@HeelX: I'm quite interested in new lightning techniques, are there any sources you can recomment concerning lightmapping and radiosity?

eh... it depends. What do you want to do? Since I know that Esper uses Cinema 4D I thought it would be fruitful if he creates a lightmap with radiosity in Cinema 4D and adds the dynamic lightning on top (or the like).

Lightmaps are pre-calculated textures that store light and shadow info (not to be confused with shadow maps!). It is a bit hard to combine that with dynamic lights though and there are many techniques - I would generally advice you to buy some of the ShaderX books or Shader for Game Programmers and Artists and/or Real-Time Rendering (3rd edition), since they cover most of the used techniques out there. Realtime Radiosity is not possible unless you have a raytracing engine or the like, but there are ways to fake that, e.g. light probes or dummy lights. Then, you have to decide if you do besides or instead of classic forward rendering sort of a deferred shading / lightning, which opens up new possibilities as well.

Hm... technically speaking, there are some mistakes in my post, but it is also quiet hard to find an appropriate (short) answer to your question

working on a new Ground Fog idea for my Titleroom..
A Model wich has a fog texture and simple shufts my.u in his action. perhaps a second entit below that shifts the v parameter..
i think with LIGHT and TRANSLUCENT, the effect is better than particles

Show us some comparison screens!

i made nos creen of the 100%-Particle Groundfog..

But this is my first WiP of my Modelbased one (with some particles):

inspired on that texture blending topic I wrote a complex texture blending with a paralax grass for isometric style views




VIDEO

Salud!

That looks very nice!

Seconded!
Why only isometric?

When you finish dungeons, you can give hints to other people in your team. You only ever hear one hint from those group of heroes who made it, but those who die? Their spirits haunt those dungeons, and instead of ruining everyone's day, they tell the player their hints. It's pretty neat! The location of the ghosts itself is, of course, also a big help, as it helps with identifying traps.

Poor ghost dudes.


[EDIT: I am aware its a bit hard to read in the shot. The whole thing is animated ingame, so just by that it's easier to read. But I definitely want to make sure that text never disrupts gameplay, so it appears with no trigger, and only transparent (and thus cannot hide anything important)]

thanks! i'm proud of it


because the parallax grass is computed with the camera render target and it is totally screen pixel dependant, so if you change the camera tilt the grass waxes and wanes.

Salud!