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Light & Shadow

Both aspects are still very much a work in progress.

Lighting is missing dynamic lights and HDR rendering. As such day/night cycles are pitch-black until I correctly implement HDR exposure/tonemapping, allowing me to balance the different light-sources' strengths.

Shadows are badly implemented naive shadowmaps for the moment, since I want to try if shadow volumes (aka stencil shadows) - in combination with modern hardware/APIs (i.e. compute shaders) - can be made feasible again. This might be foolish of me, but shadow volumes produce sample perfect shadows, which is exactly what I want. There is no need for soft shadows or shadows handling alpha-textured objects correctly in my low-poly, architectural/model approach. The only downside of shadow volumes are their high performance/fillrate cost. Add to that Metal’s lack of a geometry shader and things become.. interesting. If the approach using shadow volumes turns out to be too slow I will have to settle for Perpective Shadowmaps.

Notable additions/changes/fixes

• Render actual map geometry
• Directional light (sun)
• Shadows
• Compute shader nearly twice as fast (see last devlog entry)
• Lakes have more pleasing shapes
• Selecting presets for the map-size in new-game dialog works
• New game is started with the correct amount of money in the bank