SDK suggestion for lighting

[tve]

I would like to see some minimalistic access to adjust lighting. For now I have modified SurfaceTileRenderer with the following. It would be nice to have a setAmbientLighting method or something like that....

    private float[] light_colors1 = { 3.0f, 3.0f, 3.0f, 1.0f};
    private java.nio.FloatBuffer light_col_ambient = java.nio.FloatBuffer.wrap( light_colors1 );
                //lighting 
            gl.glEnable(GL.GL_LIGHTING);

            gl.glLightfv(GL.GL_LIGHT1,GL.GL_AMBIENT, light_col_ambient);

            gl.glLightModelf(GL.GL_LIGHT_MODEL_AMBIENT,1.0f);
            gl.glEnable(GL.GL_LIGHT1);

            gl.glTexEnvi(GL.GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL.GL_TEXTURE_ENV_MODE, GL.GL_COMBINE);

[fabrizio.giudici]

Can you post a screenshot? I'm curious about the result.

[tve]

Originally Posted by fabrizio.giudici

Can you post a screenshot? I'm curious about the result.

Sure, here is a post I made before. The lighing with settings of about 1.0f I think....

[tve]

Maybe a more flexible approach would be to implement the multi-texturing for tiles in a fragment shader as the comments in the source code elude to. I tried doing this with some success. I could pass in a sampler2D and get the tiles to draw, but I could not figure out how to the get alpha masking to work via a second texture unit. It does make drawing borders around the tiles extremely easy. This would also allow all kinds of really cool stuff like real-time color interpolated overlays like surface temperature for example.

After thinking about this more, it seems like just simple control over ambient lighting is not enough. For night simulations, you might want to have some kind of directional lighting for example.

I'm not suggesting that this should all be implemented in the core, but It seems like there has to be some clean way of implementing these things without requiring the SDK user to modify the core code.

Just some thoughts...

[patmurris]

You need normals for the terrain vertices to get proper lighting/shading.
Not done yet.

[tve]

Originally Posted by patmurris

You need normals for the terrain vertices to get proper lighting/shading.
Not done yet.

I don't think you would need normals for what I have suggested so far, but aside from that, I guess I'm just pointing out the need to modify the SurfaceTileRenderer code to do any kind of lighting manipulation. Shaders would provide the most flexibility. I think just providing a mechanism to install a shader for the TileRenderer and maybe an example of how to implement the alpha masking in a shader would be enough

[patmurris]

It sounds very interresting... i should look into shaders
What version of GPU shaders support would you need for this ?

[tve]

deleted

[patmurris]

Originally Posted by tve

I'm just learning about all this myself. Modern video cards are definitely a technology to marvel at These procedural shaders are just the tip of the iceberg.

Talk about it! Nvidia is starting to offer supercomputer boards. In a few years from now we may well have realtime raytracing.

btw, I looked at quite a few of the plug-ins you have done for WW... impressive! I'm not a dotnet guy, so I can't really follow, but you have been busy!

Can you tell i love WW ? Hopefully i will port a lot of it to WWJ, in a way or an other. Or maybe some other WW enthusiast will...

I'll have a look at your shader test bench... after i retire that aging GeForce4 MX i'm using. I'm a bit lagging on the hardware these days

[what_nick]

Playing with shaders again not sure how to attach a texture to a named uniform sampler.