New Renderer (OpenGL 3.3)
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Today I finished a bretonian texture, it’s b_player02_256. It’s a diffuse map + a normal map + a specular map. What do you think ?
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@J.R.: Thanks! I thinks so too, but still am experimenting with other networks to get it more detailed. Some progress has been made…
@Blake00: Hehe, then I have reached my goal
@Freestalker.fr: It is a way to start, but I think you could add some more fine details. Also the colour palette is a little bit boring but that can be improved easily. The white reflections look more like plastic, maybe you can change that for a start. Or is this just phong lighting? There are also some texture mapping problems where it gets blurred, but I think you noticed that. Can you send me your model along with the maps so that I can integrate loading them into the shaders of the wrapper?
Btw. I started a model viewer for your preview but realized my code can not load the TBN data for the normal maps etc, yet. I need the time available for the wrapper, so it has to wait.
In the meantime I fixed problems which prevented the wrapper running on Intel and Nvidia cards. I still have a weird error which causes FL to crash on undocking in nebulas/asteroid fields and which happens only on a Nvidia card. There are still some other issues, which might be related. But I am getting there
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I just used the color palette of the original texture but now I improved it. In fact the blurry texture come from the anisotropic filtering deactivated or the original model’s UV, I think it’s more UV related. I can send you the maps via PM. I used a 1024X1024 and I was very close to the model, I think the blur wouldn’t be so visible ingame as the camera is more far than in the screenshot. Do you recommend to increase or decrease brightness on my spec map ?
@ Everybody : When I said “What do you think ?”, I wanted some feedback of all the community not only Schmackbolzen because it’s a good way to improve or confirm things.
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I think you should open a separate topic for it where we can discuss models using the (hopefully soon available) new features. Also, since there are currently not many people active anymore, expect it to take quite a while until people respond. I hope this changes with the release of the wrapper, but you never know.
Regarding the maps: It really is highly dependent on the lighting model. I currently use one of the often used GGX equations for PBR, but there are a lot of variations and different models with different parameters and different results. Also it often is a matter of taste. If you send me the model I’ll make you a video how I think it would look best and then you can make a decision. That is until I find a lighting model which I think is better and implement it (I am half serious here ;)) If you have roughness or smoothness parameters for your material/renderer try experimenting with the values. This also will make a difference - and also is highly dependent on the lighting model used.
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Hey !
I optimized the texture ! The result is shown on a box 3d model.
I think the color palette is better and specular map too but I can be fooled.
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Looks really nice! This is like I would have tried to make it look. If we get this into my wrapper it would look really good. The silver can made looking more like metal if you desire it, but we better tweak that with the real implementation of the wrapper.
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Hehe, I am currently having the fight with matrices and coordinate systems again (don’t worry I am used to it). I converted code for PSSM/CSM (cascaded shadow maps) and the frustum culling it does for the different splits does not work correctly (as I was expecting). Worked at it till late night yesterday. At least it is integrated (which also took some time) and I only need to check out the math. Remember the difficulty that I don’t really have the game objects and have to keep track of them myself. Which is very very intricate.
There also is a really strange bug which happens only with Nvidia cards where it crashes when you undock. It even doesn’t crash while rendering, but after the frame was done somewhere in the FL exe, because some offset FL loads is zero, which I don’t even touch. Intel and AMD is fine…
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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.
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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.
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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.mkvWhat’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!
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Thats a nice breakthrough! You definitely have to test this with some modern models (preferably a ship, with a white light source to negate some misperception) to reveal and test the potential of the stuff.
Some blur on the shadows will be cool too, i mean this:
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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
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As a game is a simulation with its own issues on every step of evolution of visualisation technology corresponding with perception of a viewer, i can agree that hard shadows are real in an IRL space, but as modern engines are unable to simulate full realism (we still use textures, whether IRL there is no textures but a game of color and reflection of every surface particle we are able to see), and as if this feature provides an advancement on perception of a product compared to a previous generation, that in my opinion may be considered as realistic. We see such shadows every day so i think it is a good option to go. I want to say that sometimes it’s ok to implement something that looks better than it is IRL and it may be called realistic if viewer finds it so. Also, FL was never known as real space simulator (like KSP) and i see it shiny and beauty-overkill (what fits its spirit very well) in an aspect of graphics, like an Everspace for example.
Suns in a game or a theoretical game have various sizes with various distances of objects that are near to them as well as brightness, also you’ve mentioned clouds, so with some dynamic adjustment i see this as a good feature. -
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).