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zergrush

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Yeah the softshadows are a huge FPS hammer, even worse i found than the hacked SSAO.

I can run sikkmod with everything but that on and its still playable but then again my PC is a beast that i doubt many could afford :S.

Fixing access to the depthbuffer will most likely make SSAO viable, and it does indeed make the game darker :) but coupled with sikkpins HDR shaders it looks rather amazing and not dark at all.

 

Shot from a certain secret area in Doom3

 

w9w7cl.jpg

 

uses SSAO SSIL HDR and Colorgrading.

Edited by revelator
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It could also help with soft-shadows, yes.

 

Though I was thinking that another option would be to write all shadow silhouette pixels as a clamped fading ramp

might be faster than blurring them.

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As for realistic amount of radiosity bounces, it's not necessary.

For realtime rendering, having just 1 bounce makes a HUGE difference. I know in Quake 3, q3map2.exe, you could set the number of bounces, and it would take forever.

I tried with 8 bounces once, my map went from 3 hours of compiling time to 26 hours.

It looked great though.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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Fantastic work Steve and Revelator guy, if SSAO gets finally implemented then TDM will definitely win with this, not only on visuals but also potentially on performance. New Horizon with SSAO in, you guys could reduce the amount of real shadows to a minimum and gain significant performance without loosing anything on looks, SSAO is very good at grounding objects (making them look has if on the ground) even when there's no shadows, so small and non important objects can have their shadows disabled and still look fine.

 

About soft shadows i don't think the Skippin ones are a good option (not trying to take from his fantastic job), for example with RBDoom3BFG soft shadows i can run the game just fine with all on maximum but with Skippin soft shadows on vanilla Doom3 performance is all over the place, the only way for TDM to have good performing soft shadows IMO, is if they are closely integrated into the render engine, and not something hackd in.

Edited by HMart
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Some commercial engines have blurred stencil shadows so it's not completely without precedent. Sikkpin's method is just harder on the renderer than anything

because it re-renders all that shadow fill twice and does multiple blur operations. Both are known rendering pitfalls. Now a more integrated version could be done.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Some commercial engines have blurred stencil shadows so it's not completely without precedent. Sikkpin's method is just harder on the renderer than anything

because it re-renders all that shadow fill twice and does multiple blur operations. Both are known rendering pitfalls. Now a more integrated version could be done.

 

Yes the idtech 4 based wolfenstein has fantastic soft stencil shadows.

 

 

Question for Revelator, i downloaded your latest engine source but i can't compile it, it says it has a VS 2010 solution on the read me but when i try to open it with 2010 it says it was made on a new VS, found you made it with VS 2012 but i only have VS 2010 and VS 2013. Will you make available a VS 2010 solution?

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Go into the project properties in the general tab and check which version is shown in the platform version, it should be v100.

I forgot to change it back when i made my new branch.

 

edit:

 

need to do this on DoomDLL game game-d3xp idlib typeinfo and MayaImport (not really nessesary unless you have the maya sdk).

Edited by revelator
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Your a freaking machine steve :wub:

Stared myself blind sometimes when i tried to get my head around the shader interface to the renderer B) .

I guess you noticed the transposeglmatrix function ? :) that one had me a little thrown of untill i noticed that vanilla does'nt use standard matrix calls.

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Hmm I haven't thought of fog. I'd have thought fog should be very cheap. Fog is supported natively by the assembly language so if the current implementation is costly, I'll definitely check it out. I see what you mean: fog shaders have to know the distance so they know how much fog to apply. So, yes, we could do fog with depth capture, if that turns out to be better than however it's done now.

 

In the meantime, soft particles are working!!! :) I've only tried one method so far (out of three that I've read up on), but already it's looking very good. I'll make a video. I want to show a couple of effects that'd take me ages to set up in a test map (detailed geometry and reduced fps), so I hope people won't mind me using their released maps in a demo vid. I'll choose some splendid scenes that are let down slightly by hard particle clipping.

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Hey that is amazing. If we could get a cheap subtle distance "fog" that would make far off objects less detailed, that would be huge for TDM.

 

Right now, you either use the fog light and take the performance hit (which is pretty noticeable), or you have crystal clear view of objects a mile away, considering the map has open areas like that. We loose a lot in ambieance by not being able to use distance fog on a more general rule kind of way.

 

In the examples below, from Thief3, you can see how the blue fog makes objects and surfaces that are farther away become fuzzier in a subtle way.

 

thief3_052104__052104_013.jpg

 

t3main2012041510524895.jpg

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We have cheap fog, but it doesn't play well with skyboxes and caulk.

 

I know about the caulk issue, and why it happens. Caulk doesn't write any visible model surface to the proc file during dmap, so there's nothing to cap the fog distance. Is there an issue with skyportal too, or did you mean caulk-used-as-skyportal?

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Video #1 is up. I'll add the second one to this post in about half an hour.

 

http://youtu.be/iumyzCicOzM

 

Note to self: I really must learn to put a proper light or two in even if it's only a test map.

 

Wow that's awesome!

You should really make that a public video, seeing as this thread is in the public space on this forum, and well, it's totally awesome and something to get people excited about.

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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Yeah, thats lovely, pretty brilliant! The effect works like a charm.

 

Just a quick reply though: presumably a fog that is designed to have its effect over a big distance would have little effect inside buildings, unless you are looking at massive strucutres like Heart of Lone Salvation's castle. Still, it would in fact be coherent and desirable to have it indoors as well. This matter was discussed ages ago.

 

The issue was that global ambient lights turn the map in a big, dimly lit world with no variations. Ambient light value can vary between locations, but thats not often used, as far as I know. Still, you always get a single light level inside the entire world/location. The only way to have true dark areas is to disable the ambient light completely. The feature that was being discussed would be a way of creating a radius around the player after which detail starts to fade. A thin black fog would create this effect, everything that is distant would become darker and less detailed. I would do that in my mission, but the impact was heavy, I was also using parallel lights outside (the moonlight). So Tels and I think also Obs were experimenting with attaching a big dim light on the player, what would de facto make an ambient light redundant (and thus eliminating it form the map). That aproach would however have to be studied, because AI also use the light level set by the ambient to notice things. Anyway, this is a short summary. Your depth rendering looks pretty good because it might help with this. But its a secondary feature I guess, since appearently you can in fact use fogs, within reason.

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