These last few days I've been working on adding a decal system into the game, as well as some new artwork.

I really wanted to go in-depth discussing the decal system, and what I've learned, but right now I'm too damn tired :-/ The decals are used to represent scorch marks from explosions, bullet holes, blood splatters, graffiti, etc.

Here is a screenshot of the decal system in action, with a test decal -


I've been referencing the decal article in GPG2 and you're basically supposed to determine the plane of the decal, and clip it against all the potentially intersecting triangles, which (can) result in a new set of triangles. This is fine, but the article doesn't really go into detail about how to determine the best tangent space for the decal. I tried using the U coordinate associated with the intersected triangle...that worked as expected, but will not always look correct...see this screenshots...


Anyways, after examining the decal system in the Source engine, I've noticed that their system is pretty "hit and miss" with the decals only wrapping around surfaces correctly a small percentage of the time, and only if the decal is close enough to the intersection of the surfaces.

It works fine 99% of the time, I'm not gonna loose sleep over this one, especially this late in the project. Here are some more screenshots of the current state of the decal system...







I've also just started creating some new artwork for the city...I made this building (the one in the center) earlier today...


I decided that I needed a basketball court, so the gangstas could play some b-ball...I'm going to add a basketball onto the center of each court, to test the multiplayer physics as well...[grin]








And here you can see a screenshot showing the two different LODs...


But yea...I need to re-code the actual shadow mapping, probably tomorrow. I'm tired of this hack I've got in there for the shadows ATM. Also, this GeForce 8800 is flooring my game, I need to allow measurement of more than 60+ FPS because that's all I ever get now, no matter what resolution, FSAA, etc. Always 60+ FPS.

Final note, I need to update the journal more often [grin].

- Dan