After spending MOST of yesterday playing FEAR 2 and the start of today watching an episode of The Planets, I decided to boot up the ol' computer and do some non-performance coding to give my brain a break.
What you are goggling at are three objects from the Game Creator Store, which is being integrated for the next update. To this end, I spent half of Sunday making sure some legacy models and entities would load in first time without modification. I am certainly not going to make Reloaded backwards compatible with everything in the store, and will be adding a filter by default to show only Reloaded content, but this filter will be adjustable so you can find older legacy static entities and see how they fair (including any that you have bought previously via FPSC Classic).
Occlusion Works
Also made some continuing fixes with the new renderer to stop it flickering due to multiple queries and cameras confusing it. I am saving the true imposter work until Monday as that's a full work day of headache that one!
Signing Off
My plan for this coming week is to have a solid version by Wednesday, on which plenty of testing can be performed THU and FRI. The old regime of releasing new updates that break old projects should really be put to rest here at TGC, and we do that by spending two days NOT adding features and JUST testing (that is, if I don't get strong armed into adding anything during those two days). The objective is stability, consistency, THEN performance, THEN the store integration. You can then be at least assured that the update is not break stuff you have working right now.
Will seller accounts from the original TGC Store carry over?
ReplyDeleteIndeed yes, we're just making a few internal flag changes so that Reloaded can have it's own category so you know that by default everything in the store that shows by default have been tested and approved for Reloaded usage. Sellers will be able to go in, make changes and flag their content as Reloaded with the new store (maybe not this update but certainly the one after!).
ReplyDeleteSounds good to me :)
DeleteOne minor criticism: The shadowing displayed in the images above look fuzzy & unnatural IMHO. Could you please consider cleaning up the shadows for the final product? Please reply & thank you for your time.
ReplyDeleteNo worries, for the next year I am feeding on feedback ;) I do however need specific feedback, as I am a coder, and need to know what 'fussy' means. There are some rather aggressive shaders in the best games available today that go out their way to achieve the magical state of fussiness you would so quickly dismiss ;) Are we criticizing the percentage closer filtering technique or the fact the fall-off between non-shadow and shadow is a little too abrupt (like my question) ;)
ReplyDeletethe shadows look fine to me
ReplyDeleteAll looks good to me. Keep up the great work. To know the next update will give at least twice as much fps is awesome and the fact you are still on it is phenomenal. Looking forward to swimming hopefully next year ;)
ReplyDeleteI am enjoying this blog,need my daily fix.A bit wierd realy,but great fun.Keep up the good work Lee.
ReplyDeleteThe shadows look OK from what can be seen for a screen grab.
ReplyDeleteNon hard/harsh edged shadows with visible detail in the shadows is what we want, broken on the shadow edge if the surface underneath is that way is fine. i.e. follows the contours of what it falls upon. That's what the screen shots seems to show so all looks good to me at least.
:-)
I too enjoy the blog... sometimes a little late here across the pond but always informative.
ReplyDeleteJust for fun...Fuzzy means "not clear, distinct, or precise, blurred.
Fussy means full of unnecessary details, bustling about or worrying over trifles.
The shadows you show don't meet either definition, they look good.
No offense meant just couldn't resist.
Perhaps I should reword that. I meant that the shadows present do not look entirely natural. I didn't say they were particularly bad in any way. I only said that the shadowing could use some improvement. Here is an example:
ReplyDeletehttp://i.imgur.com/JVc9Yq5.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/q72wWcq.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/YPaLc5z.jpg
Although it definitely does not have to be quite this detailed, these images could serve as a basis for the final product. It has the non-harsh edged shadows that Coleman described while also looking solid as well. Thank you for your time.
Neat shots, can you send me a demo or link so I can run around this scene. I can't make my mind up whether they are stencil shadows or pre-baked. Looks like you are after higher definition shadows with sub-pixel filtering, which should be possible with larger cascade shadow camera images and tighter filter radius. Naturally it means a performance hit so you won't see it immediately, but if you can send me these shots as a real time demo I can soak up how they managed it :)
ReplyDeleteThe shadows you are seeing there are 100% fully dynamic, for moving entities as well as static geometry. Fully self-shadowing also. I believe they wrote an article on how they managed it. Take a look:
Deletehttp://tesseract.gg/renderer.txt
Also you can download the engine (from http://mappinghell.net/tesseract/tesseract-nightly.zip), hit Load Map, select Complex, and run around looking at awesome Mirror's Edge-quality dynamic shadows. Hit F9 for 3rd-person view.
DeleteThe screenshots from littlevince104 are powered by Tesseract, which is a fork of Cube 2: Sauerbraten (https://github.com/lsalzman/tesseract) and requires you have those binaries too. A technical readme of how they render shadows is available at http://tesseract.gg/renderer.txt. The thread with the map in question is http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=121367 but the download link no longer works. You can see additional screenshots there with the final one having softer (more fuzzy) shadows dependent on the lighting.
ReplyDelete@xCept, Thanks for the reminder for Lee. I'll be sure to remind him.
ReplyDelete