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Plan for Brian Ramage

Name:	Brian Ramage
Date Posted:	Jun 24, 2005
Rating:	5.0 out of 5
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Blog post

TSE Milestone 3

TSE milestone 2 is complete, and milestone 3 is well underway, so I thought
it would be a good time to share my thoughts on where we're going with it.
The main goal of MS3 is to tighten up the engine for more general consumption.
We want to fix some of the more annoying bugs and streamline some areas so
working with the materials is easier. We'd also like to increase performance,
particularly on nVIDIA FX cards.

Here are some of the major improvements planned:
- Get FSAA fully working
- .DDS support and more DXT compression options
- Fix skinning code with interpolated tangent space vectors
- Get an Atlas terrain editor working
- Add a texture / material flush so artists don't need to reload TSE to tweak materials
- Pre-load materials/shaders/other resources on level load
- Better .dif warnings if they are incorrect version
- Material enhancements
- Alpha test
- Parallax mapping
- More blend operations for cubemaps
- More procedural shader options
- Better control over specular colors
- ... much more

In addition, I've got an update of Materials coming up next week that has:
- client side Materials / ShaderData / CubemapData
- auto loading of materials.cs from subdirectories - so they can live with the data
- got rid of addMaterialMapping() calls - the mapping is done in the Material itself now
- full path names of textures are no longer needed

I'll explain these improvements in greater detail when the updates go live.

Figuring a timeline for MS3 is tough at this point as we have a LOT going on behind the
scenes right now. Josh should be releasing a "bounty" list for MS3 tasks that we'd pay
to get done, so we're hoping that can speed the development a bit. We've also got the
possibility of GG co-founder Tim Gift making a guest star appearance for MS3. He might
break out some goodies (OpenGL anyone?).

Recent Blog Posts

List:	01/24/07 - TGEA Milestone 4.2 release 10/30/06 - TGEA Milestone 4 Demo 08/17/06 - TSE Milestone 4 06/07/06 - TSE optimizations 07/26/05 - Plan for Brian Ramage 06/24/05 - Plan for Brian Ramage 02/25/05 - Plan for Brian Ramage 10/25/04 - Plan for Brian Ramage

Submit your own resources!

Chris \"C2\" Byars (Jun 24, 2005 at 01:43 GMT)

WOOT for OpenGL support! :)

Anthony Rosenbaum (Jun 24, 2005 at 01:50 GMT)

Very Exciting!

Joshua Dallman (Jun 24, 2005 at 03:27 GMT)

opengl would be very nice!

Pat Wilson (Jun 24, 2005 at 04:52 GMT)

*cough* Xbox360

Matthew Langley (Jun 24, 2005 at 05:06 GMT)

wow... very cool! (love the water btw, a friend who picked up TSE runs it and the terrain on a Radeon 9000 mobile 64mb video memory and 512 mb ram at about 40 FPS with the water in full view =0 our jaws dropped lol).

Martin Schultz (Jun 24, 2005 at 05:42 GMT)

Hey, cool! A goodie? Please add to that list: Distributed painting on materials while the game is running (for printing tags/logs/text) on player skins. There are already resources about this, but only at game start. Would be nice as useful.

But anyway, great stuff!
Martin :)

James Laker (BurNinG) (Jun 24, 2005 at 07:36 GMT)

Aaare weeeee theeeeere yeeet? :)

Timothy Aste (Jun 24, 2005 at 10:03 GMT)

Awesome stuff Brian!

Stefan Lundmark (Jun 24, 2005 at 10:25 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

Very nice!

Craig Fortune (Jun 24, 2005 at 10:33 GMT) Resource Rating: 5

*grins*

Michael Cozzolino (Jun 24, 2005 at 11:59 GMT)

Ah the elusive Tim Gift.

I don't know jack about graphics stuff so I had to google some of those terms. It's exciting stuff. Great job guys.

Dunsany (Jun 24, 2005 at 14:51 GMT)

OpenGL!

Brian Richardson (Jun 24, 2005 at 14:58 GMT)

/me waits for bounty list, sounds interesting..

Tim Muenstermann (Jun 24, 2005 at 15:12 GMT)

I thought "Tim Gift" was like Santa Claus... so you are saying Tim and Santa are real? =0

;)

Kevin Johnson (Jun 24, 2005 at 15:12 GMT)

[ Add a texture / material flush so artists don't need to reload TSE to tweak materials ]

YES!!!

Hokuto (Jun 24, 2005 at 15:25 GMT)

Good stuff...
it is nice to know what's planned from your side

Alexander "taualex" Gaevoy (Jun 24, 2005 at 17:06 GMT)

badly Need For OpenGL! ;)

Adam deGrandis (Jun 24, 2005 at 18:18 GMT)

Nice :)

Josh Williams (Jun 24, 2005 at 19:14 GMT)

Nice .plan Brian, very exciting. :)

So you all know, that bounty list will be up next week, with full details on how to work it.

Vashner (Jun 24, 2005 at 23:23 GMT)

I just want to say. It's an amazing value for the price considering all the features. Thanks guys *.*

Weston (Jun 25, 2005 at 02:46 GMT)

Sweet, can't wait!

I'll be throwing a texture flush party when this is implemented, if anyone is interested... lots of drinkin' and flushin'

Jack Oneal (Jun 25, 2005 at 04:43 GMT)

It just keeps getting better and better =)

Nasir Khan (Jun 25, 2005 at 18:13 GMT)

i am totally new to game programming... so plz show me the easiest path to start.

Brian Ramage (Jun 25, 2005 at 22:49 GMT)

Thanks for all the comments guys.

No promises on OpenGL, but cross your fingers ;)

@Martin - I'm still thinking of a good clean way to do that. Might take a shot at it when we hit the texture / material flush feature.

Brian Ramage (Jun 26, 2005 at 08:17 GMT)

*Ahem*, Pat will also be guest starring on this (and future) edition(s) of TSE, reprising his usual role of bringing TSE to the console realm. This time it's with the delicious XBox 360.

Rizzen (Jun 26, 2005 at 18:24 GMT)

OpenGL! First step towards Linux version of TSE.

:)

Anders Jacobsen (Jul 06, 2005 at 02:11 GMT)

That Bounty list out yet? Is it just for TsE?

On another note, I think MSAA + Anisotropic Filtering is much more useful than FSAA (aka 'SuperSampling' right?)
Mostly because it has less of a performance hit. Given, people probably want the power of choosing between both.
MSAA also has no impact on textures, leaving that up to Anisotropic filtering.
Edited on Jul 06, 2005 02:13 GMT

Chris Labombard (Jul 07, 2005 at 14:32 GMT)

According to a secret source on irc... Maybe his nick was Galdor... Elluded that the bounty list would be for more then just TSE.

But I can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of this information.

That source may also have elluded to the fact that it is not ready yet.

Robin Degen (Dec 29, 2005 at 14:58 GMT)

Great.. only it's posted half a year ago. Any idea on the release date/month?

eb (Jun 24, 2007 at 04:04 GMT)

""- got rid of addMaterialMapping() calls - the mapping is done in the Material itself now""

How would someone assign sounds to materials ? ...all attempts after 4 hours of web searching have failed.
Docs Docs Docs...explain explain explain

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