Remove isInterior restriction from WMO shadow sampling so city
buildings (flagged as interior groups) correctly receive shadows.
Apply shadow to interior-lit surfaces. Enable shadows by default
and persist the setting across sessions.
- Tighten celestial glow falloff and edge fade to eliminate visible quad boundary
- Add opacity support to minimap display shader, synced with UI opacity setting
- Fix audio double/triple-scaling by removing redundant master volume multiplications
- Rename "Original Soundtrack" toggle to "Enable WoWee Music"
- Add About tab with developer info and GitHub link
Alpha blending caused faint quad edges to be visible against the sky
gradient. Additive blending correctly adds glow light without the
outline artifact. Edge fade starts earlier and discard threshold raised.
- Replace dark edge RGB on alpha-tested foliage with mip-4 average color
proportional to alpha (low alpha = low trust in original RGB)
- Raise foliage alpha cutoff to 0.4 and remove dither band for cleaner edges
- Disable depth test on insect particles so they don't vanish behind foliage
- Exempt dragonflies/butterflies/moths from foliage animation freeze
- Spawn dark point-sprite insects buzzing around cattails/reeds/kelp/seaweed
- Fix firefly M2 particles: exempt from alpha dampening and forced gravity
- Make water shoreline/crest foam more irregular with UV warping and bluer tint
- Fix HeightMap::getHeight() to use interleaved 17-wide row layout
matching MCVT storage (was using wrong 9-wide contiguous indexing)
- Guard terrain bump mapping normalize against zero-length vectors
to prevent NaN propagation and GPU faults
Shadow casting: foliage batches now bind their actual texture in the shadow
pass with alpha testing, producing leaf-shaped shadows instead of solid cards.
Uses a per-frame resettable descriptor pool for texture sets.
Shadow receiving: foliage fragments now sample the shadow map with PCF
instead of using a flat constant darkening.
Replaces single-tap shadow sampling with 3x3 grid PCF (36-sample equivalent
with hardware bilinear filtering) for smooth shadow edges. Adds normal-offset
bias to eliminate shadow acne on oblique surfaces without peter-panning.
Extends the WMO normal mapping/POM system to character M2 models with
bone-skinned tangents. Auto-generates normal/height maps from diffuse
textures using luminance→height, Sobel→normals (same algorithm as WMO).
- Expand vertex buffer from M2Vertex (48B) to CharVertexGPU (56B) with
tangent vec4 computed via Lengyel's method in setupModelBuffers()
- Tangents are bone-transformed and Gram-Schmidt orthogonalized in the
vertex shader, output as TBN for fragment shader consumption
- Fragment shader gains POM ray marching, normal map blending, and LOD
crossfade via dFdx/dFdy (identical to WMO shader)
- Descriptor set 1 extended with binding 2 for normal/height sampler
- Settings (enable, strength, POM quality) wired from game_screen.cpp
to both WMO and character renderers via shared UI controls
POM fixes: use blurred height only for ray march (keep crisp Sobel for
normals), reduce pomScale 0.03→0.012, clamp grazing angle denominator
to 0.15, hard-limit max UV offset, smooth fadeout at steep view angles.
Add Normal Map Strength slider (0.0-2.0) in Video settings for user
control over surface detail intensity. Persisted across sessions.
Generate normal+height maps from diffuse textures at load time using
luminance-to-height and Sobel 3x3 filtering. Compute per-vertex tangents
via Lengyel's method for TBN basis construction.
Fragment shader uses screen-space UV derivatives (dFdx/dFdy) for smooth
LOD crossfade and angle-adaptive POM sample counts. Flat textures
naturally produce low height variance, causing POM to self-select off.
Settings: Normal Mapping on by default, POM off by default with
Low/Medium/High quality presets. Persisted across sessions.
Dedicated Vulkan pipeline with alpha blending AND depth writes so
windows look transparent at oblique angles without see-through artifacts.
Fresnel alpha ranges from 0.4 (grazing) to 0.95 (head-on) with sun
glint, reflections, and silver-lining specular.
