Light volumes and more

I've not been able to work much on the engine the last week since I've been busy with school projects.

Some things have been done though. I've updated the deferred rendering system to work with light volumes instead of full-screen quads. This alone provides a huge speedup as long as the lights are reasonably small. This also made me think about light attenuation. Funny enough, this thread at gamdev popped up today. As discussed in the thread, I also wanted to find a way to set a maximum radius for a light, without affecting its atenuation too much. After some playing around with Maple, I found that max(0, 1-1/maxRadius*x)/(1+k*x^2) does the job quite good (this function is suggested in the thread) . I implemented it in my lighting shaders and the result is fine. I also took the opportunity to shave of a few instructions.

Here are some screens:

In the second shot there is 100+ lights. As you can see, the point lights does not cast shadows yet. I will also need to implement a 64 bit HDR pipeline as I get oversaturation and banding artifacts.

I've also ordered a AMD HD3870. While slightly slower than the Nvidia 8800GT, it's slightly cheaper and most importantly: it's available ;)