Frobbing

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

A past nuissance is that when frobbing, the object lights up unnaturally bright in a dark situation. can that / was that corrected by decreasing the brightness proportional to room brightness or making an outline instead of brightness or etc...?

[gleeful]

A past nuissance is that when frobbing, the object lights up unnaturally bright in a dark situation. can that / was that corrected by decreasing the brightness proportional to room brightness or making an outline instead of brightness or etc...?

 

You can very easily adjust the brightness of frobbed objects in the textures' material shader. Out of the "box" TDM will aim for a brightness level similar to the original Thief games as far as I can tell.

 

Kind Regards

gleeful

[Gildoran]

Yes, it's easily possible to make frob highlighting scale the amount of light an object receives. (but it requires the material shaders for frobable objects to be set up properly) Currently, however, we use a scheme that more resembles T1/T2.

[bob_arctor]

I can see his point. In bright areas the frob isn't as noticable and in dark areas it's too noticable.

 

But I can live with that. Don't notice it in TI and TII really.

[gleeful]

"Fullbright" is what it's called by the way!

 

And -fear not- it looks pretty good.

[New Horizon]

It runs on a scale of 0 (no bright) 0.5 (full bright - classic Thief) 1.0 (over bright...aka, washed out).

 

I never had a problem with fullbright in the original games, but the blue frob light in TDS was absolutely foolish looking.

[drumple]

yeah.. tds relied heavily on a bluish feeling through the game.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

Ok good. My fears mostly pertained to doors.

[Domarius]

Yes, it's easily possible to make frob highlighting scale the amount of light an object receives. (but it requires the material shaders for frobable objects to be set up properly)

That sounds like a really good idea.

[Gildoran]

Shall I set up some demo frobbable textures so team members can try them out and see what they think?

[Domarius]

Well I'm already convinced it should be in the game, so anything towards convincing everyone else is fine by me...

[Springheel]

Yes, it's easily possible to make frob highlighting scale the amount of light an object receives.

 

What does this mean, exactly? That an object in a dark room would be less lit by the frob than an object in a light room? How would you code that? AFAIK we can't easily detect how much light is hitting a particular object.

[firoso]

What does this mean, exactly? That an object in a dark room would be less lit by the frob than an object in a light room? How would you code that? AFAIK we can't easily detect how much light is hitting a particular object.

 

 

simple, ramp up the txture gamma.

[Gildoran]

@Springheel: The way textures are lit/rendered, is that first the texture is set to black, then for each lighting pass, the values from that lighting pass are added to the texture. Usually textures have only one or two lighting passes (normally a diffusemap and sometimes a specularmap), but they can have more. For example, you could have multiple diffusemaps. There's normally no reason to do that, but in the case of frobbing, using the same diffusemap for two lighting passes will result in the object being twice as bright (or if you want the object only 1.5 times as bright, you could set the rgb of the second lighting pass to 0.5). If you take a frobable material and change the line blend add to blend diffusemap, it'll increase the light the object receives rather than adding the full values of the diffusemap to the texture without regard to lighting.

 

Edit: In other words, the SDK code never actually detects how bright the object is, the material files just tell the engine to increase the amount of light it recieves.

[sparhawk]

You can very easily adjust the brightness of frobbed objects in the textures' material shader. Out of the "box" TDM will aim for a brightness level similar to the original Thief games as far as I can tell.

 

"Very easy" is a bit optimisitc. Of course you can do it, but you have to go through every material file and adjust it. It's not as if there is a setting thaty has to be switched.

[sparhawk]

@Springheel: The way textures are lit/rendered, is that first the texture is set to black, then for each lighting pass, the values from that lighting pass are added to the texture. Usually textures have only one or two lighting passes (normally a diffusemap and sometimes a specularmap), but they can have more. For example, you could have multiple diffusemaps.

 

Which sounds like an additional renderpass, for each texture sitting on an object that can be frobbed. This doesn't really sound like a good idea to me because it seems to cause a rather high performance impact.

[Gildoran]

It's not necessarily as bad as you might assume - I believe that the if statement in material files will cause a render pass to be skipped entirely if the condition isn't met (admittedly, I'm not 100% sure), so the extra render pass probably only applies to the object with the frob highlight, rather than all frobables. As for how much performance the extra render pass takes... it's like adding a specular map to a texture that never had one. (and I've noticed that we haven't exactly been stingy on where we've used specular maps...)

 

As for changing the brightness of frob highlights, that'd be easy to do without needing to modify material files every time... Instead of passing 0 or 1 through renderparm11, we should pass 0 or X (where 0<=X<=1, and X is probably determined by a cvar), and let the material adjust its frob brightness accordingly.

[Dram]

Seems kinda pointless though. Why waste the time/performance on such a trivial issue? Though I would like it, I would'nt want to waste performance for it.

[Gildoran]

Because it's easy to set up that way, allows us to adjust frob intensity, and would later allow us to upgrade the frob code so that the frob highlight fades in/out as you highlight different objects, if we wanted to do that. Changing it later would be a lot of work. If we set it up correctly from the start, it's practically no extra work.

[Dram]

fair enough, as long as it can be turned off, for perfomance issues.

[bob_arctor]

Sounds good to me. Don't reduce the FPS unnecessarily.