Linear-space lighting is the second big change that has been made to the rendering pipeline for HPL3. Working in a linear lighting space is the most important thing to do if you want correct results.
It is an easy and inexpensive technique for improving the image quality. Working in linear space is not something the makes the lighting look better, it just makes it look correct.
Second part of the scripting overview.
I just recorded a little clip about how scripting works in HPL3. In this film I just talk about the very basic elements of scripting and will follow up with another movie were I talk about some more complex features.
For a couple of months now I have, on and off, worked on some basic tech aspects for the engine. Everytime I was done with one of these I thought it was among the hardest things I would do for the new engine, yet the next feature as always proved more challenging. Terrain geometry was harder to implement than sun shadows, terrain texturing harder than geometry, and so on. Implementing the script system is no different.
After writing the previous post on pre-pass lighting I started doing some tests, to see how it compares to the old deferred renderer. The results that I got where pretty interesting, so thought I might as well share them. Also note that this post might be a bit more technical than the previous.
Progress on the new engine, HPL3, is coming along nicely and recently I changed the core rendering system into something called Pre-pass lighting. This switch has been made for a number of reasons, but before I got into that and what pre-pass lighting exactly is, I need to explain how we did it back in the “old days”.
Now I am pretty much done with the first major feature for HPl3, the engine that will power our upcoming (and so far super secret) game. This feature is global sunlight along with shadows, a feature not implemented previously. And since it is now implemented you can bet it will an important feature for the secret game 😉
