Wrapping up lighting: Up next- Detail texturing.

So the deferred lighting system is about complete. A preliminary video was posted to the youtube and another more final video will be uploaded shortly. After that time I'm going to work on cutting the GBuffer bandwidth in half by eliminating one of the unused color buffers and encoding normals into an RGBA8 target (from RGBA16F). The primary performance hit comes from the GBuffer as there is minimal overdraw and minimal screen coverage from the light pass.

The next big thing that I'd like to address (among others) is detail texturing which would require modification to the surface properties which come in from the map. By tiling a repeatable texture and modulating it into the base texture, we can drastically improve the quality of the apparent texture resolution while not necessarily increasing texture size. 

So UV offsets will be precalculated and passed into the GBuffer pass for surfaces which have a detail texture. The detail texture would be interpreted as a heightmap where we can derive the normal and use it to perturb the surface normal for finer detailed bump maps.

I don't anticipate much of this to take particularly long, most of the hard work is over and hopefully we'll see a bunch of new work coming down the pipes very shortly =]   (Edit: that is if I can stop playing Left4Dead.....)