Valhalla Legends Archive

General => General Discussion => Topic started by: EvilCheese on September 11, 2003, 01:38 AM

Title: Wooo, first public screenshot
Post by: EvilCheese on September 11, 2003, 01:38 AM
This is the first public screenshot from the engine I'm creating for my Industry demo (to get me a job).

This is from the (relatively) small snowscape map I use as a testbed.

Feature list below the image:

(http://www.ninjazone.net/EngineScreen1.jpg)

Currently supports:

Single-pass multitexturing.
Dynamic texture generation.
Pre-caculated and dynamic lighting.
Deformability
Dynamic Level-Of-Detail mesh generation (all the little hills you can see into the distance are actually real ones and you can go there)
Can handled infinite tiled terrain, up to 1024X1024 entries per tile.
Frustrum culling.
Dynamic cameras.
Animated sky.

Currently working on texture-per-cell mapping, to allow widely varied surfaces over a single terrain.

Any comments or critique on the screenshot would be welcome :P

Edit:

Oh, and it tops 500fps at 1024x768 on my modest 1300 celeron machine with Geforce-3, in case anyone is curious.
Title: Re:Wooo, first public screenshot
Post by: Soul Taker on September 11, 2003, 02:19 AM
Wow.  That is really, really cool.  The only thing I see is the shadow edges are all blocky looking, and the lightning in the distance looks really fake.
Title: Re:Wooo, first public screenshot
Post by: EvilCheese on September 11, 2003, 02:38 AM
Yes, the shadows are something I've been wrestling with today.

To start with I was using vertex diffuse color for the shadowing, but it kinda sucked.... the shadows would move when the ground vertices rearranged and optimised themselves.

Now I'm pre-generating a shadow map, and rendering it in the base texture pass, then overlaying everything over it.

The blockiness is caused by the low resolution of the shadow map (it's only 1024x1024). I've reduced it by adding a trilinear magnification filter (they had firm edges earlier), but I think I need to do a radial blur or a matrix average on the lightmap pixels after I generate it to remove the obvious stepping.

I'd like to try to preserve the nice "granular" effect that the current system is giving though.... you can see it on the nearest slope, the shadow granularity there actually adds some nice texture to the shape.

For the distance lighting... I'm thinking of adding some depth-of-field effects. If I make contrast reduce into the distance, that should be eliminated, plus it will look more real.
Title: Re:Wooo, first public screenshot
Post by: j0k3r on September 11, 2003, 06:23 AM
The lighting in the very far background looks fake, but really cool... But otherwise it looks all nice.
Title: Re:Wooo, first public screenshot
Post by: iago on September 11, 2003, 08:43 AM
You should read the system clock to determine the angle of the lighting! :-)


And it does look really nice, good work!  When can we expect a play-able demo? :-P
Title: Re:Wooo, first public screenshot
Post by: EvilCheese on September 11, 2003, 10:40 AM
That largely depends how playable you want the playable demo to be ;)

At the moment, you can just kinda float aimlessly around the landscape and admire the scenery.

Before I release a demo, I'd like to get the physics subsystem functional and put a few static and non-static entities (trees and buildings) into the world... so you have something to do at least, even if it's only kicking beach-balls around.
Title: Re:Wooo, first public screenshot
Post by: iago on September 11, 2003, 10:43 AM
Quote from: EvilCheese on September 11, 2003, 10:40 AM
That largely depends how playable you want the playable demo to be ;)

At the moment, you can just kinda float aimlessly around the landscape and admire the scenery.

Before I release a demo, I'd like to get the physics subsystem functional and put a few static and non-static entities (trees and buildings) into the world... so you have something to do at least, even if it's only kicking beach-balls around.

Can we put somebody's face frpm a bmp onto the beachball? :-D
Title: Re:Wooo, first public screenshot
Post by: hismajesty on September 11, 2003, 01:53 PM
Quote from: iago on September 11, 2003, 10:43 AM
Can we put somebody's face frpm a bmp onto the beachball? :-D

I'll volunteer  ;D
Title: Re:Wooo, first public screenshot
Post by: Eagle of BH on September 16, 2003, 08:18 AM
Yeah, the light rays in the back look a bit fake, but otherwise it's very well done, good job.
Title: Re:Wooo, first public screenshot
Post by: Banana fanna fo fanna on September 19, 2003, 07:34 PM
Should antialias the lines as well.