[portej05]

Hiya Folks,

This is Antipodes build #2

Antipodes is a staging ground for changes that will eventually make their way into trunk. Antipodes should not be considered stable.

This build incorporates Trunk to 5512.

The major change in this build is the behaviour of the shader system. Please read Zacams post below on the exact benefits, however the summary is that we no longer have to support 67 shader files. We can now support just 2, which will simplify development and has prompted some interesting discussion on future directions.

Massive props to our new forum member Hery for his patch and his hard work on the shaders.

Antipodes #2

PDBs (for when you have troubles) can be found in this folder:
Antipodes PDBs

Note that they don't compress well. To use: Download matchine PDBs zip, unzip into the SAME location as the executables.
The PDBs have been versioned in the same fashion as the Antipodes executables, so multiple PDB versions can coexist in the same folder. (although, I recommend removing old ones due to their size)

[Zacam]

The major change portej05 is referring to can have some more details explained HERE.

But, to spare everybody, a quick rundown is thus: Instead of 66 *.sdr files for the shaders to encompass all the possible launcher combinations, there are now only 2.
main-f.sdr and main-v.sdr, which go in to data\effects.

Judicious use of #ifdef is done to handle how where and what handles who for how many cookies.

Best part? They can co-exist and with and will (with this build or Hery's topic posted build) override the regular MediaVP shaders.

Benefits can include, but are not limited to: instead of maintaining a long list of combo shaders that may or may not always play well with eachother, we can adjust the engine to use the main shaders as a default, or read an lookup file to be able to use scripting and/or SEXPs to change the shaders on the fly. The use of #ifdef means you can set FLAG types not necessarily used by the engine, and then call them.

Should make utilizing shaders in a TC much easier as well.

[Echelon9]

And OS X builds for those interested:

FS2_Open Antipodes 2 (includes Release and Debug builds)

[Zacam]

C'mon people! FRAKKING TEST ALREADY!

Or atleast just give us a one-liner saying it works.

Like this: So far, no problems with unified shaders or current MediaVP SVN content. Still testing.

[Solatar]

So if I understand this right, in playing this build I shouldn't notice any changes (it's all from a coding and simplification point of view).

So far, no problems with unified shaders or current MediaVP content. Still testing. 

[pecenipicek]

no errors at all, played through a few retail missions, nothing seems different.

[Fury]

Used this to play BP: WiH yesterday. Couldn't notice anything different to the 3.6.11 nightlies.