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Tweaks to Frob highlight


New Horizon

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Maybe moving the light vector is not the best solution; the effect I am thinking of is something like the one that is applied to various objects in The Cradle in TDS, which are "important" but not loot. The effect looks like a sort of subtle band of light which passes over the object every few seconds.

 

Alternatively, a simple sinusoidal pulse of the highlight intensity might work as well.

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I would prefer not having any effects to show you that something is important and do that through the object itself (texture and model).

But a lot of such effects are possible with shaders and material definitions.

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Rebb, what would it take to implement your froblight, so we could test it in game?

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I would prefer not having any effects to show you that something is important and do that through the object itself (texture and model).

 

I wasn't suggesting using an effect to identify important objects, I was suggesting using a gently animated effect to supplement the static frob highlight (on any object) with a view to addressing any issues with the highlight being difficult to distinguish in brightly-lit areas.

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The setup should now be available on the CVS, i hope the upload worked because i had tortoiseSVN act up a bit.

 

Just start the test/frobhighlighting.map.

 

Note that only the vase has a time-animated pulsing on the frob-effect - but this can be enabled/disabled for the other objects by editing the test_frobhighlight.mtr file and commenting/uncommenting the respective "vertexParm 0 xyz" lines in each material.

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Yes, on first run-through this is an improvement, though it might be more clear with models that have a strong normalmap. I like the subtle pulsing effect, but I'm hesitant to want to use it by default. I think it could get distracting, especially on locked doors or other objects you have to frob for some duration. I'll test a few different models tomorrow.

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Very nice, I like it a lot. :)

The amplitude of the pusling effect is a little bit too strong for me, and if you happen to highlight the vase when it is darkest, the frob hightlight is not that easy to see. I played around a little bit with the shader, this works a little bit better I think:

 

vertexParm	0	(sinTable[ time * 0.25 ] * 0.2) + 0.8 // effect strength

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Right now it's only available in the frobhighlighting test-map when you go into the "Test" alcove to enable it.

But you can copy this stage into other materials :

 

{
if ( parm11 > 0 )

blend add
program frob.vfp
vertexParm	0	1
// vertexParm	0	(sinTable[ time * 0.25 ] * 0.2) + 0.8 // effect strength
fragmentMap 0	theNormalMap // normalmap
fragmentMap 1	theDiffuseMap // diffusemap
fragmentMap 2	theSpecularMap // specularmap
}

 

Then set the 3 fragmentMaps to the respective Textures of the object and comment out the standard frobhighlight-stage in them so they don't overlap.

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Sorry, thanks (I probably skipped right over it).

 

Looks pretty good. I'm undecided about the pulse. On the one hand, it serves a definite useful purpose. On the other hand, we wouldn't want it to be too "gamey." Perhaps it's not though... hm. The brightest phase of it is very nice.

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  • 1 month later...

We could extend the sintable[] expression to something like this:

sinTable[ time * 0.25 ] * 0.2 * parm10

such that we can control the pulsating effect via a CVAR from within the SDK. If we don't like it, we just set parm10 to 0 and we're set.

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@Flanders :

The current CVS Version shouldn't have the "frob highlight pulses in and out" effect any more, only the coins in the map have a subtle "blinking" type of effect on them. Unless thats what you meant with the pulsating ?

 

@greebo :

Yeah, such a Shaderparm-CVar could be handy to toggle some extra effect on the frob-highlight.

 

I guess the biggest problem with a new frob-highlight effect would be to write some clever script which replaces the current frob-stages in the materials with a new one, somehow pulling the specular / diffuse / normalmap settings of the encompassing material into it :ph34r:.

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@Flanders :

The current CVS Version shouldn't have the "frob highlight pulses in and out" effect any more, only the coins in the map have a subtle "blinking" type of effect on them. Unless thats what you meant with the pulsating ?

I'll update and look again.

 

I guess the biggest problem with a new frob-highlight effect would be to write some clever script which replaces the current frob-stages in the materials with a new one, somehow pulling the specular / diffuse / normalmap settings of the encompassing material into it :ph34r: .

Tels has a lot of experience with that, maybe he can help us.

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  • 3 weeks later...

So, what's left to take this over the finish-line? The script to implement this in all shaders? How is this new method affecting performance (out of curiosity)? Is there anything left to implement coding-wise, then I'll try to help here.

 

It'd be a bit of a shame to let rebb's effort go wasted, methinks.

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Yes, pulsing is a non-starter with me. Especially when so many things highlight in TDM.

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