Work and postprocessing modding taking up all my time and energy for the moment.
As always, sorry for not replying to many messages, I'have had a minor brain burnout for a while now.
Good things:
* All (or almost all) in game shaders are now d3d9.
* All of those ps 2.0 shaders are now compiled as ps 3.0 (which means more code is possible and some more functionality is enabled)
* Deferred rendering, resulting in more consistent lighting over the whole scene. There is a color texture, a normals texture and a masking texture that are combined to the scene.
* Anisotropic filtering is now included in the game. Mipmapping is included in shaders, but needs more tweaking.
* Shadows are more realistic now. Instead of being drawn in top of other things I have now redirected shadows shaders to the masking texture, reducing/removing diffuse and specular lights. Looking better an much more consistent. Shadows areas and surfaces facing away from light are now the same, and are not added on top of each others.
This things were just not possible before.
* A little bit of AO and screen space shadows added. Cars and other objects casts some shadows on themselves and near objects. (picture 5 and picture 2, shadows in red and yellow garage to the right)
* Cars now reflects environment and other cars. Not perfect, but should be 'good enough' I think. Still need a little bit of tweaking in bonnet view. (picture 3)
* Hacky water reflections shader WIP (picture 4)
* New omni and glow lights pass added (WIP). I can easily add point lights, but we need the game to tell the shader where to put them. This could also be car headlights if I knew how to add the positions and statuses (on/off etc) from the game...
* Other effects. Very soft versions of depth of field, darkness correction and vignette added.
Bad things so far:
* I haven't been able to add really good multisampling yet, it doesn't look as good as before when using really high resolution. There are 'manual' multisampling and shader FXAA included, but they are not perfect.
* Some texture animations with a lot of textures (exhaust flames) crashes d3d. Using 10 or less textures seems to work. Not entirely sure why yet.
* Minor car selection menu inconsistency (semi transparent menu elements are slightly less opaque when drawn in post processing mode. Haven't been able to separate them yet after the car is drawn.)
* Lense flare doesn't work for the moment, but might be replaces with a light.