Custom frob idea

[Oktokolo]

The non-frobbed highlight should be applied on shiny valuables only. Could be enabled by a spawn arg.

Sometimes i miss some valuables hidden in plain sight because they do not look as shiny in TDM as in other games. Extra shinyness would surely make that special goods stand out a bit more.

 

That new frob could indeed be more reliably than the vanilla one. A test map containing frobable stuff with different diffuse and specular maps in different lighting conditions would indeed be great.

[peter_spy]

Something small with new frob on stock assets and tweaks for different lighting conditions would be easier than changing it for all the objects. I will be using this frob for all objects in my mission, but it won't be released this year, I'm afraid.

Edited March 15, 2018 by Judith

[peter_spy]

This is something closer to outlines we often see in modern games. It's just a blend add stage with texture made from curvature map generated by Substance Painter. The result depends on how you make your models and normalmaps, so it's not something you can do on the fly for all your models. More like a curiosity and not feasible in the long run.

 

[STiFU]

Looks awesome. Duzenko has already planned to remove the frob highlight shader stages for 2.08 and move frob highlight to a separate glsl shader. So that will open doors to easily swap different frob highlights. :-) This one is a good candidate for inclusion. However, I am not sure how this frob highlight will look in a darker scene.

[peter_spy]

Unfortunately, this is just a hack. It wouldn't work with e.g. cylindrical or spherical shapes, the outline wouldn't move with the camera. But having proper working outline like this isn't easy even in modern engines: http://www.michalorzelek.com/blog/tutorial-creating-outline-effect-around-objects/

 

Frob in a separate glsl program is a great idea, I bet it would be easier to write a proper frob outline, or just use other custom solutions with such system.

 

Edit: At this point I'm thinking about what I used so far, so a cubemap but with this subtle slow pulse (alpha animated via simple table), so it's draws player's attention in most lighting conditions. Unfortunately cubemaps look dimmed in strong lighting. A blend add stage will look better, but it can't encompass the whole model in even manner, it needs some contrast. Stuff I did above needs custom alpha texture for every interactive object, so it's a no-go in a long run. A GLSL program that can use model geometry to do this, as in the link above, would be the best solution.

Edited January 4, 2019 by Judith

[OrbWeaver]

Frob in a separate glsl program is a great idea, I bet it would be easier to write a proper frob outline, or just use other custom solutions with such system.

 

Yeah, those extra shader stages were really ugly and potentially bad for performance, due to massively increasing the number of required draw calls regardless of whether something was frobbed or not. It's great to hear that this is being moved into the actual renderer where it belongs (which of course is only possible now that the full engine source is available).

[peter_spy]

 

Yeah, those extra shader stages were really ugly and potentially bad for performance, due to massively increasing the number of required draw calls regardless of whether something was frobbed or not.

 

Actually, the frob doesn't generate any additional drawcalls until you're in frobbing range. And even with more complex frobs, like the cubemap one (2 stages), you get +2 DCs, so not so much. But doing it for every object is tiresome, as is adjusting the effect manually.