This week, work focused on developing a completely new interface for placing and customizing lights in the scene.

New Light Component Panel in the Vortex Editor.

The history of Vortex with lights is interesting. In Vortex 1.1, the light system would leverage the fixed pipeline functionality. This meant that any single object in the scene could be lit by up to 8 different lights simultaneously.

In Vortex 2.0, the entire light system was replaced by programmable shaders. This meant that a user could define as many light as she wanted, as long as she created a custom “Visual Effect” that implemented the lighting rig. This was very flexible, but shifted the burden of lighting to the application.

For V3, we are changing the approach again to be able to support multiple dynamic light sources while, at the same time, moving most of the work back into the engine. The plan is to effectively shield the application from implementing the lighting logic and let it focus on just light placement and configuration.

In V3, lights are components that can be attached to entities. Being part of entities means that lights will be able to move around just like any other object in the scene. Being custom components allows bringing in the flexibility of exposing a rich declarative interface for configuring the appearance of the light and how it affects the world.

Under the hood, the new renderer will take care of processing all the lights in a consistent fashion, ensuring that lighting throughout the scene is uniform.

I think we are about to reach the most interesting parts of the new renderer. This is where V3 will really set itself apart from previous iterations of the engine. Stay tuned for more!

These past few weeks the majority of work went into establishing the underpinnings for frame postprocessing in the new V3 renderer.

A postprocessing effect that renders the framebuffer contents in grayscale.

Vortex 2.0 was the first version of the engine to introduce support for custom shaders and, although this opened the door to implement postprocessing effects, the API was cumbersome to use this way.

In general, the process would boil down to having two separate scene graphs and manually controlling the render-to-texture process. This would spill many engine details to user programs and was prone to breaking if the engine changed. This would also mean engine users would have to write hundreds of lines of code.

With V3 I want to make render-to-texture the default render mode. This means the engine will never render directly into the default framebuffer but, rather, we always render to an FBO object that we can then postprocess.

Architecting the renderer this way provides the opportunity to implement a myriad of effects that will up the visuals significantly while also keeping the nitty gritty details hidden under the hood.

The image above shows a postprocessed scene where the framebuffer contents were desaturated while being blit onto the screen, producing a grayscale image.

For the upcoming weeks, work will focus on building upon this functionality to develop the components necessary to support more advanced rendering in V3. Stay tuned for more!