Models by Jorzi (AR)

[MaNGusT]

@MaNGusT: So you can place any number of muzzle flashes? That's nice, but I assume they are all attached to the barrel and rotated with it?

with this patch - yes, but it's closed. So nevermind.

[Olrox]

@Olrox: Good to see you as always

Thanks, it's really good to see you're still kicking!

[Corporal Punishment]

@ Jorzi: The german Luchs reconnaissance vehicle uses plastic brushes in the ejector port to keep dirt out. Thinking along these lines, you could just model the ejector as a rectangular indentation and paint the bottom in a bar-code texture. Can't get any cheaper then that.

[CyclonatorZ]

Phew, glad to see this project isn't dead. I don't think my timing could have been worse - I came back here to browse towards the begining of December for the first time in months, only to find that everyone else had stopped posting in this subforum as well, and only a few days after that, Jorzi posted his latest WIP.

That said, Jorzi, whatever happened to the second release of ArtRev you talked about way back in August? Is it still a work in progress, or did you upload it somewhere that I'm not aware of?

[Jorzi]

Well, essentially what haappened is I'm working on my bachelor's degree & orther stuff... But you're right, I really should make a new release with the bugfixed shaders. Unfortunately, I won't have any new models to include with it.

[Per]

with the bugfixed shaders

While you're on that topic, I'm revisiting that code now, and I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on the shaders. Is there any input from the game (uniforms) you miss? Should the shaders be split up (eg separate shader for defensive structures, or for structures under construction..)? Anything that should be fixed/changed in the current shaders?

In other news, I just recently changed the model rendering code in master/3.2 to use VBOs, so now rendering large amounts of polygons should be much faster. (For low poly models, all the other bottlenecks will probably make this change not very noticeable.)

[MaNGusT]

I'm sorry that I'm getting into your talk but afair all these speed ups are exist in wzm branch.
Btw, separated shaders sounds cool.. more customization = better quality.

[Jorzi]

I have been thinking a bit about what could be useful/cool and I'll try to compile a small wishlist:

1. World sky texture, would be nice for ambient specularity and metal reflections.

2. Ground illumination, would allow making the ambient light factor the same color as the vertex color of the terrain the unit is standing on, could also be used for rim lighting from explosions (this would be absolutely delicious)

3. This might be a hard one, but shadow pass (i.e. a per-pixel mask from the shadow calculation). Currently shadows are implemented as a semi-trasparent black layer on top of the rendered frame. This causes already non-illuminated areas to be further darkened which is highly undesirable and a bit ugly.

4. A funny thing that always confused me is that flattened (under construction) structures have extreme specularity, which with my current artRev shaders causes them to glow. This is not necessary a bad thing, since it looks pretty cool, but could perhaps cause unexpected behavior elsewhere, so investigation might be needed.

5. Water shaders, for great justice.

6. Post-processing, i.e. the scene is rendered to a texture/buffer(containing color and z, possibly other data) which is then rendered to the screen using a custom fragment shader.

[MaNGusT]

6. Post-processing, i.e. the scene is rendered to a texture/buffer(containing color and z, possibly other data) which is then rendered to the screen using a custom fragment shader.

6.1. Bloom effect support. Do not mix up with glow effect.

7. Separate shaders for GFX effects.

[aubergine]

@MaNGusT: Doesn't bloom put a strain on GPU? I've seen it in other games and it looks great but drops FPS (maybe just their implementation?)

Mind if I chip in from a JS scripting perspective? I really want to get more atmospheric effects in to game - better skies, clouds, weather, etc.

In layman's terms:

Currently setSunIntensity() has limited effect: more info

It would be great if we could create ground mist, fog (with option to change it's 'range' from the camera), and dust/haze.

A complete overhaul of the skies...

Replace skybox with a semi-circle that can be gradient filled (either linear fill or radial fill, with multiple colour points in the gradient, alpha values allowed). An outer semi-circle for stars background (they appear as alpha is applied to the inner semi-circle's gradient).

A sun and moon object. (I have scripts for setting their position, phase, etc).

Four rectangles that can be resized and placed anywhere (using world coordinates, to allow them external to map bounds) which can have custom texture applied. These will allow effects such as sundogs, halos, circumzenithal arc, parhelions, rainbows, light pillars, belt of venus, earths shadow, stratospheric (eg. Nacreous) and mesospheric (eg. Noctilucent) clouds to be implemented in just a handful of polys.

Ability to create and position volumetric (or equivalent) clouds. A vast array of cloud types could be created from just a few models used in combination with control over lighting applied to them (via JS).

[MaNGusT]

@MaNGusT: Doesn't bloom put a strain on GPU? I've seen it in other games and it looks great but drops FPS (maybe just their implementation?)

Bloom - doesn't, Glow - does, because it applies per model. We need bloom to apply it to whole screen.(its iterations should be configurable ofc). Bloom just give us a fake effect of hdr colours on LDR monitors.

[aubergine]

Are there any good example vids of what bloom can be used to achieve? Including what sort of effects happen when it's at it's max and min effect?

[MaNGusT]

Are there any good example vids of what bloom can be used to achieve? Including what sort of effects happen when it's at it's max and min effect?

Bloom effect, I think in this video more advanced hdr bloom was used. Affects the whole screen. Ofc we don't need that high-dreamy amount of bloom in wz, just a little bit.
Glow effect. Affects only selected objects.

Just took random videos from youtube.

[Jorzi]

By the way, since we use clip alpha, could the clipping be adjusted in the shader? Currently everything above alpha 0 becomes alpha 1.
I'd like to do something like alpha = (alpha > 0.2), and more importantly, I'd like to do it after doing texel interpolation (i.e. in the fragment shader)

[Jorzi]

Some quick barrels for fun