Has anyone every tried some deferred shading stuff?
I really like the deferred lighting, screen-space ambient occlusion, bloom, and edge detection based anti aliasing.

I know we have bloom and fog, which are both deferred shaders, and I've found some nice whitepapers on the implementations.

I know kloot implemented dynamic lights, but iirc it wasnt deferred, but calculated separately for each fragement, with no scissor culling.


Screen-space ambient occlusion:
http://www.gamerendering.com/2009/01/14/ssao/

Deferred lighting, bloom and screen-space AA:
http://bat710.univ-lyon1.fr/~jciehl/Public/educ/GAMA/2007/Deferred_Shading_Tutorial_SBGAMES2005.pdf

Finding papers is not the problem (we read them), the implementation is. Deferred shading would be easy if there wasn't a giant Lua API allowing raw OpenGL access at pretty much every rendering stage, and if all current FFP/non-GLSL code were dropped entirely (realize what those points mean for us and the userbase: major cleanup and abstraction would be required across all renderer components, all widget/gadget drawing would have to be MRT'ed, all players with Intel GPU's would be cut off, etc). It is also too complex to make optional.

A nicer post-processing pipeline that includes SSAO (for which there is even a half-finished shader widget floating around, iirc) and bloom effects is a more realistic goal, but still hairy enough. Spring just is a victim of its own flexibility and age.

I wrote a deferred shading tech demo for a class project a while back. But as Kloot said, implementing it in Spring is a much harder project, and will break a lot things.

Thanks for the rundown guys, clears alot of things up for me.