[ 2.10 ] New Frob Shader

[Wellingtoncrab]

Hmm... it's not just edge case assets, but health potions and special arrows all have transparent components. Since the problems areas would be portions of a material which are fully transparent - not sure if there would be a way for the shader to tell the difference between those and say these types of glass surfaces?

 

[STiFU]

We have too many new frob shader threads.  I count 2 public and 2 internal.

[Wellingtoncrab]

Well this seems to be the one to actually discuss the frob shader. The other one is ostensibly about menu options related to frobbing and I didn’t want to add a bunch of clutter to the dev release thread. Is there somewhere else you’d recommend I post this?

[nbohr1more]

I think this is the right place. The other discussions should probably be moved here.

[Oktokolo]

16 hours ago, STiFU said:

We have too many new frob shader threads.  I count 2 public and 2 internal.

Most can't see the top secret ones which are for inner circle eyes only... 

And frobbing is a pretty important mechanic which is hard to get right and is perceived to work pretty good in current stable by most players. So it is hard to improve.

If you want to know the real potential maximum count of frob highlight threads, just ship the depth-ignoring glow version to stable users.
A mere two really isn't that much... 

[stgatilov]

The latest build dev16368-9627 contains a lot of changes in how frob outline/highlight works.
Moreover, the outline is enabled by default again... but not the same one as before.

Now there are two different implementations of frob outline:

1. Image-based outline is the old one (r_frobOutline 1) --- was default previously.
2. Geometric outline is the new one (r_frobOutline 2) --- currently set as default.

Note that the image-based outline works a bit differently than before: there were fixes for alpha-tested surfaces, depth fighting issues, translucent objects.

Both of the implementations have some strong and weak points, and it's not clear yet which one suits TDM better.

Cons of image-based outline:

• Outline has to be thick.
• Some visual artefacts due to depth test conflicts.

Cons of geometric outline:

• It does not fully support alpha-tested surfaces.
• Soft version has intensity bumps at mesh vertices.

To simplify testing, there are three presets which can be enabled easily:

• r_frobOutlinePreset 1:  hard geometric outline  (set as default for now)
• r_frobOutlinePreset 2:  soft geometric outline
• r_frobOutlinePreset 3:  image-based outline

Here r_frobOutlinePreset is just a command, which sets a bunch of cvars to proper values.
All three presets respect depth.

The old frob-related cvars should still work as they did, in case you want some fine-tuning.
You can also change thickness of geometric outline via cvar r_frobOutlineExtrusion.

[MirceaKitsune]

Thank you for your work and implementing all those different methods! I'm glad the feature is still working well by default in one form or another, that's what matters in my opinion. It will be nice to give the new one a test, will let you know what I think after that.

[duzenko]

Is the outline supposed to work for both old and new backend? I think it should though I vaguely remember something only working in new backend

[stgatilov]

8 minutes ago, duzenko said:

Is the outline supposed to work for both old and new backend? I think it should though I vaguely remember something only working in new backend

It seems frob outline does not work in old backend right now.

[MirceaKitsune]

I very much like the new implementation! Sharper and more accurate in many ways. Unfortunately it will not help much with geometry reliant on alpha textures, that might look ugly for a handful of assets.

Only one issue I'm seeing so far: It's causing bright speckles at least with my bloom settings. If it's shader based the outline should probably be processed after bloom not before it.

[wesp5]

11 minutes ago, MirceaKitsune said:

Only one issue I'm seeing so far: It's causing bright speckles at least with my bloom settings.

 

I haven't tried this myself yet, but just looking at this screenshot makes me dislike it again. I don't know if this is due to your bloom settings or not, but do you see all the big white pixels in the almost vertical lines that look completely gamey? They kill the atmosphere big time!

Edited October 11, 2021 by wesp5

[AluminumHaste]

20 hours ago, wesp5 said:

I haven't tried this myself yet, but just looking at this screenshot makes me dislike it again. I don't know if this is due to your bloom settings or not, but do you see all the big white pixels in the almost vertical lines that look completely gamey? They kill the atmosphere big time!

r_froboutlinecolora 0

[stgatilov]

20 minutes ago, MirceaKitsune said:

Only one issue I'm seeing so far: It's causing bright speckles at least with my bloom settings. If it's shader based the outline should probably be processed after bloom not before it.

Wow, sparklies!

Yes, bloom is applied after outline, and most likely it will remain so.

You can set "r_frobOutlineColorA 2" instead of "r_frobOutlineColorA 5": the outline will still look hard, but I don't get these uberlights on highest bloom settings.
It can be fixed properly of course, allowing to reduce r_frobOutlineColorA down to 1, but that would need code fix.

[stgatilov]

4 minutes ago, AluminumHaste said:

r_froboutline 0

This is (or soon will be) not an option, if you want to avoid the issue when an item is frobable but does not highlight at all.

