New Renderer (OpenGL 3.3)

Thanks for the offer! I have been thinking and actually it would save me a lot of time if someone could create all the normal and heightmaps for the vanilla textures. For now the vanilla textures are automatically upscaled and filtered with a program I wrote. I had to create the height maps myself, which took some time and only include a few for now. The normal maps are generated from the textures. My intention was to approximate the maps with some algorithms when the rest of the OpenGL wrapper is working.

I understand if you don’t want them first used by our mod, but if they would be ready for a public release this would also help me a lot.

Hehe, thanks!

But you have to be patient. I don’t have the time to work full time on this. On the positive side I was able to fix one major issue today:
Before:

After:

This was not so easy because I needed to duplicate vertices and this is tricky with the model format FL has. I also still need to fine tune the algorithm which generates the tbn data (those of you who now tangent space will know what I mean). But at least those weird white stripes are gone.

Issues like that are the reason why this will still take months to be in a state where I can release it. It is of no use if you fly through FL with weird graphical artefacts and flickering. Breaks the atmosphere. I hope you can understand my reasoning

Actually this is the one I patched :D. My plan was to upload the fixes I did but I never got around to do it, at least not yet

Here is a video to pass the time: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl2708.mp4
Hopefully this keeps you entertained

I was able to fix a lot of errors this week, but there are still many remaining. I also use too much video memory for some reason as you can see (~1,5 gb - which does not make sense. Must be a bug, because all textures and normal maps are compressed).

Also you should see the issues I mentioned. I need to change the shadows and get rid of the flickering. The shaders don’t yet support the glow maps (no lights in the windows) and many other things. But at least I am nearly at the graphics quality level I am aiming at

I’ve found the error concerning texture filtering. Here is a better video: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl2808.mp4

This will be the last one for some time. There won’t be much new stuff I can post for a while, since it is just fixing the remaining errors.

I hope you enjoyed the videos and understand that this will still take some time

Thanks all for the positive feedback!

@Freestalker:
1.: I use a variation of valve’s ss bumps. They are in tangent space and have more light directions baked in (I did not write the tool which generates them). So you need a height map and normal map and get a new normal map. Additionally I use parallax mapping so you need height maps too. Keep in mind that this is the current state and might change when I have fixed the errors and start experimenting again. Also you can use just normal maps without height maps or no additional maps at all. It is all supported. And yes I created my own height maps, which took quite some time and which is why I don’t have many of them.
2.: The fps where intentionally limited to 30fps because of the video recording. This way it is way more fluid.
With my radeon 270x I get at this scene around 100fps. This is with 2 lights casting shadows, so the scene is actually rendered 3 times. I have optimized a lot of the draw calls but I did not finish all cases yet, so there is still stuff which reduces fps and will be fixed. Also I will let you choose how many lights cast shadows so you can limit it to 1 or none at all.
3.: I am assuming you mean using the calibration file of the monitor to get a good colour reproduction. I have a pretty good calibrated IPS Display (Dell u2515h) so I will think about it since I might notice a difference. But I need to do some research how this can be implemented with OpenGL. I have only read about gamma values and doing gamma correction in the shaders for now.

Thanks adoxa for the offsets. Since I create the window myself I don’t even need them (at least I think so). Of course that does not apply to regular FL without the wrapper. Maybe one should add those to the “Limit Breaking 101” site?

In the meantime here is a screenshot from my latest version:

I just thought it looked nice. Might be a nice desktop background or so.