I think it is the third time already that I am rewriting my particle system. There is always some effect I want that is missing; lightning, velocity based deformation, pulsating size or color, physics...
Look at how many variables there are already ! And just when I thought I was done, I realized everything is flawed AGAIN. It's the randomization of values ! Those also need more control, so they can change like a sin wave, or linearly, or randomly, or in discrete values...
This video shows my dynamic 2D light system based on Box2D (nothing to do with Box2DLights library) and Clipper:
This is how it all works:
- light is a textured quad/polygon
- Box2D is used to get all the sprites inside the light polygon by either using light as a sensor, or using b2World::QueryAABB()
- for convex shapes visible edges are calculated using a dotproduct of light and edge normals
- for concave shapes(which can only be chains in Box2D) all edges are considered visible
- shadow polygons are created by extending visible edges
- using polygon clipping library called Clipper a "difference" operation is performed between the light polygon and shadows to get the final light polygon
- UV mapping is performed on the resulting vertices
- the resulting polygon is rendered as a GL_TRIANGLE_FAN
No raycasting is performed, which you usually find in tutorials.
The "depth" mask uses the green channel to mark which pixels should be
illuminated, and for the intensity (ex. transparent smoke should be
illuminated less than a solid surface). Blue channel is used for depth,
and works basically the same. It's not perfect, but I can get some nice
effects with it.
Soft shadows are generated by rendering the lights on a FBO smaller than the screen size and rendering it with a blur shader.
