Plan for Jeff "Reno" Raab

Alrighty everyone, sit down around the campfire, for i bear important, and incredibly interesting news.
All of you know of a fanciful thing called High Dynamic Range lighting.
Well, the TTR team has developed HDR for Torque.

But, sad to say, not for TSE.
So for what you may ask?
TGE.

That's right, we've developed HDR for TGE. We're calling it Fixed Function High Dynamic Range out of sheer lazyness.
Some of you are probably asking, "whats your proof?"
well, i shall quote from my original posting on the TTR forums:

Quote:
Welp ladies and gents, the TTR coders have done it again.
We've broken every coding standard ever made.

This isnt strictly TTR related, so it should be in the clear to show, if not, i give full rights to EK to show up at my house and tazer me in the eye.


pretty no?

Allow me to explain what's going on here.
Basically, i'm sure all of you have heard of a pretty little thing called High Dynamic Range lighting, correct? Basically what that does is it allows the camera to simulate the adjustment of the visible range of light so that you can have an overall wider visible range. This introduces more vibrant, realisitic scenes.

Traditional HDR implementation requires at absolute minimum, pixel shaders 2.0, and about a gig of ram, usually more along the likes of ps3.0 and 2gb of ram.
However, there have been implementations that go as low as ps1.1(a helpful member of the GG community has acheived this)

So what have we got that's better? how about HDR that requires no shaders at all, and can run on any machine that can run the stock Torque Game Engine, as seen in the pic above.
We are rather accurately simulating how the eye perceives overbright, the effect that happens when you walk into a very bright area suddenly, like going outside from indoors.

This has been acheived without shaders, and actually runs faster that the psuedo HDR effect that the Torque Lighting Pack does, as well as being more accurate and vibrant.

Why should we care?
Because this will likely work its way onto TSE, saving us alot of power that would otherwise be attributed to the HDR shaders, giving us more elbow room, as well as other indie games having a massive edge over most professional studios.

Hope you enjoyed this little tech report.
me and Del have been working hard, and are still going.
-Reno out

After looking at this, some of you may begin to consider "That's just the Light Pack, but brightened"
Well, actually, its completely new code(and slightly faster, actually)
Not only is it new code, all the lighting in that scene is procedural(the lightmaps themselves are still static, but the ambient HDR lighting is completely calculated on the fly)
While it's still being polished, our dynamic apature code allows for the lighting to adjust to the apature of the camera dynamically, so dark areas are truly dark, and bright areas, as you can see, are truly bright. Our dynamic apature code will also include the support for the sudden transition of lighting, so walking outside from indoors acheives that overbright effect, which your camera will slowly adjust itself to, or vice versa.

We have the intent to show this off in full at IGC, so stay at the ready, because this stuff is danged cool.