New Release Alpha 0.23b

This Release represents a huge overhaul with new meshes, new shadows and new base layout.
Changelog:

• New texture shadow system - As mentioned in the blog post had become necessary for several reasons, but I am very pleased about how the CPU usage is reduced. They have flaws but I think the net balance is positive.
• Updated and expanded shaders - Became necessary since the previous shaders were not meant for texture shadows
• New male mesh - Generated with makehuman
• New female mesh - Generated with makehuman
• New animations - They are only new in the sense that I had to completely redo the existing ones, some still require work
• New base layout - With the possibility of transparent materials new possibilities for the base layout emerged.
• Redesign of several objects

With these changes several mechanics broke and I have not fixed all. There are currently only one hair and cloth meshes and the customization is essentially limited to changing colors. There may be bugs, although I fixed most I know of.

Station redesign

As announced, with the new shadow system and the possibility to use transparent materials, the design of the station is iterated. Here is a render image of the latest iteration. There is a lot of glass, because with the previous setup it was possible there was an impenetrable wall between the camera and the NPC & player.

 This is an early ingame view of the station. There are missing textures and unfinished materials. The transparent material works, the appearance might be improved with a shader in the future/coming iterations.

New shadow implementation

To this point MoonBase69 implemented a shadow technique called 'Stencil-shadows'. It is easy to set up, yields accurate shadows and supports self-shadowing. There are however two drawbacks:

• Stencil shadows are calculated on the CPU and becomes more expensive in terms of computation time. With the new high-poly meshes from makehuman the framerate suffers. In fact, the performance was essentially limited by the CPU even before the new meshes.
• Stencil shadows do not work well with transparent materials. I do however want to have transparent materials, maybe for clothing but surely for windows instead of walls to give the station a more open look.

Because of this the shadow technique is currently being changed to 'Texture-shadows'. They are calculated on the GPU and can handle transparent materials. They do have however other issues, notably they require some efforts to enable self-shadowing.

Getting this system working took a while and is not finalized, but the result for a demo scene do look good and a early implementation in the main scene does indicate a significant drop in terms of CPU load.