[Nemesis6]

Is there any possibility of future support or just a tech demo build of some sort showcasing something like relief or parallax mapping? Would help a lot on capital ships. Normal mapping works, so I guess it shouldn't be that hard...? No idea about shaders or shading, I just know of a couple of them, so don't beam me out of the sky if there's some huge obstacle I don't know about. Just curious.

[Nuke]

what the engine needs is shadows and better lighting. then more advanced mappings would be cool. other than that i dont think youd notice them in the 0.3 seconds you have between ligning up for the kill, and getting sliced in two by a bfred.

[Reprobator]

shadows and improved lightening would be awesome,
just imagining a flight inside a dense asteroid field with a star behind that cast shadows ... O-°

We could make some use of new types of turret too , like a sort of lighthouse turret who scope around it's parent's ship...

Shadow and lightning would add a lot to the ambiance of the game 

[Bobboau]

actually I believe the earlier pixel shader packs had parallax mapping but it was removed because you couldn't tell

[blackhole]

I coded in parallax mapping, which is similar to relief mapping. Relief mapping is just a more elegant and prettier way of doing the same thing - and its far more difficult to implement in an engine like FS2.

The issue is simply that the capital ships aren't using parallax mapping.

ALL MY CODE HAS GONE TO WASTE! 

Shadows do need to be added but are currently impossible due to the fact that the innards of FS2's rendering code are like trying to figure out the internal organs of a cthulhu. I've tried on 3 seperate occasions to re-order and/or adjust the FS2 rendering code to try and get it to render everything in one go, but it usually only resulted in me saying "What the F*CK?!" repeatedly at my monitor.

[Reprobator]

Do you mean that parallax mapping is working already?


edit : the 4th try could be the good one 

[Galemp]

You know I make height maps for all my normal maps, but when they're actually used they introduce nasty artifacts that more than make up for any benefit the parallax mapping would have afforded.

Maybe there's some kind of trick to it, I dunno.

[taylor]

Do you mean that parallax mapping is working already?

Parallax mapping was working day one actually.  It has always been there, so long as the model has both height and normal maps provided.  The shaders in the MediaVPs have tweaked values for parallax mapping from what I originally had however, which I feel introduces more strange artifacts to the maps.

But the issue with more advanced mapping/shader features is simply that the rendering code has never really be updated properly.  It's old, slow and just plain inefficient.  I cut out numerous features from the shader code just because the game grinds to a halt with them enabled since the rendering code isn't optimized at all.  The other problem is that since we don't have a material system in place all of the shaders are forced to be completely generic, which greatly limits what can be done with them.

[blackhole]

But the issue with more advanced mapping/shader features is simply that the rendering code has never really be updated properly.  It's old, slow and just plain inefficient.  I cut out numerous features from the shader code just because the game grinds to a halt with them enabled since the rendering code isn't optimized at all.  The other problem is that since we don't have a material system in place all of the shaders are forced to be completely generic, which greatly limits what can be done with them.

The other problem is that the code is freakishly difficult to understand.

[Dark RevenantX]

Hopefully you can freeze all other work and focus entirely on rewriting the graphics engine to get it over with.

[taylor]

The other problem is that the code is freakishly difficult to understand.

Largely because so much has just been tacked on over the years.  It was originally set up to be used with a software renderer with 3Dfx stuff on top of that, then D3D/OGL was put on top of that, and then you've got the HTL conversion which is mostly just a series of hacks on top of all that other crap.  Add to that the fact that there is multiple ways to render any one thing and it doesn't take long to get really complicated.  Most of the code optimizations are still just what was used for the software renderer, with everything else mostly just being brute-force rendering.  It's some pretty crazy stuff. 

Hopefully you can freeze all other work and focus entirely on rewriting the graphics engine to get it over with.

Assuming that somebody with the know-how actually volunteers to do it that is, since there isn't currently an active coder on the team with the ability to handle the needed rewrites.  But, now that keeping D3D working isn't a barrier I suspect that it will be somewhat easier for someone to do now.

[blackhole]

Which is why i must point out that most of my experience is in D3D, not openGL.

[Dark RevenantX]

Yeah, it would probably be better at this point to start most of it over...  It's too bad I have little coding experience and nobody here seems to be an OpenGL expert.

[Flipside]

Oh there's plenty of OpenGL experts, it's just that rebuilding the entire rendering engine from the top would be an absolute nightmare, since, from what I understand, it's not entirely encapsulated, so altering the code would mean tracking down every single link with external code and somehow fixing that, or risk simply creating the same problems all over again.

It would basically require another re-write of the almost the entire game (as I say, as I understand it).

[blackhole]

from what I understand, it's not entirely encapsulated, so altering the code would mean tracking down every single link with external code and somehow fixing that, or risk simply creating the same problems all over again.

It would basically require another re-write of the almost the entire game (as I say, as I understand it).

Its more like its not escapulated at ALL, and would require rewriting 80% of the game's code. You're better off coding your own space sim engine.

[redsniper]

and then, Ferrium.

[chief1983]

Is it just me or is "Ferrium" becoming synonymous with the "THIRD BASE!" line from "Who's on first"?  We seem to be getting to that a lot lately.

[DaBrain]

Still, I don't think FSO performs that bad at all.
With the shader support it looks quite ok and any medicore pc can run FSO with everything maxed out/enabled and still gets solid 60 fps all the time.

Even with some of the more complex models and bigger textures in SoL, it's hard to notice slow-downs. And my PC was build in 2006, so it's not high-end at all.


I think there is still room for more features, even if they run horribly inefficient.
A semi-decent material system would be enough to keep the FSO graphics on a good level for quite a while and would also allow some heavy content optimizations. Mainly by reducing the memory usage for a lot of EFF/ANI maps.

[Reprobator]

a good stuff would be anti aliasing fsaa and such, but i don't know how hard it is to code.

[Herra Tohtori]

a good stuff would be anti aliasing fsaa and such, but i don't know how hard it is to code.

Well, driver level anti-aliasing is available but it seems that anti-aliasing is somehow responsible for the infamous thruster flickers, at least on my rig...