Performance And Percentage Closer Filtering Fun

A good day of work today with the morning sorting out a further performance improvement which accelerated the IDE to a nice smooth speed, and I also fixed a bug which restored all dynamic shadows to the editing process.  The afternoon was spent adding dynamic shadows to all dynamic entities while in the pre-bake mode. This means we get the visual quality and speed of lightmaps, but when required we get dynamic shadows for things that move.

The last two hours have been spent battling with getting the shadows to filter nicely, and it's now 6PM and I've run out of time.  I dug out a few articles on Percentage Closer Filtering but each implementation differs from the way I stage and render my own shadows so it looks like I will need to completely absorb the concept and adapt to what I need.  The above shot uses a four sample depth read to fake alias around the edge of the shadow, but there still seems to be a problem with the per-pixel filtering coming out of the pixel shader, the size of the texel offset and perhaps some other icky mystery yet to land on me. I can announce that this new shadow shader, which is attached to the glass terrain system is very efficient and there was no noticeable performance penalty in adding a little PCF so that's good!  Work continues on this Tuesday perhaps, but as the quality of the shadow is technically another task, I will have to refer to the master list which has me on a tight schedule!

Reloaded Get Medieval On You

This was sent to me today and it's a great demonstration of Reloaded in action, and an awesome level design to boot:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LaB2J1YSM&feature=youtu.be

Virtual Reality in AGK V2

Also came across this one in my inbox too, and after I stopped grinning my face off it sank in that Android and AGK have come a long way.  Notice the 360 degree freedom of the cardboard VR, even Oculus DK1 could not do that :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD05Iwh1ZDM&feature=youtu.be