- Fix MLIQ vertex stride: each vertex is 8 bytes (4 flow + 4 height), not 4
- Use MLIQ tile flags to mask out tiles with no liquid (bridges, covered areas)
- Disable wave displacement on WMO water to prevent edge slosh artifacts
- Convert screen-space depth to vertical depth for shoreline foam and water
transparency, preventing false shoreline effects on occluding geometry
- Add underwater blue fog overlay and scene fog shift (terrain water only)
- Add getNearestWaterHeightAt to avoid false underwater detection from
elevated WMO water surfaces
- Tint refracted scene toward water color to mask occlusion edge artifacts
- Lower WMO water by 1 unit to match terrain water level
- Skybox now uses DBC sky colors (skyTop/skyMiddle/skyBand1/skyBand2) instead
of hardcoded C++ color curves, with 3-band gradient and Rayleigh/Mie scattering
- Clouds receive sun direction for lit edges, self-shadowing, and silver lining
- Fixed sun quad box artifact with proper edge fade in celestial shader
- Lens flare attenuated by fog, cloud density, and weather intensity
- Replaced garish green/purple lens flare ghosts with warm natural palette
- Added zone-based weather system for single-player mode with per-zone rain/snow
configuration, probability-based activation, and smooth intensity transitions
- Server SMSG_WEATHER remains authoritative when connected to a server
Player interaction ripples: vertex shader adds radial damped-sine displacement
centered on player position, fragment shader adds matching normal perturbation
for specular highlights. Player XY packed into shadowParams.zw, ripple strength
into fogParams.w. Separate 1x render pass for water when MSAA is active to
avoid MSAA-induced darkening — water renders after main pass resolves, using
the resolved swapchain image and depth resolve target. Water 1x framebuffers
rebuilt on swapchain recreate (window resize).
Skybox: replace sphere-mesh approach with a fullscreen triangle that
reconstructs the world-space ray direction analytically via inverse
projection/view matrices. Eliminates clip.w=0 degeneracy at the horizon
and correctly maps altitude to dir.z in the Z-up coordinate system.
Clouds: hemisphere mesh was storing altitude in aPos.y (Y-up convention);
the Z-up view matrix projected this sideways, making clouds appear
vertical. Store altitude in aPos.z and update the fragment shader to
read dir.z as altitude and dir.xy as the horizontal UV plane.
- renderWorld() now calls wmoRenderer, characterRenderer, m2Renderer (+smoke,
particles) in the correct opaque→transparent order; water moved after all
opaques; per-subsystem timing active in live path
- Deleted the 310-line #if 0 GL stub block and removed #include <GL/glew.h>
(last GL reference in renderer.cpp)
- Full-screen overlay pipeline (postprocess.vert + overlay.frag, alpha blend,
no depth test/write) for underwater tint; lazily initialized, renders a blue
tint when camera is meaningfully below the water surface; canal vs open-water
tint colours preserved from original design
- overlay.frag.glsl / overlay.frag.spv added
- ensure player transform sync is not gated by third-person so player shadow stays consistent
- hold shadow projection center during movement and snap once on stop to remove delayed catch-up
- smooth foliage caster transitions using blended phase-shifted UV samples
- tune foliage motion frequencies/amplitudes for less popping
- increase shadow map resolution to 2048 and retune terrain PCF texel scale
- increase global shadow strength from 0.62 to 0.68 for stronger, clearer shadows
- keep shadow projection center fixed while moving to remove per-frame projection churn flicker
- replace delayed post-move catch-up with immediate stop transition and idle smoothing
- rework foliage shadow caster motion to use blended phase-shifted UV samples for continuous position transitions
- reduce high-frequency foliage threshold popping by removing threshold warping path
- sharpen terrain receive filtering with tuned 5-tap PCF weights/offset for more detailed shadows
- raise shadow map resolution to 1536 and keep light-space texel snapping for stable sampling
- set shadows enabled by default and lower global shadow strength from 0.65 to 0.62
- keep foliage animation speed consistent between moving and idle at 80%
- SHADOW_MAP_SIZE 2048→1024: 4x fewer pixels rasterized in depth pass
- Replace 9-tap manual PCF loop with single hardware PCF tap in all 4 receiver
shaders (terrain.frag, wmo_renderer, m2_renderer, character_renderer).
GL_LINEAR + GL_COMPARE_REF_TO_TEXTURE already gives 2×2 bilinear PCF per
tap for free, so quality is maintained while doing 9x fewer texture fetches.
- Throttle shadow depth pass to every 2 frames; OpenGL depth texture persists
between frames so receivers always have a valid shadow map. 1-frame lag at
60 fps is invisible.
Drop specular lighting from terrain shader — ground materials (dirt, grass,
stone) are purely diffuse and specular highlights made them look plastic.
Replace Reinhard tonemapper with a shoulder-only compressor that is identity
below 0.9 and softly rolls off HDR values above, preserving scene contrast.
Replace hardcoded specular multipliers with uLightColor * uSpecularIntensity
uniforms in all 4 world shaders (terrain, WMO, M2, character), set HDR sun
color (1.5, 1.4, 1.3) and specular intensity 0.5 so highlights can exceed
1.0, and switch the post-process pass from passthrough to exposure-compensated
Reinhard (exposure=1.8) for soft highlight roll-off without clipping.
