Hey,
Iridium far from dead. Everyday, I spend between 2 and 8 hours working on the engine.
Some general news:
//Instant Radiosity//
-Instant Radiosity has been removed from the primary features list!
I know this is disapointing but after hours of research and development, I have concluded (and my professors agree) that real-time radiosity is simply too slow for a video game. Over 70% of rendering time is spent calculating this term alone. Also, because it is an estimation, models with high detail geometry cause a lot of unavoidable noise (true with any algorithem). The algorithem is best suited to static geometry, or simple geometry.
The good news is that the feature CAN be enabled for those who have a crazy graphics card or who want to just see GI in a game. The feature is disabled by default and is purely experimental due to its extravegent cost.
//Deferred Rendering//
-a new system allowing for 2 methods of deferred rendering is now implemented.
-One method is the traditional "old" style that renders each light as a mesh and only fills pixels with light from their surrounding mesh. This means that dozens or hundreds of small lights cost the same as one large light.
-The other method is the method I have been using so far which is to simply render lights to every pixel within the screen space view as a post processing effect. This has the advantage that specular reflections are not bound within an artificial range of the light and that an additional rendering pass can be skipped.
-These two methods can also be enable together to provide a unique lighting system that has advantages of both methods. We refer to the mesh bounded lights as "detail" lights. Hundreds of detail lights can be rendered dynamically without shadows at very high framerates (60 fps). Use normal lights for extra high quality or large area lighting.
//Atmospheric Lighting//
-Lighting is no longer limited to surfaces. All air volumes are rendered with lighting from surrounding sources. This enables side effects such as atmospheric scattering, chromatic dispersion, and volumetric light shafts (god rays) all generated procedurally.
//Bump Mapping//
-The level of surface detail generation is now variable and can be automatically assigned based on GPU performance. Bump Mapping, Parallax Mapping, and Relief Mapping are the 3 possible values (listed from fastest to slowest).
//Light-Entity synergy//
-Lights can now be manipulated using actions. All lights can effectivley be treated as entities making interactions between the two extremely simple and intuitive.
//Advanced Object and Light Culling//
-Objects and lights are now culled using the GPU. Objects behind other objects and lights that are not visible are culled. This process is dynamic and occurs every frame. This does not replace the need for bsp trees, but improves performance greatly by only rendering polygons and lights that are visible and not occluded.
I will post more updates as they become available -Michael-
http://www.groundtacticsgame.com/Alienware m17x R Custom laptop
specs:
Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad CPU Q9300
2x Nvidia 280GTX 2GB vram
6GB ddr3 memory@ 1333Mhz
512GB SSD
1200p 17' screen
runs Crysis Warhead on max settings at 1200p at 90 fps
