The final week of 2015 turned out to be quite prolific.
There was a new stable build on Friday: 1.15.7.
I made a little bit of progress with animating player weapons by introducing the vanilla-style walk bobbing for the new model renderer. The final missing detail now is to improve how the weapon is positioned, so that FOV and viewport size changes don’t so easily move the weapon out of view. This has always been a bit of a problem with the old model renderer, so doing it better this time around is important.
I continued last week’s work on reflections by incorporating cubemaps to each of the default shaders. Cubemaps can now be put in packages and loaded as assets: there is a new asset type for environment cubemaps (texture.reflect).
It turned out part of the confusion last week was due to some mistakes I had made earlier in how light directions were being passed to and calculated in the shaders. This was causing artifacts such as specular highlights in the wrong places on the model. While fixing the shaders, I also managed to streamline them a little and remove excessive texture lookups.
Overall, we are now getting closer to calling the shaders feature complete. The next step is to apply some final adjustments so that lighting on 3D models will appear natural yet distinctive. However, a big part of making models look good is tuning all the shader and material parameters correctly for each model asset. It is quite challenging to do this if one only has a text file and the appropriate values have to be found via trial and error. Therefore, I added a new editor sidebar for making adjustments to 3D models. I got a nice head start on this by reusing a bunch of code from the Renderer Appearance editor.
The model asset editor should provide all the tools for perfecting how a 3D model appears in Doomsday. It shows basic information about the model file and allows interactively adjusting shader variables, enabling and disabling rendering passes, changing materials, and trying out animations. The editor will not write definition files, though, it just allows finding the best parameters. This is partly because the definitions may incorporate Doomsday Script, and partly to ensure that one can’t accidentally mess up the parameters of a model.