Models by Alpha93

[Alpha93]

Improved the tc mask:

[Alpha93]

Actually went ahead and made the hexagonal bunker

[MaNGusT]

We really need some shadows in game. At least a simple shadows that use hardware acceleration. New models look good, but a bit incomplete without soft global shadowing.

[Alpha93]

Sadly my PC isn't powerful enough to handle shadows.
On the other hand I can handle hundred of units clashing with shadows off while playing with AR.

[MaNGusT]

Sadly my PC isn't powerful enough to handle shadows.
On the other hand I can handle hundred of units clashing with shadows off while playing with AR.

The problem is in code, not in your hardware. Wz's shadows code doesn't use hardware acceleration.
With shadows enabled even my powerfull pc is freakly freezing.

[Jorzi]

Something like cascaded shadow maps would be perfect for warzone allows 1-bit alpha shadows and allows very large polycounts without additional penalty.

[Per]

I have a semi-non-working implementation of shadow maps here already. Only problem is, I realized a bit late that once we use shadows maps, we need terrain to be part of the shadow rendering process, too, otherwise you'll see nothing interesting. (If you look closely, you'll notice that terrain does not actually cast a shadow now. It just fakes it by darkening some vertices.) That requires rewriting the terrain code, first.

Current shadow code does use some hardware acceleration, but it is for hardware modern 10 years ago, basically, and does not scale well at all.

[Jorzi]

Well the terrain shading is currently pretty much as wrong as it gets. Even the fake shading is mirrored compared to the actual shadows (although from my observations, the shadow casting is the one that has been flipped since earlier versions when the shadows and terrain shading pointed in the same direction). I assume the current shadow casting is an implementation of shadow volumes, famous from games such as doom 3. Another one of its problems (which is not because of the algrithm but the implementation) is of course that rather than be a part of the lighting, the shadows simply apply a darkening layer onto the scene afterwards.

Anyway, do I understand correctly that the problem with the current shadow buffer is that the terrain doesn't recieve shadows, or is it simply that it doesn't cast them? Because whether or not it casts them isn't that much of a problem imo.

[Per]

We currently use stencil shadows.

The problem with the terrain is that we will need to draw it using shaders to fetch shade from a depth texture, rather than the hacks it currently uses using the old fixed function pipeline, and that is a bit of a pain.

While on the subject of pain... We now draw things in a rudimentary back-to-front order, with terrain first. Back-to-front makes sense when you have transparency, which we do. I think that is mostly because it makes up for lack of geometry, since on hardware modern 15 years ago, drawing geometry was much more expensive than alpha blending. Nowadays, alpha blending is far more costly than a bit more geometry, however. So if we could somehow get rid of most of the alpha blending I would be a very happy coder...

[Jorzi]

Afaik the only meshes using actual alpha blending are jet flares, muzzle flashes and projectiles, aside from the billboard stuff like explosions, smoke & beacons, which should have their own pass after all the other geometry anyway. All the other stuff seems to use 1-bit alpha, which doesn't require sorting since it either draws the pixel in full alpha or it doesn't draw it at all.

[Alpha93]

Update:

[Boris]

hmmm..n n nice,,but you need more faces and bigger body..

[Alpha93]

Body is actually the original size multiplied by 0.01 iirc, so that once I export it into WMIT I only have to scale it by a x100 factor.

[cnceo]

I have seen some discussion about this apparent "smaller" size issue somewhere in the forum. It seems that this is kind of an illusion caused by the added details to the models. I'm not sure, but maybe it would be worth a try to elongate the model a little bit to make is appear longer. On the other hand, one should probably wait for a fully textured model before judging this.

[Alpha93]

Notice to all readers:

A couple of days ago I decided it was time to make a massive cleanup of my HDD since I had bought a new one anyway, so I decided to format it. Brought my PC at a friend's house, had him make a clean Win7 install on my new HDD and asked him to format my old one and install Ubuntu on it. Since it took a bit to install Win7 and we ended up finishing the work on it at 9:30 PM, I asked him to format my old HDD the day after. Before doing it he asked me if I had to backup anything. Out of the blue and without thinking about it too much (since the HDD was probably filled with viruses anyway), I told him not to make any back up.
10 minutes ago I realized I actually had SOMETHING to back-up.

tl;dr version: model is gone, and I gotta redo it. FROM SCRATCH (which might not be a so bad thing after all). Lesson learnt: always backup your crap.