So, I added shader-based fog, and some half-assed sky ripped from an earlier project. It does make quite a big step towards turning this into a more plausible looking project when you have sky.
Overall, I’m pleased with the appearance of the terrain, at least from a lighting perspective. I don’t think it’ll be necessary to do anything more with normals or lighting in general — horizon mapping/ambient occlusion lighting is more than effective in that area, and the shader fog adds depth to the scene. The sky will need to be fancier with regards to having a, you know, sun in it, and I do want to vary the overall lighting and sky coloring as you look towards or away from the sun (a neat trick Ace Combat 4 uses to fake a HDR-esque effect on PS2 hardware.) And it would be nice if I could round off those shadows somehow… But still, lookin’ pretty good.
The one annoyance: This 3x3 terrain tile environment used to run at 60 fps. It doesn’t any more. I’ll want to take another look at the shader efficiency and see if anything can be done there, because in an ideal world there’s a lot more I’d like to draw, such as billboarded ground clutter.
Notes
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mayflystudio posted this
