New Renderer (OpenGL 3.3)

I got access to the same graphics chip (it’s in my main desktop PC) and even some older hd4xxx mobile ones. Also some old AMD cards (mobile and desktop), so there will be plenty of testing on my side. The only thing I lack are Nvidia cards, where I only got one (970m). But I suppose this should be enough.

I can tell you that the hd4600 does not like compute heavy shaders. So expect to get worse graphics. I will try to include simpler lighting models so that very weak cards at least work. Currently if I switch to the HD530 in this laptop I don’t get much FPS. But it looks at least the same.

Sorry, while I understand that people want to test it themselves, I want to get rid of all bugs I currently am aware of first. Also I want to use it for our mod exclusively for a time period (we are talking about some few months) where I can further polish it. We are currently working on a mod update and this will be very fitting to be included. When I see that there are no unexpected side effects I will create a standalone mod on ModDB which can be used for mods and also works with vanilla FL.

After the short teaser image here is a video of the current state including the new shadows:

http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl0512.mkv

Edit: Here is another one.
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl0512_2.mkv

So after some fixes and tweaks I am now at the graphics quality level I wanted to achieve. Only one feature is missing, which will even add more to the atmosphere, but I decided to add this after everything is working and maybe even after the initial release.

Here are two videos of the current state:
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1912.mkv
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1912_2.mkv

What’s left is getting the performance back again, as the shadows are tanking the fps (it’s not optimized yet) plus the remaining fixes. There also seem to be some glitches with the new shadows I need to figure out.

Feedback is as always welcome!

Skotty has asked for the same thing. The shadows are currently PCF filtered, but since the resolution is so good now it only has an antialiasing effect.

But shouldn’t be shadows in space only hard shadows anyway? The sun is so far away you basically get a point light and there is no atmosphere which scatters the light. This might be different in a nebula, though.

I will see if I can get a high poly model with good textures somewhere. The problem is ideally it also hast height maps since otherwise the self shadowing of the textures does not work. So it would have to use real geometry to make up for this.

@eigos: You’ll have to wait a little bit more, but good to know there is nothing in the videos you find unfitting or something like that

I think I know what you mean. Basically you see things more from an artists viewpoint. I personally like the more realistic touch (which is a matter of opinion) and am not a fan of applying lots of effects (like bright bloom etc). So for me it would look really irritating if I don’t get hard shadows in space with no nearby larger light source like a planet. But I suppose since I am used to rendering and image processing I have a lot more trained eyes than the usual user.

I already had started to look for soft shadow solutions, since FL has fake light sources placed at planets (fake reflection) and since they are so close the shadows would indeed be soft. But this isn’t an easy topic plus it is not so much important. I’d rather add this after the initial release. For now I need to polish the rest and get it into a usable shape (including ingame GUI for settings etc).

While we’re at this topic, since the new shadows have so much higher resolution I was able to enable point lights again and let them cast perspective projected shadows (FL uses them for e.g. fake planet reflections). This works surprisingly well since usually you would have to use cube map shadows. But we are most of the time not so close that this is really visible. So now even the FL explosions cast shadows. There might be cases, where they are wrong, though (being close enough to the light source).

While I did not have much time I managed to implement rough cubemap reflections. They are way more fitting now

Also I think I have found a way so that you can use the lighting model in blender and probably port it from there to other modeling software. It is actually quite easy to build your shader pipeline in blender. When I am sure it is really accurate I’ll post it here. Then you can see how it will look in your modeling software itself.

Yes, it looks really beautiful!
My plan is to try this one:
https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-starship-spacecraft-model-1277308
Already got it working in blender with the mentioned shader pipeline. Or do you have a better one?

That is only partially true, since I only found the crash because I have a notebook with a 970m. Only happens when you undock, not when in space. And it is after the frame was rendered. So it is not the typical bug. But I will find the cause, don’t worry

Here are some new screenshots with the new material system (based on a json file). Also with it in place I now can use alpha test for shadows. As a result textures now don’t block the light completely if they have transparent parts (and you set the right parameter for the material). The space domes also have glass material parameters as you can see at the reflections.