[GPU pro] rendering technology of Wild West: Life and Death Alliance

Callofjuarez: boundinblood. The Chinese name is "Wild West: Life and Death League", a great review of rendering technology.

The developer is techland. I have never heard of it before. I checked it and found it in 1991. Now I am still developing the NextGen game, not bad!

With its own engine, it is still evolving.

This article is very exciting and compact with high gold content.

Deferred Shading

Here techland thinks that the biggest benefit of deferred shading is that it can simplify render pipeline.

On this basis, it brings the benefits of multiple light sources, such as decal and ssao.

Pipeline

The first step is to buildTexture of ambient lighting, 32x32. The dot values of normal and sky are used for sample.

What is built in it is various customization, which can be fully used by your own project.

Cloud maskBuilt for the shadow cast by render cloud on the ground.

Gbuffer:

Techland uses the quarter buffer in many of the following parts, so it downloads the depth buffer downsample to 1/4.

Ambient lighting (simple gi ):

Techland implements a very simple gi. On the 1/4 buffer, the simplified render Object Model (box, sphere, cone ...), Use min/MAX blending.

A volumetric fog is rendered in 1/4 buffer.

A simple shadowmap is built on the 1/4 buffer and placed on the R channel. The other two channels are cloud shadow and ssao.

Ssao is the simplest one. The hemisphere uses 24 samples.

Then this 1/4 buffer further downsample (with Blur) to 1/16, used for the following particle.

Lighting pass:

• Linear Space Lighting
• Rgba16f on PC, 7e3 on xbox360
• Shadow:
• 4 Cascade
• There is smooth between cascade
• Ssao and cloud use bilateral upsampling back

Rain: The shadow map method is used to calculate the rain occlusion. tonemapping has eye adapt.-> the color space is converted back to the normal color space-> color grading.
Others: Terrain:

• Heightmap based
• Geometry mipmapping
• Procedural vegetation & mesh spreading
• Road System: Edit Road, path, and creek

Geometry:

• Portals
• Occluders
• Levels
• Management of small objects

In short, for project programmers, this is a very good article that can be compared to see how their engine works.