[I'd like to contribute my HDR implementation]

By the way, there seems to have been on and off talk about implementing soft-shadows, which seems to be a problem in Doom 3. What is your opinion on this, would you be able to implement them?

The way right now soft shadows are being done for Doom 3 requires one extra rendering pass for shadows, which is slow as heck. I can attempt an entirely different approach with everything done on GPU, but it's a huge task.

 

That is utterly beautiful! There seem to be some slight graphical glitches on Shot062 and Shot064 - the metal bits on the two towers look off. Otherwise, these are some exciting possibilities for TDM players.

 

[edit]Would I be able to enjoy this if I installed it on my doom3 install and loaded TDM?

 

Well, I certainly like criticism, but I don't think the metal on the tower looks off. In fact, it looks metallic now than before.

 

The modified interaction shader is just drop in thing. You just need to place it in the TDM folder.

 

Overall performance is an issue for us, as TDM is not like vanilla Doom 3. Under the hood, tdm is a lot more intensive and our core audience generally have mid to low range systems....myself included.

 

At most, I think we would be quite happy with just the test.vfp changes, we would make them an option just as we do with Rebb's enhanced interaction shader. Auto eye exposure is cool and all, but doesn't really fit the flavor of TDM.

 

Can we download your test.vfp to try out on our own systems?

Wow! You almost wrote the feature off ! Well, you can give me a chance to implement it and you can test it on different machines and if then you find out that it's not worth the performance hit (which there should not be much) then I'd agree. In such a case, you guys have nothing to lose.

 

Here's what I can do to keep the performance impact low:

 

As it is, the lighting model is an extension of blinn-phong (my very own version that can't be found in any book or paper) and not something as math heavy as cook-torrance, but visually produce almost same effect. Also, the postprocessing the right now the TDM has, is my own and I know that I can fit the new one with nearly the same performance impact. I am ready to trim down the new version of postprocessing if need be. Also, it can be turned off through console and a parameter can be hooked in into the settings GUI, so that people can easily turn it off from the menu.

 

I can factorize/approximate my version of test.vfp and make it faster without much of a visual difference. As Serpentine said the contrast is little high between the bright and dark and it can be tweaked by changing one value in the test.vfp, but I can just hook in a postprocessing parameter so that the contrast becomes user configurable.

 

What automatic eye exposure can do:

When you are standing into a bright area and looking at dark corners but could see almost nothing unless you move out of the brightness and stare at the dark are few seconds longer. Or, when you are hiding into the shadows and you see lit areas slightly brighter. Also, when you are looking at a scene with parts bright and parts dark then the contrast will be dynamically shifted giving a nice visual contrast.

 

 

As for AO maps, I think TDM 1.0 shipped with a single one, I dont know if it would be worth the effort, but maybe I should set up a scene and see.

 

Precomputed AO has advantages such as:

-For the fact that AO is constant at any time of day, it can be baked.

-The baked AO, if stored as a map can be applied based on direction of light with next to no performance loss.

-The baked AO can account for all the occluding geometry in the map as well as the normal maps and is accurate than SSAO.

-Character lighting looks far more superior with AO maps (than without them), with only drawback that, AO remains constant when character changes pose and the character does not cast soft-AO-shadows on surroundings.

 

If you could set up a room with AO maps that'd be really great! I have to change a line or two to apply AO based on direction of light. Also, AO looks very good with hemispheric ambient. A lot of current generation games use bake AO into their diffuse e.g. Rage does it for environment, crysis does it for characters (despite the fact that crysis has SSAO).

 

On a side note, I'd suggest to use specular map to store AO, specular, glossyness in R, G abd B channel respectively. We can get nice simulation of shiny as well as rusty surfaces with zero performance sacrifice. That also means the specular intensity should be a gray-scale map.

 

 

 

[I'd like to contribute my HDR implementation]

Hi,

 

I am the same guy who had done Denton's Enhanced Doom 3 mod, from which the bloom effect is now being used in The Dark Mod. I'd like to integrate my latest implementation of HDR with TDM. You can find some WIP screenshots of my HDR with automatic eye exposure and modified blinn-phong lighting with approximated fresnel, glossyness, self-shadow term and hemispheric ambient.

 

http://www.doom3worl...6eb9c286cc5070d

 

I would love to work on The Dark Mod. I hadn't been able to touch modding for almost two and half+ years, something I have always missed. Nowadays, I work on such stuff, mostly on weekends and rarely on weekdays. I'd like to contribute the HDR implementation.

 

You can check some screenshots taken from TDM with modified test.vfp that has aforementioned lighting model, HDR encoding and hemispheric ambient lighting modified to work the TDM way ;-).

 

http://www.filefront...ewLighting.rar/

 

Note that, the images are result of only changed test.vfp. To further enhance the look and to add automatic eye exposure I'll have to add the new postprocessing mechanism to TDM. Also, having worked with artist at our company to create assets that'd best utilize an engine in terms of visual goodness, I can suggest few things on content creation/modification, some of which, I suspect, you guys are already doing on dark mod (stuff like AO maps for example).

 

Also, I can work on improving the water and stuff like accurate under water fogging.