Weekend Research

Work

Did a little research over the weekend on the subject of lighting models in relation to performance. There is an argument for implementing something like a cluster deferred lighting renderer which has the potential to reduce the 'lighting/shadow cost' which was the route cause of the present performance issues. Alas such an implementation (done correctly) will require an upgrade to DirectX11 and a new deferred rendering pipeline which combined would take a few months of dedicated coding. That is, nothing else would get done while this work happened, and the kicker would be that some users will not even notice the difference, aside from some frame rate changes and the benefit of adding thousands of lights without a performance hit.  It is a thankless task that has more long-term benefits than short term goodies.

I expect everyone wants performance yesterday so will not be willing to sanction a six month sabbatical while Lee buggers off to re-write the entire graphics engine. To that end, the smart course is to finish the optimization work on the DX9 engine and get it as fast as it needs to go, so that when we do upgrade to DX11, we still have a very good fall-back for those users still using Windows XP and Vista (DX11 won't work on those OS platforms I think). Moreover, DX11.2 only works with Windows 8.2. See the pattern ;)

Anyhoo, the reason for my quick weekend blog is to write down a small idea I had about the shadow system I am working on. Right now the fast entity shader (LOWEST) does not use the dynamic terrain shadow texture due to the relatively low resolution texture and the lack of any meta data in the shadow texture to work out whether to shade entities at higher elevations (i.e. the roof gets a shadow when it should not).

My simple (and fastish) idea is to feed in the texture holding the height map data of the terrain, which will give each XZ coordinate a world space height position. I then write how 'deep' the shadow pixel in the dynamic terrain shadow texture is instead of just black/white. From these two pieces of information, I can work out whether a single world space position of the entity is in or out of the shadow being cast.  I would have to increase the texture size of the dynamic shadow texture to get a better finish, and there is a concern that the extra per-pixel calculations and texture read might create some drag factor in terms of performance, but the theory is sound in my mind. It's not a lot of work and it would mean entities get 'almost' true shadowing, just as terrain and grass currently receives.

I have all day Monday to work on this, plus the other ideas I have, and the big job of getting it all on an Ultrabook as my meeting is over 100 miles away from my main machine. It's a good test however as GDC is even further and this trial run will be very revealing.

Play

And now, I will forget all that stuff and see if I can boot up Thief and continue my pilfering in the dark and rain soaked streets of what looks like London. It's possible they put Big Ben in there for the 'pending' UK tax breaks. It will be interesting to see UK developed titles in the next few years coming out with all manner of Britishness crow-barred in. The next time you play a fast paced zombie-horror blood-splat gore-fest shooter, and have to consume 'cream teas and buttered scones while affecting a cockney accent' to restore your health, you can blame the politicians of Europe! Interesting times!!