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A good day of work today with more progress on the lighting system, screenshot second one below.  Also continued having fun thinking up the new name for the product for our Steam launch.  You may have read the latest forum thread on this but the headline titles for this week have been Hyperion, Scorch, Titan, Breeze and Dark, with the addition of Viper during our call today. We're also been playing with dropping 'Game Creator' in favor of 'Maker', 'Kit' and 'Engine'. Give me coding any day, thinking up new names is HARD!  The hunt for the perfect name continues.

The above is what I started with this morning, with the obvious issue being the total shadow under the fallen fence gate. This was due to the light mapper not detecting semi-transparent textures in the process.

My task today was to get my shadows looking prettier, adding ambient occlusion back in, allowing semi-transparent textures to cast semi-transparent shadows, ensuring the whole Escape level can be processed, solving the edge artifacts and making it all blend together.  Apart from wasting four hours finding out why D3DXLoadSurfaceFromSurface was not working, everything else went smoothly. For DX coders out there, I must share the above solution. It seems you cannot use the Surface function to copy a compressed video memory texture to an uncompressed system memory texture. Any combination of the above fails. What you have to do is create a system memory texture and directly load the compressed texture into it using D3DXLoadSurfaceFromFile. Hopefully this little pearl can save you four hours of your life on day!

As you can see, the new lighting system brings out the depth of the building features and adds subtle shadows where required. It only costs a few extra frames and replaces the very crude LOWEST shadows, but gives a much higher resolution shadow, and even here the resolution of the lightmaps have been limited to 512 pixels wide. This can be increased to 2048 or even 4096, that is, once I have solved the management of the memory used by the light mapper. You find though that most games keep the pre-baked lightmapping relatively low resolution and subtle, mainly to conserve aforementioned memory. I have not yet batched the static geometry which might yield a return of these frames, and most likely gain some too.

Also bear in mind the above buildings and objects are not using any normals, specular or other per pixel refinement, just basic diffuse + lightmap. Hopefully when I add in specular and normals, the flattish surfaces will bump a little to create some more fidelity or they are too subtle and can be left out of all but the closest objects, we will see.

Next on my list is to squash the whole lightmapping process so it does not take up quite so much system memory.  It was originally written and tested against small objects, not whole levels and as a result the implementation proceeds to create allocations for the entire process at the start, AND creates more memory on the fly as it goes. Pretty hungry now, and it becomes positively ravenous when you increase the light mapping resolution quality.  My initial idea is to break the job up into 200MB or so of work, process that, then move onto the next 200MB using the previously freed memory. Might add a few seconds of set up to the whole thing, but allows light mapping to happen inside Test Game which is ideally where I want it.  Before that however, I shall spend some of Wednesday tracing through the 1338 static objects from The Escape level and investigate why they are collectively eating 500MB of system memory. It might be perfectly acceptable when you consider the addition of collision geometry for the ray caster, holding areas for the light accumulation buffers and the system memory copies of the transparent textures, but it's always worth checking out memory allocations of that magnitude.  It also means I am one step closer to starting my performance work, which I am very much looking forward to!