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Townscaper and Tiny Glade enjoyers should keep an eye on Björn Ottosson's upcoming cozy city-builder – they will definitely like what they see. Ottosson has worked at Frostbite and EA DICE, so he has plenty to say with his creation.
While it's still in development, the game is shaping up quite nicely, with cute houses and rocky cliffs catching the eye. Ottosson has been working on the lighting and rendering for the title – specifically, screen space ambient occlusion and global illumination he achieved with Mirko_Salm's GT-VBAO.
"I've known this for a long time, but it still amazes me how much of a difference ambient occlusion makes," the developer said.
In his latest experiments, Ottosson sampled a distant light instead of computing AO and added a heuristic for estimating occluder thickness.
For the distant light sampling, he estimated directions for each bucket in the visibility mask and evaluated the light for each one.
He also wanted to add occluder thickness estimation, but GT-VBAO's constant thickness has some issues, namely, it's impossible to tweak so that it works for varying sizes of occluders, and occlusion is binary, which means you get artifacts when a gap opens up behind an object.
"My solution is to estimate if subsequent samples along a horizon are a part of the same surface or not, and using that estimate the width of the surface. I then simply use the width as the thickness estimate. On top of that I randomly scale the thickness to reduce artifacts."
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