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Awesome! Any idea when it will be pushed to the server for us to play with?

This sounds great.

Awesome news, I cannot wait to try this.

Fantastic! Well done Josh.

Great news

Dynamic lighting is usually dynamic, and baked lighting is usually static. I'm not sure what this qualifies as

 

 

Dynaked lighting?

 

 

Great idea, nice one Josh

Realtime baked shadowmaps?

the 420 maps

wow - very good approach...

Normally you think of baked lighting as, you have a long processing step that is done before the game runs, then you display the results and it is fast. You think of dynamic lighting as, okay, it will be slow because it has to update each frame, but it looks good. It's interesting that our approach has turned into, "display the results each frame, and only update it when it is absolutely necessary".

..i guess, its still available option to turn off/on shadows from light source(point/spot) regardless this new approach taken..

yep, it looks like it according to what he wrote in the previous blog entry in the comments section:

Previous blog entry

Most probably the best feature of Leadwerks. No engine beats that. Love it, kills me that I don't a freaking second of time.

Awesome job!

Add: Isn't this worth a 2.31? Anyway, just my thought.

Or an addition to this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_mapping

Sorry, third comment but: Why not Directional Lights? I barely use point lights, I get everything from dir.

Directional lights usually have to be recalculated every single frame, because the camera is usually in motion. One technique I want to try with directional lights is one of those skewing techniques. They are glitchier than cascaded shadow maps, but if something with reasonable results can be implemented, it will only require one render of the scene, instead of the three that CSM requires.

Delighted

Sounds very promising

@Josh: If it isn't too long to explain, how are Directional Lights different from the point lights in terms of camera movement? Unless it has to do with the actual positioning.

 

Wonders: Is it possible to glitch a point light with a distance and a radius so big it would practically act as a directional light? i.e. Sun-earth proportions.

No, you would not have enough video memory or texture bandwidth.

 

Directional lights are very specialized because you cannot possibly make a texture big enough to shade the whole scene, with a decent resolution. The whole challenge of directional lights is to use more pixels in the foreground and fewer in the background. The two main ways of doing this are to have several renders of the scene at different resolutions, or to render the shadow with a skewed matrix that uses more pixels closer to the camera.

 

There's little I can do to optimize directional lights, as they are very much a brute force technique. Far Cry 2 seems to use a skewing technique that doesn't seem to have visual errors, but of course they are going to go to great lengths to hide any errors their technique produces by not using certain sun angles. If I can devise a decent skewing technique, it could mean one shadow render of the scene instead of three, but I am not sure I have ever seen an error-free implementation.

 

..i guess, its still available option to turn off/on shadows from light source(point/spot) regardless this new approach taken..

Yes, but you have some additional options that will produce real time shadows at virtually no cost.

Sounds pretty cool