I finally solved the last issues with my light pre-pass renderer yesterday and designers got to work with point lights today.  After all the time I spent on implementing it, it’s a huge relief for it to work finally, and look good to boot!

As happy as I am with current progress, it also led me to some brand new problems.  For example, I “discovered” that setting all render target textures to R32G32B32A32_Float is a horrible, horrible idea.  Who knew?  Ryan Rohrer did, so thanks!  It also has led to additional work needed on handling transparency in models, but that was to be expected.  For the scope and time constraints of our project, I’m planning to do a basic forward lighting pass for models that have transparency, and designers can set the primary light to use for that in editor rather than do any closest light calculations at runtime.  It might not be a super elegant way to solve it, but it’ll work and I can get it done, so!

Now that the basic implementation is finished, I’m hoping that progress will speed up considerably on a large number of smaller tasks.  We’ll see how that pans out.