Encountering a Rather Big Problem...

I implemented photon gathering on the shader. A ray is first traced into the scene. Once it hits a surface, it looks for photons within a certain radius (spherical for now) and computes the radiance. This is computed by adding up the power (RGB channels) of all the photons, doing a dot product with the surface normal and the incident angle, and finally multiplying by a linear drop-off filter (I believe this is cone-filtering.)

Here is an initial result layered on top of ray tracing. 20 photons are initially casted, with final 49 photons in the global photon map.

The problem now is, I cannot increase the number of initial photons past 20 (on my laptop) or 35 (on a machine with decent graphics card.) The shader simply fails to initialize. I believe I am hitting some sort of temp variable limit, operations limit, or loop size limit. This is actually quite discouraging to me, since I need to cast at least 100 initial photons (~220 final photons) to make a decent image. I will further investigate the cause of the shader failure, and if there is a way around it.

Otherwise, if there exists such a barrier, I have a few backup ideas, but they will require that I majorly alter my framework:

1. Instead of having one big global photon map that will take time to loop through, create "local" photon maps, one per object in the scene, and only loop through that local map to look up photons when computing radiance.
2. Look at kd-tree for acceleration structure. It will help in reducing look-up time, but I do doubt that it will improve from 20 to 100. Also, I doubt this would be possible since GLSL ES does not allow random access to arrays.
3. Discard the single viewing plane framework and render onto the actual textures of WebGL geometries. This is quite "crazy" and I'm not sure whether it will work; it will also require huge changes to my code - basically a rewrite of most of my current framework.

I will keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best, since this is very critical to the success of the project.