What seemed like a simple issue to solve (lack of performance on low-end card because of ambient occlusion) ended up being much more complicated than expected! So, yesterday I decided to add a new system to be able to customize the level of ambient occlusion (in terms of resolution)… I added the system, but while […]
I wasn’t very happy with the way the camera behaved when the player got occluded by nearby voxels… Sometimes it works nice, but most of the time it’s unsettling from a gameplay perspective… What’s happening is that when the camera is occluded, it will zoom in the player and then zoom out when it’s no […]
Today I started adding the rendering effects to the editor, since I’ll need them to build some stuff for the teaser trailer I’m working on… First I had to get it working again properly (a lot of changes since I last used it), but that didn’t take long… Then, time to add the ambient occlusion […]
Finished the ambient occlusion system, in OpenGL as well… Before: After: Also arrived to the conclusion that I can’t really use the ambient occlusion to make the sprite shadows (they’re too small to actually impact the occlusion properly)… So I’ll have to use either the shadow system (still under consideration) or the decal system (waiting […]
Today I didn’t have much time to work on the game, so I basically just tweaked the ambient occlusion parameters and saw where they went… First experiment was to see if better filtering would help the algorithm… Of course, the filtering improves the effect, but visually it doesn’t add anything, so I’ll keep the low-cost […]
…with the results of the ambient occlusion in practice… It works fine now, but it’s extremely difficult to notice, which makes this whole endeavor kind of pointless… The effect is clearly there (note the corners and the far edges of the shelves), but it doesn’t help much with the whole lack of contrast I wanted […]
After a long battle with almost every single line of code of the screenspace effect system, I managed to get something resembling ambient occlusion! Now I need to add a blur filter to remove the artifacts and I can run tests on the actual scenes, see how good they look, and to see if I […]
Found some of the problems of the system yesterday, but the results are still terrible: It was inverted on this screenshot due to lack of correction of texture coordinates to screen coordinates. Anyway, the problem I’m having is reconstructing the camera-relative position of the pixels, based on the depth and field-of-view… Something is going wrong […]
..and it didn’t go very well… I can distinguish some features (if I move around), but it seems… wrong… It’s like only the part in the middle Y of the screen is having ambient occlusion computed more or less correctly, and I’ve been looking at this shader for almost one hour and I can’t figure […]
For the SSAO, we have to compute a basis for the points to be able to do the random sampling… My linear algebra was a bit rusted, but I found the Gram-Schmidt process to be useful for this. Basically it creates a geometric orthogonal from vectors, which define a local space, in my case aligned […]