A challenge: deferred lighting and shadows, looking for a programmer

Hi all,

Since some time Crystal Space has a deferred render manager which
implements deferred
lighting with shadows. Matthieu Kraus worked on this but doesn't have time
right now to
continue working on this (since he is now working on another part of CS as
part of
Google Summer of Code). He is available for advice though.

As such this new render manager works nicely. It produces nice visuals with
real dynamic
shadows. However there are still some issues which make quality less then
desired. I
would like to use this render manager in my Indie game project and I need
professional
quality there.

Firstly performance is a problem. The performance right now goes down
rather fast with
number of lights and objects. While of course deferred lighting will always
be somewhat
slow (and it is also up to the level designer to construct optimal levels)
I think that
some improvements should be possible here.

Second there are various quality issues. First the display is not stable
when moving
around. Shadows flicker and there are very disturbing slight movements of
the shadows.

Thirdly there are also errors in the shadow casting. Sometimes light leaks
through at
places where it shouldn't for example.


I would like to find someone who can help improve the deferred render
manager until
we can get shadows as good as we can get in commercial games. I can provide
test levels
to demonstrate various problems and Matthieu and Frank Richter kan give
advice on
various part of the Crystal Space internals. I think that some familiarity
with shaders
and rendering/lighting techniques would be a great bonus here.


Matthieu already mentioned a few things that could be done:
- Caching: this is probably one of the most important things to implement.
- Tweaks on how depth values are stored and retreived.
- Better filtering (like PCF)

So who would like to try? I think this is an important area in a modern
game engine
so it would be a worthwhile task.


Greetings,


--
Project Manager of Crystal Space and CEL (http://www.crystalspace3d.org/)
Project Manager of AresEd (https://code.google.com/p/ares/)
Support: https://www.gittip.com/jorritTyb/

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