] [target file] [-c OPTIONAL compression]

You can also build archives from within code (see the VFS example for details on how to do that).

VFS supports compression (using Burrows-Wheeler Transform + Move-To-Front + Run-Length Encoding + Huffman Coding algorithms) and is pretty transparent for the programmer. See this post on nGENE forums or the VFS example for more details and example of usage.

Besides to make debugging a bit easier I changed configuration of nGENE demos.

Another change is that you can now follow nGENE improvements on Twitter (see widget on this page).

New demo and tutorial

New demo (presenting god rays in nGENE) and new tutorial (about joints) are available. There is a movie from the first one:



I hope you like it.

Small fixes and improvements

This time, screenshots only. Still far away from ok but believe me the changes and fixes are numerous :)

Bug fixes and tech demo update

Last two weeks I spent mainly on improving existing features and fixing various bugs. Here is how updated nGENE Tech Demo looks now. Probably I'll use it once again in the future to make another trailer but it is still not the time to do this.


As you can see grass rendering has been slightly improved. It is also much more efficient now as I wrote on my devlog. To makie it look this way I suggest turning SSAO on (F7 by default).

Besides I improved several things regarding shadows and finished working on God rays (they contained a nasty artifact).

A lot of changes and bug fixes

I promised to commit to SVN repository more frequently now and it seems I manage to do it. In the last few days quite a lot of changes (more than 10 commits!!!) have been made:

• many bug fixes related to shadows rendering (there were some issues with both directional and point lights) and some general improvements regarding them (e.g. you can change shadow density and shadow resolution on a per light basis),
• light-shafts (God rays) are working almost properly,
• added all missing files,
• I'm busy working on GUI,
• and much more...

Below you can see light-shafts in action:

How they are actually done you can read on my personal devlog.

There is also Google Group dedicated to making nGENE Tech a better engine. The idea, originally by Biovf from the forums, is to separate talks about contributing from talks about using nGENE. Here is the link.