Month: August 2018

ResidualVM: Summary

This is the summary of all the works I have done in Google Summer of Code 2018.
Overall Description:
Improvement for the Stark engine used in ResidualVM for the support of the game The Longest Journey with two main focuses: menus and characters’ shadows.
Pull Requests:
Below are the main PR created and merged, ordered by the sequence of development. One may click the number of the PR to view it in detail on GitHub, which contains discussions between me and my mentor along the development.
 
#1415: Implementing the main menu.

#1417: Implementing the settings menu.

#1422: Implementing the save & load menu.
#1442: Implementing the video replay in the Diary menu.
#1443: Implementing the diary pages in the Diary menu.

#1450: Implementing the conversation log in the Diary menu.
#1456: Improving the debug console of the game.
#1467: Implementing the version info text and the Book of Secrets in the main menu.
#1468: Implementing a rough version of confirmation dialogs.
#1474: Implementing the keyboard bindings.
#1483: Implementing the characters’ shadows.
Current Status:
The two main focuses: menus and characters’ shadows are finished as scheduled. All codes have been merged and one may test and use them freely in the game.

Other than that, there are some issues, which is out of expectation, emerged during the development. The feature of pressing F8 to save a screenshot is not implemented for the time being. The confirmation dialogs are still pretty rough. Also, there are some proposed GitHub issues related to the engine, most are about the debug console. I have planned to tackle them after GSoC and I will keep engaging in the future development of ResidualVM to help further improve the Stark engine.

ResidualVM: Week 12

With the help of my mentor, I followed the logic in the original game and finally, now The Longest Journey in ResidualVM shall have shadows that are calculated based on actual lights in the scene!
Below are some screenshots as demonstrations. For a better illustration, I temporarily rendered the shadow with solid green. As you can see, in location 39 00, the shadow of April will become longer and change its direction based on the lights.

As I have said in the previous blog, the game computes the shadow in a way that is not the same as the reality. Well, with the help of my mentor on reading the disassembly, the truth behind the screen was revealed. Honestly speaking, after knowing this, I really don’t think I can figure it out just by observing the game itself.
So, in general, the game first calculated an overall direction from lights. The way to compute the directional vector from lights varies based on the type of the light, but basically, it is related to the distance between the model and the light and the brightness of the light. Notice that I am saying “model” here, not vertices. It turns out that one light direction is applied to all vertices of a model.
The Calculation of the Point Light
After that, the directions from all the lights are summed together as an overall direction. Remember the maxShadowLength I mentioned in the previous blog? It is used to clip the horizontal length of the overall light direction. It turns out that the maxShadowLength needs to be divided by 1000 before being used, that’s why its value seems to be so large.
After that, things become trivial. By passing the overall light direction to the shader, with some linear algebra, it is easy to calculate the casted position of a vertex. It is even easier if you first transform the light direction to the model space since then the plane of the shadow is just the XZ plane. You can save some of the math.
The Vertex Shader
By the time when I wrote this blog, the PR was not merged yet, but I believe it is very close to that. So now, all the tasks scheduled for this year’s GSoC are finished. I have learnt tremendously from this project. I get more familiar with C++, I know more about game programming, and I even get some hands-on experience on CG with OpenGL! Also, I need to express my greatest gratitude to my mentor bgK. He is truly a good mentor. Without his detailed reviews and clear guidance, I would never accomplish so much. This is a truly wonderful journey and a valuable experience.
Thank you all, for you guys are truly wonderful 😀
All code snippets are generated through Carbon