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[cameni]

Yes we are thinking of using a deferred renderer, but I do not want a pure one. Atmosphere and distant terrain should be computed like it is now and written as a special "do not touch" material to the buffer to pass through the deferred stage. I expect some problems there though.

Terrain self shadowing - we have an idea to use a different algorithm on large terrain areas, i.e. to compute another shadow map containing the rougher terrain occluders, and then to perform two lookups in the shader, the second one to the already existing shadow map containing object occluders, to be extended by the close, detailed terrain so there are sharp shadows from nearby rocks etc.

We will see how it plays together.

[Edding3000]

Yes we are thinking of using a deferred renderer, but I do not want a pure one. Atmosphere and distant terrain should be computed like it is now and written as a special "do not touch" material to the buffer to pass through the deferred stage. I expect some problems there though.

Terrain self shadowing - we have an idea to use a different algorithm on large terrain areas, i.e. to compute another shadow map containing the rougher terrain occluders, and then to perform two lookups in the shader, the second one to the already existing shadow map containing object occluders, to be extended by the close, detailed terrain so there are sharp shadows from nearby rocks etc.

We will see how it plays together.

I see. That's an interesting but actually very logical solution to the shadows.
A lot of engines/tech-demo's have the problem that shadows far away are a problem. They try to fix it with a single shadow algorithm (CSM, with huge maps and 4 or more cascades) that uses a huuuge amount of video memory. I really like the solution of using several algorithms for different types of models/distances to reduce memory usage and processing power. Al it takes is another tex lookup and an add operation in the shader!
Great. I hope i'll fix my own material and shader system very soon now, so i can add frustum(and later occlusion) culling, and some other base functionalities in my engine. Then finally some more high-level things like a (flat) terrrain class and shadow mapping can be integrated to test if it might work!!