Hi everyone,
I have recentley changed the name of my previous lighting engine as I found an already existing engine with the same name.

I have been very busy over the last few months but I have continued working on the engine.

In this topic, I will list my progress on the engine as well as new additions and versions.

You can expect to see this engine (v1.0) before the end of the year.

-Mike-

How about making a topic when you _actually_ have something to show?

Engine status:
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November 16th, 2008
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-a new Omni Directional lighting system has been implemented. Dynamic lights can now cast shadows in all directions instead of only a 3D cone.
-support for unlimited dynamic lights has been added. Lights are now automatically turned on and off via an automatic light detection system that uses a KD tree architecture in consort with Gamestudio's BSP engine.
-the maximum number of views to be used at any given miment to render shadows can now be set with the MaxRender variable. There is no limit to the number of shadow cating lights, however, each light is a drin on the gpu and can dramatically lower framerate. Make sure to limit the MaxRender variable to conserve preformance, especially in complex scenes.
-each light's shadow map can now be retrieved using the GetShadowMap(Light*) function which returns a bmap pointer to the shadow map buffer.
-Percentage Closer Soft Shadows has been implemented.
-Sunlight has now been improved. You no longer need to create a light and update its position above the camera. The engine will automatically adjust the views to provide a large* area of shadow around the camera.
-*The SunQuality variable has been implemented. This variable controls the quality of dynamic sunlight. This must be between 1 and 10 where 1 is low quality and 10 is the highest quality. When set at 10, the sunlight has a resolution ratio of 1:1 per screen pixel at all times.

Here is the manual so far by the way (it is not even close to finish however):

FireFly Lighting 1.0
-Michael Auerbach 1008-

In the FireFly Engine 1.0, there are 3 kinds of lights that can be easily implemented into your gamestudio project:

Omni-directional : casts light in all directions

Spotlight : casts light in a cone shape in one direction

Directional light : casts light in a single direction as sunlight or a non-point light source


Each light source can have any of several variables and flags checked to customize each light’s properties:

Shadows : if true, this light will render a shadow map. See sub properties below:

ShadowRes : select a resolution for the shadow map. An integer between 1 and 10 where 10 is the highest quality. The

default is 5.

ShadowBlur : FireFly 1.0 support high-quality Percentage Closer Filtering for all shadow maps. This property can be

modified to control how blurry a shadow should be. This must be an integer between 0 and 10 where 10 is the most blurry. When

set to 0, shadow blurring is shut off.

ShadowCol : One extraordinary feature of FireFly is the “pure” lighting equation. By default, shadows will equate to

a value of 0.0f light from the light source. The result is a realistic rendering that, however, requires lights to be placed

abundantly as to influence other light’s shadows. However, as this is often computationally expensive, a simple “ambient” value

can be set to override the standard 0.0f shadow value. It is recommended that this is not changed.
NOTE: the deferred shading algorithm ensures that the 0.0f shadow value will not automatically clamp the final pixel value

to 0.

Color : a 3 floating point or char (0-255) value to represent rgb color. The color is augmented with the range and HDR

light strengths as shown below.

Range : this represents the light’s “range” and is virtually identical to light range in the standard Gamestudio engine.

Longer ranges will provide a larger attenuation area when lighting your world.

Gamma(HDR) : this value represents the actual brightness or strength of the light. This value is used in the HDR

calculations and affects the scenes “mood.” For example, the HDR values for a couple of indoor lights might be set to a low value

and an outdoor sunlight set to a very high gamma. When the camera moves from the indoor lighting into the sunlight, the indoor

area will become very dark and the outside will become a normalized light value.


Lights also have basic properties:

Position : 3D World coordinates in Gamestudio x,y,z format. These are automatically converted to x,z,y format

(DirectX) for convenience

Pan : Light direction for spotlight and directional lights.

Arc : width of light cone for spotlights (between 1 and 120)

? did you really respond before I finished posting ?

happy birthday Michael_Schwarz

lol, yeah happy birthday Michael!

good stuff Foxfire! i'm keen to see it in action, but it all sounds really good so far.

julz

Sounds interesting, but after reading all that text, I would love to see it in action or at least some screenshots showing the features...

How about making a topic when you _actually_ have something to show?

guess what, he hasn't...