3D light enhancements

[Kevin Rushforth]

Both enhancements seem like interesting additions to JavaFX's 3D API. As 
long as it's only the 3D support that will no longer work on older cards 
-- meaning that those older cards will no longer report that 
ConditionalFeature.SCENE3D is supported, but 2D HW acceleration will 
still be available -- then this seems fine to me. Given that these 
enhancements will only touch the 3D shaders, it should be fairly 
straight-forward to make the check for shader model be part of the "is 
3D supported" calculation.

-- Kevin


On 1/2/2019 4:31 PM, Nir Lisker wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> FalcoTheBold and I been discussing enhancements to the 3D lighting
> mechanism on GitHub [1]. The summary is as follows:
>
> 1. We want to add additional light types: directional light and spotlight.
> 2. We want to add attenuation and range parameters to the current point
> light and future spotlight.
>
> Our efforts are currently directed at 2, specifically, adding attenuation
> (inc. range) to the current point light. Some preliminary results for the
> d3d pipeline can be seen in [2]. I'm working on the d3d pipeline (with a
> lot behind-the-scenes help from Ambarish) while Falco is working on the es2
> pipeline. Iv'e also taken upon me to do the Java side modifications.
>
>  From the 3d3 pipeline perspective, it seems that this change will require
> upgrading the shader models from 2.0 to 3.0. This means that backwards
> compatibility is lost for graphic cards that support DirectX 9.0 but not
> 9.0c. Fortunately, these should be a small number of very old cards.
>
> On the API level, I'm thinking about adding 4 `DoubleProperty`s to
> PointLight for the 3 attenuation factors and the range. Their default
> values are such that current behavior is preserved. SpotLight will also
> have these values (in addition to other required parameters).
>
> If this plan is approved by Kevin/Johan, I will create JBS tickets for
> step-by-step implementations. Other comments are welcome.
>
> Thanks,
> Nir
>
> [1] https://github.com/javafxports/openjdk-jfx/issues/256
> [2]
> https://github.com/javafxports/openjdk-jfx/issues/256#issuecomment-450762358