[MirceaKitsune]

3 minutes ago, stgatilov said:

Wow, sparklies!

Yes, bloom is applied after outline, and most likely it will remain so.

You can set "r_frobOutlineColorA 2" instead of "r_frobOutlineColorA 5": the outline will still look hard, but I don't get these uberlights on highest bloom settings.
It can be fixed properly of course, allowing to reduce r_frobOutlineColorA down to 1, but that would need code fix.

Thanks: That would explain why I'm getting it with preset 1 whereas 2 mitigates it. I'd default the alpha to a lower value then if possible, the highlight is pretty solid anyway and less intensity may look better.

[Filizitas]

57 minutes ago, MirceaKitsune said:

I very much like the new implementation! Sharper and more accurate in many ways. Unfortunately it will not help much with geometry reliant on alpha textures, that might look ugly for a handful of assets.

Only one issue I'm seeing so far: It's causing bright speckles at least with my bloom settings. If it's shader based the outline should probably be processed after bloom not before it.

This looks amazing! Now we just need some more pbr! So good!

[wesp5]

2 hours ago, stgatilov said:

This is (or soon will be) not an option, if you want to avoid the issue when an item is frobable but does not highlight at all.

What does that mean? Wasn't it planned to replace the frob-helper-option with a remove-outline-option anyway?

[stgatilov]

6 minutes ago, wesp5 said:

What does that mean? Wasn't it planned to replace the frob-helper-option with a remove-outline-option anyway?

The main plan is to remove frob-highlight stages from materials.

It seems that it is not possible to implement a universal rule for highlighting all objects. The current rule works fine in 99% cases, but there are some objects which don't react. The outline is here to help with these cases.

So... please stop saying "just disable outline!", don't ignore the problem.

[wesp5]

3 hours ago, stgatilov said:

It seems that it is not possible to implement a universal rule for highlighting all objects. The current rule works fine in 99% cases, but there are some objects which don't react. The outline is here to help with these cases.

So... please stop saying "just disable outline!", don't ignore the problem.

So because of maybe 1% of objects we will get artifacts like in the attached screenshot for basically every door? And each highlighted object will show the blockyness of the models as if we are playing a retro shooter? What is the sense in that?

Edited October 11, 2021 by wesp5

[Oktokolo]

6 hours ago, stgatilov said:

The main plan is to remove frob-highlight stages from materials.

It seems that it is not possible to implement a universal rule for highlighting all objects. The current rule works fine in 99% cases, but there are some objects which don't react. The outline is here to help with these cases.

So... please stop saying "just disable outline!", don't ignore the problem.

As the outline is the problem, "just disable outline!" actually is the fix. The old highlighting has its flaws in bright environments - but it still almost always worked just fine.
So the new highlighting but without the outline should work just fine as well.

[Wellingtoncrab]

Glad to see the outline back! I think it's great personally. I tested out the three presets and only seemed to run into bugs with the first one, like these boxes would periodically appear around bound items (in this case door knobs):

Couldn't get it to repeat on present 2 or 3 - which I would say as far as appearance I prefer both of those options over the hard outline of 1 anyhow. I am partial to the smoother falloff of the image based preset 3 as I think it looks the best and seemed to provide the most consistent results in my experience but I will keep testing as see if I run into anything.

I was also happy the see the base frob highlight seems to play much nicer on items with transparent components like gravestones or the potions I posted above. 

It can be very frustrating to discover you could not make an object interactable so I just want to say I really appreciate the effort towards covering everything!

[nbohr1more]

I think this is a general issue with our bloom implementation.

I created a water material that also exhibited these types of artifacts.

I believe we need to ensure either input or output values are clamped so they do not go out-of-range.

We probably should cure this sooner than later because if I bump into artifacts with my own water

material chances are other mappers (etc) may bump into this issue as well.

[stgatilov]

8 hours ago, wesp5 said:

So because of maybe 1% of objects we will get artifacts like in the attached screenshot for basically every door? And each highlighted object will show the blockyness of the models as if we are playing a retro shooter? What is the sense in that?

Well... any outline will make mesh geometry more visible.

As for partly visible pixels: that's the price for respecting depth, I'm afraid.

[stgatilov]

5 hours ago, Abusimplea said:

So the new highlighting but without the outline should work just fine as well.

spawn atdm:moveable_flask1

Highlighting with plain white will make things look milky. Highlighting with diffuse texture does not work for some specular objects. There is no universal rule to highlight everything, I'm afraid.

 

[wesp5]

2 hours ago, stgatilov said:

There is no universal rule to highlight everything, I'm afraid.

Still there should be an option to turn the outline off for those of us that want the better atmosphere and not the easy hightlights. After all with a little bit of experience you could probably figure out what to frob without any highlights...

Edited October 12, 2021 by wesp5