Slides and example from Delphi Day 2025 presentation and after-thoughts (Afterwarp, shadow maps, BGFX and deferred rendering)

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Throw chickens

I’m traveling back home after enjoying Delphi Day 2025 in Piacenza.

  1. I think I’ve made a nice presentation about the engine features.

    Slides are available here and one new (simple and fun 🙂 ) example is part of the engine now: examples/physics/physics_throw_chickens.

    During the talk, I also showed a number of existing projects, including platformer, fps_game, complete FPS game using Blender, Sketchfab, Quaternius models, TCastleMoveAttack (shown first at Zlot 2024).

  2. I also watched a number of inspiring presentations from fellow Delphi users. It was really good to see so much activity around Delphi and Pascal!

  3. One talk that in particular remains in my memory was about the Afterwarp Framework by Yuriy Kotsarenko. I was truly amazed by some features he shown, in particular the deferred shading implementation combined with shadow maps that allows to have 65k dynamic light sources casting shadows (and he showed demos really proving it — one demo with really ridiculous 65k dynamic lights, one demo with over a thousand lights casting shadows and car with headlights moving through them). Really impressive, and it makes me jealous, and I told him about it 🙂

    To make it happen, deferred rendering is the key (in contrast to the current CGE forward rendering). I was looking into this in the past… but there was never enough time to “attack” it, as it’s a bigger task. Possibly our optimal path forward is to speedup BGFX renderer integration, as BGFX will give us deferred rendering, and we want to have BGFX as alternative renderer anyway.

  4. I had a few “nudges” recently to focus more on our shadow maps as a preferred shadows algorithm, and maybe leave the shadow volumes as… maintained, but not default.

    To explain more:

    • In the current engine version, shadow volumes are more comfortable to setup (just click 1 checkbox, if only your models are 2-manifold), while we have a few TODOs to make shadow maps comfortable.

    • But the shadow maps have likely a brighter future: more performance, because you can control the shadow map resolution and frequency of updates, which was pointed both by Afterwarp presentation and recent forum thread where Erik Johnson managed to use our shadow maps with great performance gain. Also, shadow maps work out-of-the-box with our upcoming (not yet merged to master) skinned animation on GPU, while shadow volumes… in short, require fallback to animate skin on CPU (see TODO there for more details). So, again, shadow maps seem to give “more performance, easily”.

    • And of course shadow maps “just work” with any geometry, 2-manifold or not, and even account for alpha testing (e.g. precise shadows cast by typical leaf textures). So there’s no need to worry about whether your 3D model is 2-manifold, and no need to tweak RenderOptions.WholeSceneManifold either.

  5. So, two thoughts coming from the above: shadow maps improvements are important (and don’t be afraid to make shadow maps, not shadow volumes, default) and BGFX renderer is important. OK, this actually validates our roadmap, with shadow maps before 7.0, and BGFX after 🙂

Have fun everyone! Stay tuned for more technical announcements next week. And if you like what we do please support us e.g. by subscribing on Patreon.