A Day Of Light

Some good fixes today, including extending the dynamic lights to MEDIUM shader techniques and making them the default. The upshot is that users can drop in dynamic lights and see the results of them instantly which is exactly what you want for a new user.  The best news is that the addition of these light calculations only drained a few FPS from the already high 90's which in lee-man speak means it's as good as free :)

I have modified the GTTR (Get To The River) level to include a static and dynamic light, plus a new scripted entity so you can switch the dynamic light on and off. Really happy with the overall work done on lights, and aside from some gaps I am sure still exist, we are getting closer to a V1 for the lighting stuff.

I certainly need to include the grass in the dynamic lighting fun to blend it all together, but at over 90 fps with dynamic lights and pre-baked good definition shadows, and dynamic shadows for dynamic entities to the floor, I'd say V1.009 is certainly going to leave it's mark.

I know there are more effects I can do with the overhead lamp machine, such as lens flare, volumetric light rays, some subtle sound effects and maybe the occasional moth flying about the bulbs, but the mission has been and will remain the completion of the core elements of the product, which means drawing a line on this one for the time being and moving onto other urgent matters like memory management, overall system compatibility and the remaining missing features of the engine/editor.

Also, I added a new slider called Fog Intensity, which turns out to be pretty cool as it allows me to make atmospherics effects without washing out the distant mountains.  Notice how the characters (which are not presently using Fog Intensity) are washed out, but the rest of the scene is bathed in a soft fog.

I have another 20 minutes of coding, and then I am off to play a few racks of pool to unwind and study the miracle of Guinness up close.  Thursday will see the various shader tweaks applied and tested, plus a slew of additional critical fixes reported so far by the alpha testers.