Feature requests

[John-Nagle]

There was some discussion of new features being added to Rend3. Here's my current wish list.

Important

• Support the three basic glTF light types - point (that's in), directional (for the sun, that works now), and cone. Cone lights that don't throw shadow and have a distance limit can cover most cases. Point lights tend to go through roofs and walls and look bad, but you can light a room with many short-range cone lights and have it look good. Real illumination values and automatic tone-mapping go with this.\

Less important

• Second Life now has environmental reflections, and even mirrors, although you're limited to one mirror being live at a time. So, eventually, I'd like reflections. It's not essential right now.
• Some examples of environmental shaders (fog, etc.) would be useful. This is more of a user-level thing.
• Order-independent transparency would be nice, The transparency sort doesn't always do the right thing. But this isn't essential.
• I've been implementing the ability to click on 3D things in my own application. Bounding boxes eliminate most of the objects from consideration. Eventually, though, I have to do a ray vs. textured mesh test. Help from Rend3 and the GPU would be nice but is not essential. I only have to test a few meshes, and can do that in the application. I don't have the meshes and textures handy in memory, though, because I sent them to the GPU. If I could request a copy of a texture or mesh back, given a MeshHandle or TextureHandle, that would be useful. If not, I can work around that, but I have to do a lot of work, possibly re-fetching from a server. if this is easy, it's worth having; if it's hard, just say so.

So, from my perspective, the main near-term thing is full lighting support. The other stuff is less critical, and behind bug fixing and performance bug fixing in importance. Thanks.