Re: [Plib-devel] State of the art?

[steve <sjb...@ai...>]

Tinoshi Kitazawa wrote:
> A very quick question:
> 
> Do you think that PLIB will ever support (within the scenegraph) shadows (at 
> least planar) reflection or some other 'simple' stencil buffer related 
> stuff???

Well, it certainly doesn't handle that stuff directly right now.

I think that a modern scene graph should make those kinds of things
possible by providing the state and multipass hooks to make them 
possible - but there are just too many shadow and reflection algorithms
out there (not one of which is both efficient and perfect) - and
implementing them all would be painful and ugly.

So I would hope to support FBO's and shaders and multipass - and leave 
the actual assembling of shadows and reflections to the developer.

> It would be nice to set some traversing mask such as SSG_CAST_SHADOW or 
> SSG_REFLECT for every node.... It is something I'd like to work on by my 
> own, but I don't know if you think it is something PLIB really needs... Does 
> it worth the effort?

It's not worth the effort within the present structure - because the 
present structure is in dire need of a near-total rewrite.

But I think it naive to expect to be able to just turn on a flag and
get shadows for all classes of object with good performance.