Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Animation:Every silver lining has a cloud.

I wanted to spend today writing the missions code. But I wasn't happy with XNAnimation's shader. It's concept of point lights (with no attenuation) and lack of directional light, made it look like crud. Apparently, once upon a time, XNAnimation did have attenuated point lights but because some crappy ATI cards couldn't handle the shader, the number of instructions had to be reduced. So, point light attenuation was taken out. I can think of a ton of stuff that should have been taken out before that! Maybe less lights? Unloop the light code?

Anyway....I spent today writing a new technique for my shader to replace the XNAnimation fail-fest. Which was frustratingly simple, in the end. But, of course, I had to go through a long process of debugging to figure out things like: animation not working on skin but worked on normals, and why DEMII's legs were on top of her head :D.