What are you working on?

[frag.machine]

[Tr3B]

Well 99% of the feedback is that the people who play Doom 3 like it and find it awesome.

The option r_forceShadowMapsOnAlphaTestedSurfaces 1 actually makes the game darker but it was requested by one of the active D3 modders and I kept it in because it looks better and plays nicely with the fake shadow lights.
I made the game a bit brighter using half-lambert lighting instead of the harsh default lambert term which makes the models completely black on the half side.

Stencil shadows require low-poly geometry to look good and proper self-shadowing looks like ass with stencil shadows and low-poly content. So the designers had no other choice than disabling it.

The soft shadowing and self shadowing looks and feels a lot better when playing the game than looking at a single screenshot.
It is especially nice to see it in action on models like skeletons or spiders with very thin legs where all shadows were disabled.

[toneddu2000]

SuperCool Tr3B!Thanks for doing this! The graphic result is awesome! I wish id released a guide on how to create a game code from scratch with d3 too..

[Spiney]

Yeah! Awesome stuff! I've been wanting this for a while
You based the code of some other engine (DP/Tesseract)? It looks really nice. I also like the alpha tested shadows.
I'm sure Id would have had those everywhere they could had they had the opportunity.

The reason self shadowing is disabled on some characters (as given by JC) is because shadow volumes can sometimes gives a sudden hard edge at the edges used for volume extrusion.
The apex of the low poly mesh not matching that of the high poly I guess. It's just for artistic reason. The Prey guys kept it on, I like it personally, feels more right, even if you get the occasional crappy shadow. I think the imps have it on by default. Iirc in ETQW they fixed it by "shrinking" the mesh inwards slightly used for casting shadows, but I might be talking out of my ass here.

*edit: illustration...



You can imagine shrinking inwards might "fix" most cases.

[Tr3B]

It is partially based on my previous Q3A/XreaL stuff and Carmack's early shadow mapping research that was released in the Doom 3 GPL code. However the Doom 3 GPL release didn't contain the necessary ARB assembly shaders but the BFG .resources did.
I was able to reconstruct the missing parts in C for graphics which is required by the open released BFG renderer and I went even further and beat the performance by replacing Carmack's shader with randomly rotated Poisson discs -> 13 texture lookups instead of 32.
In the end, I figured that Carmack's shadow mapping filter was still the same in Rage.

My approach is described in
http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/medi ... apping.pdf

It is an approach not used by DP or Tesseract afaik.
This stuff is faster than anything I wrote in XreaL. I only use depth textures and no floating point textures which only requires half of the fillrate and is not affected by classic light bleeding problems (ESM, VSM).
The shader implementation is very elegant because I can rule all 3 shadow casting light types (spot,point,sun) with a single shader using sampler2DArrayShadow and the rest is matrix math.
I even implemented cascading shadow mapping for sun lights although the game has almost no sun lights except in the monorail map. I wanted my shadow mapping implementation to be feature complete for a 1.0 release.

[toneddu2000]

So you're the man behind Xreal? I always tought it was the quake based engine most advanced by the graphics side I've ever seen!
Congrats man!

[revelator]

Looks good also nice to see that you fixed the missing bink code with ffmpeg.

One small problem im facing is that the game window sorta flickers (not the usual flickering it kinda jumps up and down a few times after koading).
My cards are 2x ATI R9 270X with latest driver, might be a driver bug or maybe crossfire incompatibility ?.

[Tr3B]

[revelator]

"koading" ergh got to remember my glasses when posting :S.

Ok so its an id introduced bug ?, what would be needed to fix it ?.
Though not extremely irritating it would be nice to have it fixed no rush though just curious.

[revelator]

[revelator]

Made a few fixes, feel free to diff against your version tr3b probably easier than doing it by hand.

[Tr3B]

Please use git and make a pull request.

[revelator]

[revelator]

32 bit build for testing.
64 bit build for testing.

changed most of jpeg's memory allocation to use c++ new and delete.
Both builds support openal.
Used newer ffmpeg builds.
update jpeg and TGA code.

Works fine on ATI if you turn of smart vsync.

[toneddu2000]