Visual fluffs

As my other post is waffly and dull, I thought I'd post some equally dull screenshots.

First, we have soft shadows and a general framerate improvement. I found I wasn't using buffer objects for my mesh streams (bad!), switched to position-only streams for shadow rendering when possible and changed the shadow buffer format to rgba16f. All this has reduced the frame time hugely, even after I started adding more crazy stuff. For comparison, a similar scene with blurred shadows was previously in the single-figure frame rate. Ouch. Still vastly too slow at the moment of course, but moving in the correct direction.

The soft shadows are done with a simple 3x3 guassian blur over the cube. It has errors on the cube edges for some reason, as can be seen in the nice black line across the lower right quarter of the image, but even with fairly low res maps and a small kernel the reduction in aliasing makes things look nicer. Hooray!


The second screenshot shows a half-finished unsmoothed SSAO post process. It's using a deferred rendering setup, with a few render targets for diffuse, normal, depth and lighting information at the moment, although for this screenshot only the depth info is used of course. Lots to do here, and I'd like to get a scene with more interesting visual fluff to show off the AO effect better...

Anyway, hopefully that helped balance up the wordiness of the previous post.