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Found 3 results

  1. As most players will surely agree, one of the things that make TDM great are its visual capabilities, which come from idTech 4 having been so well designed. As I've been playing more with rendering and game engines during the last period, I realized this is something worth bringing up in the graphics department. I dare suggest it since frankly, TDM has some of the best graphics in the world of open-source games today... the idea of adding a common effect that would rocket its visual quality even higher sounds acceptable enough to post about. Typically there are two light occlusion effects, though I can imagine them combined in one by a smart renderer: Ambient Occlusion to simulate darkening in tight spaces, and Global Illumination to simulate light reflecting off surfaces. They're often costly to calculate for realtime lights, but there are engines that do it right... Tesseract (FPS based on Cube 2) offers a great example of doing FPS-cheap GI! A more serious problem specific to TDM is that this would affect the brightness of areas, and in turn the gameplay on existing maps... it would need to be an user option for this reason. I'm mostly curious on the opinions of the devs; Could at least SSAO be considered at some point, if not an implementation for radiosity? Some examples of why this is so awesome.
  2. I hope this isn't a useless thread, just thought it would be constructive to let everyone know about it. I was looking up some TDM related concerns, and accidentally stumbled across another fork of the idTech4 engine. It's called fhDOOM, and it seems to have a lot of neat graphical improvements over the stock engine. eXistence/fhDOOM There are definitely things in there that TDM could consider grabbing! Some important ones highlighted on their front page: Modern renderer based on OpenGL 3.3 core profile. Any up-to-date engine should have this as a norm.Parallax mapping. Not sure if we have this already... I only know the original engine had simple bump mapping.Soft shadows. A heavily desired and long awaited feature.Alpha textures affecting shadows. This allows light to shine through textured grates, which is a very beautiful improvement.Soft particles. This one we already have now however.An example of the old lighting system (ours) versus lighting with shadow mapping (fhDOOM): As the obstacle to new features is almost always finding someone willing to code them, discovering those improvements for our engine is a goldmine... since unless they conflict with any of our changes, I assume they should be easy to just plug into the code. Can any of this good stuff please be considered for inclusion in TDM's version of the engine?
  3. I recently saw a post about the functionality of the idTech 6 engine, which brought this suggestion to my attention. It's actually a simple and trivial improvement, although I can imagine people missing it and not thinking about its absence. Also keep in mind I don't know the lighting code of TDM, and everything I say is purely out of observation. Like most engines that use dynamic lighting, TDM tends to have considerable performance issues when a lot of lights are rendered at once. This is often because of shadows and possibly other calculations. A common way to prevent extra computation in the renderer is caching all lights, and only updating each one when necessary. Meaning either the light itself has moved, or something is moving in front of the light. If both the light and the geometry it affects are static, there is nothing to recalculate, which offers a significant performance boost. TDM has a serious problem here: Even if the engine already knows how to cache lights, every torch has a moving light source! If you look closely at a torch, you'll notice its shadows constantly bob around. While this makes sense aesthetically, it also means that light will be recalculated each frame... even if the torch is mounted on a wall and no physical object or NPC is currently moving within its radius. Since most maps use torches and have areas where characters don't walk in front of them, I see a notable performance improvement being lost here. My personal suggestion: First of all, does idTech 4 support light caching for static lights + geometry to begin with? If somehow the original engine didn't have that, I definitely think it should be patched in! Once that's solved, I believe moving light sources for flame based lights should be controlled by a cvar; If people are okay with the performance loss, they can enable that to get bobbing shadows... if not, disable to allow torch lights to be cached and improve overall FPS. An idea to compensate for the visual loss: Can't we use an animated light texture to simulate moving flames altogether, as well as pulsating brightness? The light bobbing looks pretty extreme anyway: In real life, candles have a smooth flame that casts a neat shadow, and shadows don't always move that chaotically even when it's a noisier flame like a campfire.
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