QUOTE
To make one point clear: I just want to remind all who expect high-end 3d-games, that it is lot of work to do. It is much more work then a puzzle game. I don't want to offend anyone.
Yea, I agree.
Anyway, not that anyone cares but It'll be my top priority to develope homebrew SGX games when i get a Pandora, though not neccessarily 3D. At the moment 3D artwork is probably beyond my capabilities. Initially they'll be small, but pretty, minigames... until i get a decent grounding. Then i'll write a 2D lighting engine, like my fixed function dx8 one:
I'll probably try to make a multiplayer Top Down shooter with the lighting engine.
I hope others, are similary motivated in regards to the SGX. [/rant]
Yep, those shadows look pretty cool. Although I noticed each object only casts a single shadow and not one for each light, which isn't unsual for games, hehe. Are they dynamic? or static? Judging by their hardness I say they are realtime dynamic shadows
.
Most of those shadows look pretty hard, with no penumbra region, but I do see one with a soft edge.
The game seems completly top down, and none of the objects have any perspective, so maybe the objects don't have any depth which makes me wonder about the shadow technique a bit. Anyhows all the shadows look consistently sharp and because the objects look to all be the shape of basic primitives makes me think they are using some form of volume shadows. But I dunno as I can't see if objects are able to cast shadows on each other or just the ground plane. If they are only cast on the ground plane then this would help performance alot. The other thing that makes me unsure is that I think it takes alot more performance to produce soft shadows on shadow volumes.
So yea I dunno, I can see alot of potential for optimisations and the possible use of many techniques for shadows in such a game and so I find it hard to figure how they are done just from these screenshots.
Hmm, if you actually knew the number of lights in a scene then an indicator to the technique used may be found by looking at the number of light renders (shown in top left of screenshots), but I dunno.
Is that game completly top down? where the view never changes? if so then I guess you could come up with a nice fast scheme for doing nice shadows, otherwise things could be tricky to do fast. Well depends on alot of things.
Hmm, if the shadows/lights are static then I guess they are just using lightmaps, otherwise they could be using shadow mapping or shadow volumes, which require a bit of power and even the pandora would struggle for a decent amount of shadows. Well you would probably get better performance with the shadow mapping technique for shadows, assuming the gfx supports doing them in hardware.
Hmm, but their are alot of issues with graphical artifacts or anti-aliasing and such when it comes to shadow mapping as it is done by rendering the scene from the viewpoint of each light and when it comes to rendering from the camera you transform each fragment into the coordinate space of the light (I guess you could do it the other way around also, hehe) and check if the value in the zbuffer is closer to the light, if it is then the fragment will be in shadow, so it depends on the precision of the zbuffer, although there are alot of techniques to improve things.
Anyhows I myself would like to create a realtime raytracer for the pandora
, then ya get really cool shadows and such, although it can take alot of performance to get nice soft shadows with raytracing as you need to spawn a heap more rays for this, but nevermind. One thing raytracing has to advantage on the pandora is that it has a smaller screen
, and as the dot pitch of the screen appears quite small I would try and get away with making the resolution half of the natural resolution, which I think will still look fine.
cyas
