light pre-pass
Update on implementing deferred lighting in Ogre. In the previous few post where I mentioned how I was going to implement Deferred Lighting, I was actually thinking of Light Pre-pass rendering. Except, I recall reading somewhere that you can render a full G buffer in order to skip 2nd pass opaque scene rendering. The approach is not the traditional deferred shading due to some subtle differences. It's between light pre-pass and traditional deferred shading.
Anyways, I decided to not worry about that and just go with light pre-pass.
This blog post has a lot more details on this:
http://liquidrockgames.blogspot.com/2010/02/light-deferred-approach.html
Basically that's what I will do also, so I won't bore you with the details :)
Transparency
Perhaps when I get to handling transparency, I will just handle that using a forward renderer. I planned to try a different approach to rendering my terrain, which is to group the "cubes" by material, instead of relying on the texture atlas technique. Doing so will makes my life easier when doing forward rendering of transparent objects since these objects will be a single batch.
When I started my adventure into Minecraft clone, I had initially thought about doing it this way. It just using Texture Atlas was easier for me at the point.
fast light volume generation
I was thinking maybe I can use instancing to generate the light volumes. When I extract the lights from my Volume, they will be in a buffer of sorts, so it's just a matter of how to efficiently getting this buffer to the GPU. Of course for static lighting I don't have to update this buffer often, once I upload it to the GPU.