New Renderer (OpenGL 3.3)

I know what you guys mean. You are talking about the well known “feature creep”. While it might look that way, there is actually a goal I had (and still have) for the first release:

• Good looking shadows
• Good rendering quality so it does not look artificial
• A (somewhat acceptable) material system
• Acceptable performance
• No problematic bugs and enough polish for release

For the current state only the last one is open now. So as you can see there is quite a large progress already made.

Stuff I have on my list for after release:

• More lights, especially make running lights real lights
• Add bloom support (currently there is only exposure control)
• Automatic exposure control (from Valve HL2 paper)
• More baked in reflections so that e.g. nebula not in the starspheres are also reflected
• More performance optimizations
• … (here you can add literally endless stuff which you could do)

@Moonhead:

I intend to make it a mod so in the end everyone can use it. I am thinking about to exclude mods who stole stuff from others, so that they can learn the hard way why stealing is not good. Why should I respect their work if they don’t respect the work of others. I am still open for feedback on this, though.

At first I will release it for our mod only, so problems can be found more quickly. After a while I plan to create a standalone mod on Moddb with only the graphics enhancements for others to use. Hopefully FL will live a bit longer that way.

As for the files: The models in the videos are from vanilla FL. They just use height and normal maps. I upscaled the textures using a self build and trained neural net plus some automatic post processing. Regarding the engine: Basically I replaced the end of the rendering pipeline from FL with my stuff. So maybe its half a new rendering engine. Some stuff still gets just passed through.

I did some tests with eigos and it looks like we have a usable workflow for exporting stuff and use it with my new rendering system. Here is a video from an asteroid eigos created: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/flroid02_4.mp4 . It uses height, normal, roughness and metalness maps.

It seems like everyone is happy with the way the rendering looks now (me included), so I won’t touch that anymore as far as I am able to.

Edit: Replaced the video with a one where the shadows aren’t bugged due to wrong bias.
Edit2: After some map and parameter tuning: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/flroid02_8.mp4

Thanks!

I was able to reverse the list of asteroids which are about to be rendered and integrate it into the shadow rendering. Also I now automatically generate the necessary TBN data for normal maps etc. on asteroids, because FL does not support saving them into the models.

The result can be seen in this video: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1011.mp4

Costs a lot of FPS currently despite of instancing, so improving it is the next step.

Thank you, I really like the look, too!

@Treewyrm: Thanks for the hints, but I know that. The problem is, that FL does not support more than two texture coordinates when rendering asteroids. So the only other option would be to load the model yourself instead of letting FL do it. This is an option for the future, since you also only can use one material, so it would be an improvement. For normal models, the TBN data already is stored into additional texture coordinates.

While I did some internal progress, here are the latest results of my texture upscaling attempts:

As you can see this takes the game to a whole new level. Some example videos are here:

http://www.flnu.net/downloads/FL2411.mp4
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/FL2411_2.mp4

Keep in mind that the material settings are not tweaked yet, so there is still room for improvement. Currently there is only one different one for glass. The rest uses the same one where I quickly tested some values and chose the best looking. If you have a different taste you could make all reflections super smooth etc.

You first need to undo the dds compression. The textures above are done with ESRGAN and pretrained models (two steps, undo dds first and then upscaling). There are quite extensive lists of models you can find on the net. I will try other networks next (e.g. the one you suggested), but the current results are quite impressive. There are tools for ESRGAN which allow alpha upscaling, although the one I tested (IEU) only worked for one texture, not for mass conversion. I did not have time yet to debug that.

Here is the texture upscaled with the same method used in the videos: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/liberty2_1024.png

I did not have any problems with cuda, everything worked fine. But the chip in my laptop is not that old (maxwell). You also could use cpu only, although that sadly is quite slow.

If you get better results, let me know!

The one I found best and used on all the images is the ground one. I also tested the misc one and the box one, but they either looked weird or too clean. For removing the dds artefacts I also found the one you use the best one yet. I will try different models/networks as soon I have time for it.

I noticed that you can mix models, so I ended up using a hybrid between the fallout weapons and ground textures models (you have to stay above 0.7, otherwise you will get colour shifts).

Also I developed an algorithm to automatically create roughness maps. The result can be seen in this video:
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/Fl1501.mp4

There are still some small issues left. One of them is, that somehow most of the time I find it too dark. Will be one of the next things I try to fix.

(Sorry for the long delay, was busy plus got a bad cold.)

Yeah, I see what you want to do, and I was hoping there was a way. I would use it for automatic height map creation. But for my understanding, you would need different neural network layouts for that. Btw. there is a network which creates normal maps in the wiki. I tested it, but it creates weird results (probably not good training data).

I already tried training my network with height map data, but the cnns I used seemed not to work with it. When I have the time I will try some more stuff, probably using ESRGAN.

Regarding the wrapper:

I was able to change the rendering pipeline to be nearly like: https://learnopengl.com/PBR/Theory
I don’t use any AO maps, since the bent normal maps already create a nice effect. I also changed the lights to be sphere lights and not point lights, since the suns are quite large. The latter is from UE4 engine presentation notes plus some annoying testing, since the general implementations I found seem to be incorrect and the notes are not clear on the equations.

In general I noticed most of the stuff I use now is from UE4 (if they still use the stuff).

Here is a video from a few days later back in January: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/Fl1901.mp4 In the end I disable the environment maps so that one can compare. It looks really good now in my opinion.

Basically I am now hunting the last bugs, which sadly are not that easy to find. Plus I don’t have that much time currently.

Looks interesting, but I think they still have a long way to go.

Last weekend I had time to test an idea I had for a while. Took me the whole Saturday to finish it, but the results are way better than I expected. Basically I use the generated normal maps to smooth the textures, so that I lose the details. This actually is correct, since the details are in the normal map. Before I had to downscale the impact of the normal maps, because it would look very weird. Now I can have stronger normal maps and it looks really good.

Here is a video of the result: http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1503.mkv

The codec is h265 this time, because with h264 it was about 250mb. Took me a while to find good settings, but now it only has about 120mb and looks quite the same.

Edit: Here is a second, shorter video, where you also can see the more 3D look of the textures:
http://www.flnu.net/downloads/fl1503_2.mp4