Global Illumination Improved on Degine

Been spending a lot of time recently getting my 3D media player, Rendepth, ready for a reboot. But took a moment to add a new global illumination technique to Degine. This uses a method called “Radiance Hints” back from 2011, but honestly looks good to me. The indirect light is baked into a grid of probes, similar to other methods, but unique here is that the 3D texture stores spherical harmonics, which keeps storage costs low, and compatibility is fine with OpenGL and WebGL (without anything fancy like compute shaders or hardware ray-tracing).

Seems to be working well with different environments and the run-time cost is barely anything since it’s pre-computed. At the moment, there is a hard limit to the scene size, since it’s saving to a single 3D texture, so I still need to decide how I handle larger open worlds. Most likely a cascading system could work here, with the area close to the camera getting full detail, and then the larger background with a more sparse grid. Though my current projects are not huge open-world games, so not much of a priority to generalize this at the moment.

In terms of the progress on the engine as a whole, I feel confident getting out the “tech preview” this year, and probably a demo in the next few weeks. Granted, I do keep saying that (since this project started 3 years ago) but the quality is certainly where I wanted, as you can see above. Got a few games and interactive apps in the pipeline, mainly with preproduction and not with active development, but I think as soon as the engine itself is functional, it will become much easier and this massive investment would have paid off. Thinking about doing a quick sort of “meme game” that I can bang out in a week or two, since POLYGIRL, and the other apps, still need a lot more time.