Nice one Excalaberr!
I have a few questions;
Firstly, do you know the state of the recast and detour GSOC, it was from 2010, so i presume something halted it, as this is the first i’ve heard.
Next up, we technically have ragdolls, but you have to manually add constraints, though if you mean a hard-coded standard that acts as a binding for the bullet physics, then sure!
In terms of the diff/inferred lighting, i may start looking at that soon enough.
I think point shadows may well be useful; it’s like adding GLSL, because at least some Graphics cards support it (most nowadays).
The shadow system may need a general work around - i’m not sure on the state of the soft shadows patch, until it makes it into 2.6.
It is still my firm belief that a lot of these features could be achieved once the rasterizer is improved, and threading supported.
The reason i continue to mention the rasterizer is that, whilst it is not too slow, and has been updated, it is like a crack in the wall that has been painted over; the crack is still there. What i expect is that the Rasterizer needs re-writing for fluidity and would bring with it a more efficient system.
imagine if we could have everyone’s requests…blender would not only be the best free engine, but then would also be one of(if not the) best game engine.
I dint read it all, but i think that all the points quoted, well, it ll be nice to see them on blender, I really want to the soft shadows to came on later blender version, I m using the 2.57 version of it since the other versions dont have soft shadows on them.
May I ask why Pointlight-Shadows (what I also would vote for) are so »expensive«? Assuming that one Pointlight is »merely« a radial Light (guess that would be with the Sphere Option activated), then the shadows would be casted from one Line, according to its radial Rays. Well, as I use that Word »Ray« I guess that this would be what Ray Shadows are, and the BGE does only support Buffer Shadows. From what I have come to understand, Ray Shadows are slow – I guess that comes from Casting Rays into 360!*2 Directions up to rounded Infinity… groar, that sounds like pretty much a heap… so what about the same Technique with a limited, low kept Amount of Directions to cast those Rays? (Would be less exact, of Course… if it would work at all. ) Using the Buffer Technique requires, as I have come to understand, that the (Spot-)Light renders a (rather simple) Lightmap, I’d call it, this rendered Map would then probably look like a Skybox – I guess that comes down to the same thing like having six Spotlights, more or less, but it still sounds faster than Ray Shadows.
But in the End it sounds all the same to me because I don’t understand any of that Stuff and probably I babbled quite a lot of fuzzy stupidity right now. ^‿‿^
The shadows in the BGE are made by, as far as I know, a depth texture. Basically, a camera renders the shot from the light’s point of view, and then maps that onto a texture and projects it. I may be way off, but I believe that’s how lights work. So, I think a point lamp would require several renders to work. I think this was mentioned on the other development thread.
Or a hack to make cameras render up to 360 degrees wide (would be useful for more stuff). Update: Well, the image would get distorted, like a angmap, but You may get away with it the distortion is up… but, Yeah, combine renders is probably needed.
I Would more like an option on spotlight to throw parallel light, like an orthographic camera, or like a wide beam rater then a cone. Shadows on such a spot should really be cheaper to implement (look up code in to the shadow buffer must be simpler math).
The shadows are a big problem in BGE, and also 2D filters (not all of them tho).
My opinion is that the Dev team should focus on the shadows, is so outdated…
Just for the record. At this moment I’m working in a BGE Network implementation to allow multiplayer games using logic and/or BGE python API. I’m not so fast (lack of C++ knowledge) but I will try to finish the feature or at least release a patch with the last modified code.
oh i c,so dats a more advanced talking =/ hope to get started in programming very soon and UUU Mr. Agoose promised me dat u would help me with the inventory and SOO FAR im still on my own lol!
Forgive me if any of the following have been recently implemented; I only just upgraded from 2.49 to 2.58a.
My ‘Christmas’ list: I think a nice LOD system is well in order. Better support for ragdolls would also be nice, as would the similar ability to create and break rigid body constraints in-game. Bump map support, default nav mesh support, default track to nearest… the list goes on. Also, making an object’s bounds change via armatures or the moving/deleting of bound-forming child objects would help physics sims greatly.
And please, PLEASE bring back save as runtime!
Oh, yeah, and not having to use massive WAV format sounds would make use and packing way easier.
) Using the Buffer Technique requires, as I have come to understand, that the (Spot-)Light renders a (rather simple) Lightmap, I’d call it, this rendered Map would then probably look like a Skybox – I guess that comes down to the same thing like having six Spotlights, more or less, but it still sounds faster than Ray Shadows.
