Plan for Brett Fattori

Yet another update to get y'all excited -- I know I am... The shadow work is going along smoothly (well, smoother) now, and I'm tackling items on my punch list. So far, I've taken care of two biggies that I was worried about:

* Animated shadows
* Point lights casting shadows

The animated shadows were more of a revelation than finding a bug in my code. I was using some borrowed code, and although it's correct -- it isn't correct for my needs. There's a set of verts called "initialVerts" and they correspond to the "initial" pose of the character (I'm assuming) and would never animate. The list I should have been looking at was the "verts" list (duh!) When I hooked this up, the results were...

Well, you be the judge

Late last night I got home from a semi-successful darts night, and wondered how hard it would be to test point lights (using Melv May's awesome fxLight). Well, turned out to be simpler than I thought. However, some examination into the code revealed that I wasn't properly initializing some structures to allow multiple shadows from multiple lights. Spent another 30 minutes on that and now it's working. It brings up some interesting points about how to get colored lights, partially lit shadows, and overlapping volumes. Anyways, just wanted to keep y'all in the loop.

More pictures when I get home tonight and can snap some.

- Brett

PS: Almost forgot to mention!! Framerate is up.. wayyy up. The animation shows 18fps, but that seems to be Fraps overhead. Without fraps recording, if I have 5 "complex" shadowed objects (like the Orcs) on screen, it drops to 27-30 fps. If it's just my player and some simple shadowed objects, framerate tends to sit around 60-70 fps... The reason, silhouettes are much simplified and silhouette caching improves performance as well.