BGE Candy - Area lights

I have a new PC computer and this is a milestone for the development for BGE and my racing game. Finally I can to some more quality screen capture, and the first ones to show you are - area lights!



As soon as I saw Arkano22`s implementation of area lights in gamedev.net forums I knew Blender must have it in GE! This is a slightly modified version of Arkano22 technique, the biggest differences are the smoother light falloff and specular reflection glossiness variations based of the reflecting surface properties and distance, and of course - the texture support!

video showing how to set-up them:



win32 build: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/11542084/Blender246AreaBuild.zip

//status update 03 & RGP day 6

it`s been a while, but no worries - the racing game project and BGE Candy is progressing. Slowly though as the spare time passes with friends and grasping the last summer days before I go back to France next week. After that aside from the job I am fully focusing again on RGP and BGE Candy.

RGP day 6

After a few days of intensive tinkering with vector math, I finally found a perfect solution to get barycentric coordinates of the track (I explained about this coordinate concept in the previous post)

I found rayCast() function in Blender`s Python API which also fetches UV coordinates of the ray intersection point. So now all I need is to UV map the race track, shoot a ray from vehicle down to track`s vertical tangent and voila we get vehicles relative position on the track.

I also made a simple racetrack trajectory recording system that records position and speed of the car at current segment. When it is recorded it saves it to a list and AI linearly interpolates between the points.

That`s it for now.

a new game project

while working on "BGE Candy" I realized I need a game I can apply the new features on. The idea of the game has been brewing for a while in my head now and I feel it is mature enough to start developing it further. I have not been sketching for few years already, so my hand needs some training..
Here are three first drawings, you can guess the genre from these already :)

(took me few hours each)







I will try to keep the visual style of the game as clean as possible using mostly gradients, nuanced lighting, atmospheric effects, vertical shapes and simple geometry.
The art of Syd Mead, Sparth (Nicolas Bouvier),  Rainart (Sebastien Larroude), Vyle (David Levy), John Wallin Liberto and other awesome concept artists will keep me inspired :)

I have already done BGE version of Simon Wallner's sky implementation originally from 2002 GDC Presentation by Naty Hoffman and Arcot J. Preetham. HERE is the link to implementation details and even a demo. It will take care of lighting and atmospheric effects:





..maybe I can finally finish a game I have started
I will screen cast the whole developing process from now on.

BGE Candy status update 01

It has been a busy week with real life stuff, so I am not progressing very fast.

Last 2 days I have been working on environment reflection mapping coordinates. Blender currently have only view-space reflection coords reflect(viewvec,viewnormal);  and of course that is not nearly enough for a proper IBL (Image Based Lighting) setup.

So first I implemented world space reflection coordinates so the environment texture is world oriented.
Then I have implemented 2 most widely used mapping algorithms - "Angular" or "Sphere" mapping and "Equirectangular" or "Spherical Panorama" mapping but sometimes also called "Blinn/Newell Latitude-Longitude" mapping.
The third and most widely used one - "Cube mapping" should be already possible as a built-in function in OpenGL, but I have to figure out how to make it work in BGE.

Same mapping techniques can be applied not only on "Reflection" coordinates, but also on "Object" and "Normal" coordinates, which means that besides doing reflection and specular reflection, the environment mapping can also be used for texturing the object or doing image-based diffuse lighting.

these are the 3 environment map textures:

"sphere" or "angular" map

"equirectangular" or "spherical panorama" or "Blinn/Newell latitude-longitude" map

"cube" map

All 3 of them does the same job, but with different results. I found a nice article about all three of env-map approaches explained in detail HERE

I'm going to vacation for 2 weeks, so no BGE Candies till then..

BGE Candy branch

From now on I am a part of Blender developers team. Together with Matthew Dietel aka mokazon we started a new Blender development branch called "BGE Candy" with main goal to fix broken and add missing and new (mostly visual) features to Blender Game Engine.

I am quite excited about this, I even made our own logo and splash screen (with "sweet", "eye", "candy" and "Blender" in mind)



so here is the list of stuff currently done and yet to be done.

done:
• SSS (subsurface scattering) material
• rectangular area lights
• logic connector highlighting in UI

in progress:
• parallax mapping
• volumetric point & spot lights
• real-time composite nodes

planned:
• volumetric shadowing for volumetric lights
• environment cube-mapping
• scrolling texture coordinates in Blender material editor
• timer node in material node editor
• world normals in material node editor
• extra uniform inputs for 2D GLSL filters
• extra 2D GLSL filters
• Sky and Atmosphere
• fog volumes

BGE Candy branch thread in BlenderArtists HERE