I believe it's an integrated intel card.

It runs (windows 8 on samsung series 5 laptop), but it took a while to start up and also only runs at 20-30 FPS. Is this on purpose?

I'm glad you liked the overview.

I've already talked about the source code issue - I even explain why in the video. I really do understand why you want it, but I've decided to not release it. That said, polygon clipping isn't that hard, and people should be able to get something together if they can get everything else working.

I think binding a texture is faster than computing the lighting fade-off in a shader (texture lookup vs. distance calculation), but if there's any difference, it's so negligible as to not be an issue. Additionally, I don't think you're realizing the advantages of using a texture - I can have masked lights! I could make lights out of any of these:

• http://www.destructoid.com/elephant//ul/20743-550x-bowsss.jpg
• http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120614104620/althistory/images/a/a7/Emo_skull_skulls_.jpg
• http://www.droid-life.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/htc-fireball.png

So yes, potentially it's useful. It allows me to customize my lights individually without needing to utilize any uniforms.

The blur shader was to be applied after the final lighting mask was calculated (not each light as it was rendered), so yes, you're correct. Render all of the lights normally, and then do a blur pass.

Eh, I'm not a per-pixel lighting kind of guy. I figure that super-fast and good is preferable to slow but perfect.

The second part of the tutorial is up. This video explains how to create cast shadows.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/4BtjcH-iLR0?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/4BtjcH-iLR0?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

What do you guys think?

I understand, and as I previously stated, I'm going to make it an open-source plugin for jRabbit v2.0. It'll just take a while.

Good point. However, while I'm willing to explain my techniques, I'm keeping my code proprietary at the moment. I'll release it (along with tutorials and examples) later.

Basically, I want to finish my current game (since it's going to be commercial, I'm not going to be releasing code). Then, once I get jRabbit v2.0 released, I'll have my lighting system be an open-source plugin for that.

Eh, I think videos are more accessible to more people. It also allows people to directly see what I'm talking about - they don't have to put out any effort and mess with it themselves.

This seems to be the general consensus. I'm putting together an addendum video that shows how I do shadows. My bad.

Welp, I put together a video that explains my general methods for 2D lighting. http://youtu.be/0FZIKX1Y_8I

Probably - however, I'm probably going to finish my current game before I do anything like that.

I've been putting together a proto-version of jRabbit 2.0 as I go - there's a lot of very massive changes I need to do, so everything is being built again from the ground up. What I will probably end up doing is creating a series of "plugin" libraries that easily integrate with the base distribution. The lighting engine will be one of those, so you would be able to very simply add lighting to any game, but don't need to have unnecessary jars bloating your end product.

Ah... that's an interesting technique. I would not have thought of that.

However, I don't think that would work very well with what I'm trying to do. Colored lights, for example, wouldn't work, and it could potentially add up to a ridiculous amount of texture memory being used. One of the big things I am trying to do with my current setup is to keep my lights as lightweight as humanly possible (both from an API standpoint and used resources); I'm pretty close to that right now and don't want to add to it.

Still, thanks for the insight. Always good to see difference techniques.

Ah...

So you rendered the light and then cast shadows from it? How did you handle multiple lights?

Ah, got it now.

How'd you go about doing this, may I ask?

Could you make the shadows darker? I think I can see the shadows, but they look almost identical to the white background...

I'm sorry, what am I looking at exactly?

@Riven
Eh, I'm not sure it would be a significant enough jump in quality to warrant the extra render costs. I'll probably look back into this later to see if I can change the algorithm to make the lights have a penumbra, but it's not a high priority.



@matheus23
Haha yeah, that's one of the main issues with pillars in my lighting engine. Straight-line terrain is fine, but curves are difficult, because the entire algorithm is based on line-segment polygon clipping.

The way that the lights work is that I render my scene normally into a texture, like this:


Then, I render my lights into a lighting mask texture:


And then I render the two buffers together in a shader, to make something this:


Voila. Easy-peasy lights.

To create the geometry for each light, I create the base geometry of a point light (a textured quad), and then I clip out sections using line segments as barriers. So, for the columns, I take the most efficient route and use the cross-section of the column as the barrier.

It looks great except for the top of the object.

It's possible that I can get away with this - one thing I did not show in the video was a "line of sight" mask that doesn't allow you to see through walls. The tops of the pillars will be covered, so the glaring discrepancy won't be as obvious.

I'm not sure - quite probably not.

Right now, the algorithm is just not set up to handle that whatsoever; the reason it's so fast is that I can cut corners (ensure that the geometry of the light is always clockwise, know that you never have to fade the light, just clip geometry, etc) - I'd probably have to do a full redesign to properly allow for that.

I also really like the look of hard lighting; I think it gives a scene a really sharp, edgy look, while soft shadows usually just make things look less dramatic.

That said, it's something I can come back to at any point in time; my lighting system is separate from everything else so I don't think there will be a major problem if I decide to upgrade.

Thank you. It actually took me a lot of re-recordings because I kept on flubbing. I'm glad that I managed to get a decent take, though.

Well, currently I'm working on a top-down, 2D action RPG. Things are interesting.

While getting things going for that, I've put together a little 2D lighting system that I'm really happy with - it's pretty, simple, and fast.

Here's a screenshot:



I also made a dev video here:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/GI63eeaXbWs?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/GI63eeaXbWs?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

What do you guys think?

Sweet, thanks, I'll be able to work with this.

Hmm. The SAT seems to heavyweight for what I'm thinking.

I'm trying to find a good 2D graphics clipping algorithm. The view region can be moved and rotated, as can the entities that would appear in it.

The method I currently use is "lossy" - I have my viewing region, and I check if each entity's location is within its bounding radius away from the view. That way I don't have to do any complex math to determine if it should be rendered or not. However, I want to look at other, more specific methods, to see what else is possible.

Here are some examples:

As you can see, object A will be rendered:


However, object B will not:

So, I have two rectangles, A and B.

Each rectangle has:
A midpoint, labeled x and y.
A rotation, labeled r.
A width and a height, labeled w and h.

What is the fastest possible way in code to determine if these two rectangles intersect or not?

That happens with most LWJGL applets. I haven't signed my jars. 

I'm not trying to hack your computer, honest.

You experienced slowdown/frame skipping?  This is easily the most lightweight game I've ever made, so I'm not sure what's up with that... Can you run my other game, Micron, alright?

Thanks! Glad you like. I was very please with how it turned out, too.

For the fade effect, I just use additive blending and render a white quad over the entire view. I switch worlds when it becomes fully opaque.

Well, if you can put the LWJGL Display on an AWT Canvas with Display.setParent(), if you want to make the Display fullscreen you just call:


To go back to the applet view, just call:

Thanks, I glad you like it!

The speed of the ball was intentional. It just took way too long for the ball to move from one side of the arena to the other if it was significantly slower. Right now, it starts at a certain speed and then slowly accelerates up to double that.

There are a lot of ways in which I could add additional features, but since I made this game to take a break from a bigger, cooler game, I really want to get back to that. They are good ideas, though, and I might come back to it later.

As a break from another project, I've put together a Pong remake. It's not all that complex, but it's got single player and two player modes, basic pong, and "challenge mode" gameplay where the arena has complex terrain.

Here are some pics:





Anyway, check it out!

http://www.minds-eye-games.com/projects/games/pong/

BEWARE: Challenge Mode gets much, much harder.

This is awesome. How long did it take you?

I like the art style, btw. Nice job.

The rendering is not hardware accelerated, so it's orders of magnitude slower.