New Renderer (OpenGL 3.3)

I think it looks better when you see it in movement, yes. More like a new game.

There is no material system, yet. The shader supports it, but it has the same value for every material. Also I am not sure whether I keep the current lighting model or choose a different one.

I plan to write a material editor with a preview. You will be able to set for every texture metalness, smoothness and specular intensity (that is for the currently used lighting model). So it can look like plastic, metal or in between. Also if this is not enough I can add every map you wish (specular maps etc), this is easy. But I don’t want to use a model no one is able to set the parameters for, because you need to measure them or they are too many.

In case I am able to render the whole scene to a cubemap or at least the starspheres, I could use image based lighting to get good metal reflections. But for now I am not able to do that. I will get to it when the rest is working.

My hope is, that with the possibility of better models / textures people will make those. Now it does not make much sense, but with the wrapper this changes. It is more like the chicken-and-egg problem.

Thanks for the good feedback, this is really helping me a lot!

I noticed one shader had old settings. Textures with only normal maps were not so smooth and reflected with a larger radius (that did not apply to the tanks, but e.g. to those towers with windows). You can see the effect for all materials in the second pair of screenshots below.

Here are a few examples of the settings:

Same settings, full specular intensity:

Same settings, half specular intensity:

Less smoothness, full specular intensity:

Less smoothness, half specular intensity:

Update: Sorry, found an error in the lighting equation Images have changed.

I think that is because the reflective colour was wrongly calculated. Fixed it in the screens above. Please reevaluate. Also keep in mind that there are two light sources (one orange). Also there is a glitch at the storage tank which has to do with the tbn values stored in the model and will be fixed.

I can make another video, but for that I would use the settings you prefer. I also would like to be sure there are no errors left before I do one, since weird looking effects might be mistakes I made and did not yet find

Alright, I have checked the equations again and now they seem to be correct.

Here is a video with rather smooth settings and a little bit tuned down specular intensity:
Link

Since as mentioned there is no material system yet, every texture has the same setting. Also I don’t know whether I will keep this lighting model or choose another or even make it selectable per texture etc.

Edit:
Here is one with even less specular intensity: Link

But I think it is better when I do more research before posting endless screenshots and videos. At least I think I do understand the problem now. Maybe it also is a matter of taste.

I can, but I am not sure what you want to see there? You’ll get me flying wild behind some ships

Here is a video with a PBR based lighting model: Link

I also think it is better, but maybe too weak. One of the next tasks is to calculate a better reflective base colour, so that the “oil effect” is reduced and you can tune the reflections up a little. I have had some results, but I am not there yet.

In the meantime I have implemented gamma correction and now the lighting calculations should correctly take place in linear space. I think it looks much better (you can see it everywhere in the game): Link

Thanks! Here is a video with settings for the reflections Skotty and I like: Link

Probably still not optimal, but I will leave it by that for now, since I plan to leave the settings to the people who configure the materials (which hopefully will not be me ;)).

Those have been there all the time. The problem is with the tbn data in the models (I had written it in one of my last post somewhere :)) There is a reason I said development will still take time I need to port the algorithm to correctly generate them, because I only have c++ code for now, but the UTF editor is c#. I only added a quick fix to correct much worse lighting problems like this:

It is the same cause, trust me Just wait until I fixed it and then you can nag if you see still see problems