Wednesday Was Animated

A Nice New Video

I think you will like today's video, direct from the art hub we call Mark, and a massive reveal about just how capable the Reloaded enemy characters are going to be compared to the classic character.  Rather than twitter on, the video does a great job of giving you a thorough overview:

As you can see, amazing animation and when coupled with some really intense AI control you will be hard pressed to even find these guys let alone shoot one.  As I say, can't wait to get started but priorities place my firmly in level engine land.

Level Engine Land

I am hotting up to the idea of deferred rendering (and cascade shadows for the outside) which of course leaves the issue of shadows on the inside. One of the links provided to me from the comments section called DeepDeferred made use of what I suspect was geometry shader based shadow volumes to cast shadows based on a single point light in the scene. It was quite dramatic and reminded me of the updated Doom 3 when it first came out.

The advantage of baked lights is that you can have fifty shadows cast and crossing all over the place to create a really rich detailed scene. As much as lights contribute to a scene, it's really the shadows that make everything pop, and as some users quite rightly pointed out, deferred rendering does not mean shader rendering, just surface lighting. Shadows is a whole new thought process, so we will leave that particular item alone for a while and let it brew!

Signing Off

I am now at the stage of adding my first deferred rendering attempt to the instance stamp engine prototype, and although I have a grasp of the theory it's not until you code and run do you get a sense for what it is.  I will warn the world in advance that the assets used will be legacy artwork, and not the final Reloaded segment and entity art.  It sounds like the majority of you want to see deferred rendering go in, and who am I to fly in the face of what the customer wants, so deferred it is.  Now you can argue among yourself exactly how we handle those fifty real-time shadows ;)