Day 16: A Little Ambience

After some investigation into the lighting issue I was having yesterday, it looks as though I set the wrong direction on the light, causing some very dark shading in places. I had also set the direction of the light to change too quickly. After fixing it, we should be fixed, correct?

Nope! Those dark parts still showed up. It looks as if the lighting needed to be combined with an ambient aspect (of which I completely forgot), so I pulled that in. However, the ambient color isn't a hot cyan...

Looks like the alignment of members in the c-buffers (buffers that hold constant information across shaders) is quite important! Important enough to not reverse diffuse and ambient color information. The actual ambient coloring:

Which, when added to the actual diffuse lighting, greatly improves the lighting of the scene and makes it good enough to move on:

As for homework? Yes, we actually got some homework! It was going over a demonstration of code optimization done by a Mr. Mike Acton from a GDC 2015 talk. That is, going over the proper order of looping variables on a matrix when one side (height) greatly exceeds another. Row-major seemed like the answer, but we're required to actually show the profiling and averages on Excel. Simple, right?

Eh. eeh. The way that I'm setting up the matrix seems to be a little off. The height is something like 8192 * 1024, but the width ranges from 2 - 512. At some point, the INT_MAX is reached and I'm not sure I can alloc that much memory at once. I'll have to inquire about the assignment tomorrow.