Posted by Rejechted on Aug 24, 2011; 11:15am
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/2D-Lighting-Tribulations-with-Shaders-tp3279698p3280670.html

Thanks for the advice, regarding ES2 we are in no way going for a mobile platform though.  The project is a bit more complicated than I may have let on.  If you can imagine castlevania, diablo 2, and mass effect esque concepts rolled into a side scrolling environment, you essentially have our project.  This means skill trees and an action bar full of various key-bound abilities and the need to be able to have a large and detailed field of vision.  These two things mean that while we would love to have access to that market, our concept simply isn't built for it.

The concepts for graphics that we are trying to achieve are not very complex, and we're going to have to test what features are compatible with various users' hardware so that we can reach as many people as possible.  For this reason we are avoiding ES2 for the time being.  A lot of the techniques used to render shadows in 3D don't even translate to 2D because of the nature of what 2D is and what a light source is.  If you have a light source in 2D on the same Z as the textures, you are not really casting light on them at all because the dot product of the normal and the light source is zero.

Thanks for the tips, we'll look at the links and see what we can do.