Lighting, Transparency and Model Loader Improvements

I have been accomplished quite a bit since the last blog post, most of the time was spent doing the Lighting in the shaders as this was a problem. Whilst looking at a few examples online I ran into a fair bit of trouble mostly because the calculations were all done in view space which was confusing but also because the majority of them used the gl_NormalMatrix which is part of the fixed pipeline. After attempting to do it as they had in view space a few times I gave up and decided to do it in world space as it was much simpler. The gl_NormalMatrix was fairly simple to figure out as it is just the transposed inverse of the ModelViewMatrix. 

Anyway here is a result of what my Point Light looks like at the moment, there are still some issues with the specular lighting but that won't take too long to figure out. 

So the next thing I have been working on almost side by side with the lighting is implementing transparency with textures, this came about as I wanted to create a model to display the light and to do so I used two intersecting quads to create a 3D billboard of a star. You can see this in the video below:

My first game for the JBEngine is a small squash sports game that I have been wanting to make for a while. After collecting some models for this I noticed they were not displayed correctly. This is due to the fact that my model loader wasn't fully developed and didn't allow for relative transformations of submeshes. I have now implemented this as you can see in the image on the right: 

Model with Multiple Submeshes that have relative transformations from the source.

The Barrels are all part of one Mesh file but are all offset from the centre using a transformation matrix. I still have some issues using Texture Atlases as you might be able to see in the picture and that is one of the next things I will be trying to figure out. 

All is going pretty well with my project and I'm hoping I might be able to move onto game specific stuff soon.

Cheers :)