[Soc-2013-dev] Weekly Report #8 BGE LoD and Bug Fixing

[Daniel Stokes]

== Progress ==
I started this week be investigating the displace modifier in the player
and supporting procedural textures. The reason the displace modifier does
not work in the player is because the displace modifier relies on the
render module, which is not linked with the player. A large chunk of the
stubs.c file is for the render module, so linking it could simplify that
file. However, that alone does not seem like a good enough reason to link
against the render module. This is why I was looking into procedural
textures, to see if the render module could be used for something else.
However, the procedural textures do not look like they would work well for
most mapping types with out a lot of work (converting them to shaders).
Generating a texture and passing it into the shader system however is
fairly strait forward.

Other than that, I have began working on point light shadows as they were
one of the community requested features. I am using a technique called
Virtual Depth Shadow Cube Texture which will provide flexibility for
multiple lighting techniques, including those using depth textures. I have
the rendering into the virtual texture and generating an indirection cube
map. However there are still some math errors and other oddities to
resolve. In other words, good progress has been made, but there is still
some work to go.

I also added a fov attribute to KX_Camera as a community requested feature.

There has also been some minor progress regarding some of the bugs from
last week:

[#33215] KX_MeshProxy.transformUV() argument ValueError:
This bug has now been corrected and closed.

[#32175] bge.texture.ImageRender alpha channel returns 255 for every pixel:
This bug will require a user option to enable an alpha frame buffer.

[#18987] alignAxisToVect() Factor Bug:
After talking to Campbell, he and I decided that this bug should be fixed,
and not simply documented as a limitation.

== Next Week ==
I plan to get the point light shadows finished, and begin looking at
improving our existing shadow support. This includes the option to control
the blur factor of the variance shadow maps and potentially looking into
some better filtering and performance improvements for variance shadows. I
would also like to look into techniques for making sun shadows work better
over large areas such as cascaded shadow maps or parallel split shadow
maps. I am not sure how far I will be able to get on those improvements,
but I will try to get as much of it done as I can.

== Problems / Questions ==
All good.
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