nbohr1more

This is a tough one. Doom 3 is very scalable, so it's unlikely that a mapper would hit an obstruction that affects all classes of hardware (maybe entity limit?) the way that many Dromed based missions are claimed to behave... But instead it is perfectly possible that a mission could be made that runs beautifully on a High-End system yet destroys any other class of hardware. The results would be interesting... Maybe (selfishly?) the best looking mission that runs on x class of hardware (hopefully not much higher than mine ).

Your search-fu has defeated my search-fu plasticman. (nbohr1more bows down)

Wicked coolz! Now someone needs to write the the plugin... ... ... (wishes I had the skills... ) Cool anyway. All sorts of nifty stuff can be done with this level of access... Thanks Greebo!

Maybe Greebo is humoring these ideas after all? See tracker: 0002359

Sikkpin last evening

A beauty contest sits well with me. Hopefully all the big-guns would participate.

If dynamic cubemap scripting were possible, you could collect one cubemap per scene then reduce it to a filter map ala similar to how this method is a radiance map: http://wiki.polycount.com/DiffuselyConvolvedCubeMap?action=show&redirect=Diffusely+Convolved+Cube+Map If you could use a light reactive filter (GL Minus One?) then it would be like a precomputed screen-space AO map similar to HL2's precomputed radiance. But it would require mappers to collect cubemaps for every room and would depend on the ability to script cubemap blends...

Hmm... Maybe just horizontal parallax occlusion and have the vertical cubemap orientations all white... Again, it's still pretty hacky...

You've got it. It's an attempt at real cheap (hacky?) SSAO method. I was trying to see if pre-computing the occlusion via a cubemap would save a little performance but there are TONS of caveats as both I and (now) you have pointed out. It still might be a cool post process effect but there are probably better uses for those passes.

I was hoping you would chime in, thank you. Yes, the idea is really simple, I think, (probably dumb too...), but we simply make things that are at an off angle to the viewer occlude. We are using camercubemap to track the angles to viewer. Yeah, AO is a confusing term these days but I imagine that most modern light-maps do not use AO for GI but instead use a more accurate GI method. So using AO to describe occlusions in a baked GI is bound to lead to confusion. I suppose you could instead call it Global Occlusion. So you would have GI and GO? (Two sides of the same coin?) Edit: Don't worry about derailing any of my threads..

Angle based occlusion is part of all current real-time SSAO implementations. Yes, if the filter is too strong it will look wrong but I have seen some pretty wrong looking AO demonstrations from ATI and Nvidia. They exaggerated the effect to make sure you could easily tell the difference. If I'm not mistaken, ordinary AO maps only include depth based AO. So having cubemap angle based AO and and AO depth map should complete all the basic requirements (other than that the depth based AO is not dynamic...). Yes, these are crude AO methods and do not factor in occlusion interactions with the light-space. That thread was the closest reference to the technique I am proposing but relies on six cubemaps instead of one (and is not piggy-backing on the camera system for it's engine...). My technique probably bears a closer resemblance to this: http://wiki.polycoun...volved+Cube+Map ...except we are reducing the light-space to the absurd "If it faces me it's brighter". If applied in a subtle fashion, it may still enhance the look though. But yes, there are still many questions: 1) Will the Normals in the Normal Map react to the filter correctly? If not we are doing AO per poly which would look very ugly... 2) How do we ensure that the Cubemap correctly occupies the camera-space so that is occludes correctly? If this were not reliant on Doom 3's fixed camera space calculation, we could adjust the Z factors more accurately without having to play with the cubemap image as much. (unless camercubemap has variable proportion controls????) Finally, I would be careful about referring to anybody's experiments as "FAIL", especially when you have claimed that Thief 2 has AO: http://modetwo.net/d...post__p__222499 This is an absurd notion as AO is dependent on view space and baked lighting does not react to view-space. Yes there are occlusions but they are due to GI not AO.

Cubemap gradient concept I presume that the cubemap should have a gradient like this:

Did you ever finish those gallows http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/8077-jerboa-would-like-to-assist/ ...

If you are thinking of cheating by adding inventory to your in-game character I don't have any tips of the top of my head but you could look at the inventory selection area of the start map and review the Start Mappers guide in the wiki... I'm sure the number of items can be adjusted that way... (Got side-tracked during my Dark Radiant training and started exploring these odd-ball ideas... ) (Edit: yep, they are in the wiki... ) (Edit Edit: Specific wiki section. )

Whoops.... Well it looks like TDM stuff is easier to track-down too.

Are you missing Stumpy's missions from this wiki? http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Fan_Missions_for_The_Dark_Mod

Actually the light from a torch should overwhelm the soft-shadows baked into the Strombine projection image but if a soft-shadow disappears and a hard-shadow appears right near it, it may be a bit jarring... (just to clarify your previous post)...

You have gotten the gist of the Strombine concept but I'm afraid that this is a different topic LEGION

I try (as much as possible) to keep my weirdo rambling out of the official spaces LEGION ... (Trying to be courteous to the editors). This is the next best option other than "Off-Topic". (When I post 90% ramble, it's hard not to clutter things up anyway... )

It may still be useful to make the darkened area light reactive... textures/your_desired_editor_texture_folder/your_texture_name { description "Add here a little description of your texture" qer_editorimage textures/your_file_folder/your_texture_name_ed bumpmap textures/your_file_folder/your_texture_name_local diffusemap textures/your_file_folder/your_texture_name specularmap textures/your_file_folder/your_texture_name_s { forceHighQuality blend gl_zero, gl_one_minus_src_color cameraCubeMap env/fake_AO texgen reflect zeroclamp //alphazeroclamp colored } }

(For my own reference because I'm on work PC more than at home to try these things ) textures/your_desired_editor_texture_folder/your_texture_name { description "Add here a little description of your texture" qer_editorimage textures/your_file_folder/your_texture_name_ed bumpmap textures/your_file_folder/your_texture_name_local diffusemap textures/your_file_folder/your_texture_name specularmap textures/your_file_folder/your_texture_name_s { forceHighQuality blend filter cameraCubeMap env/fake_AO texgen reflect } } Since it's just an effect, we probably don't need to actually GL subtract? (unless filter does that anyway? not light reactive...) Tests pending... (unless someone chimes in and says this wont work at all... )

Ever since the light baking thread I've been thinking about the following question: "Why not use GL Subtractive Camera-Space Cubemaps to approximate AO in all materials?" As the angle of the texture/material trends away from the viewer, it will get darker a la AO. So... 1) Can GL Minus One be applied to a cubemap stage in a material definition? 2) Is it still too expensive to apply cameracubemap to all (or most?) materials in a scene? Similar discussion for the OGRE engine: http://www.ogre3d.or...=37128&start=25 Edit: filter key word?

Yep. The "Tea Party" is the false populist movement. It's a way to round-up all the angry yet incoherent voters and make them vote for the establishment without knowing this is the case. If this keeps on happening we'll end-up with Julius Cesar again (just like George Lucas predicted...? I'm so sorry... ) ...as the populists keep handing over more power to less people. They keep cheering "small government" wait 'till they see it's so small it consists of one person...

I'm loosing my mind over these pending releases... Must focus on FM's I haven't yet finished... Thanks for the heads-up Biker

Good luck and get well soon.