TSE.. What are you most excited for?

#1 That looks very cool! To bad I dont have TSE yet. =(

-Stephen

#2 Wow that is a cool effect - have u already achieved this in TSE??? or is this the developers' shot?

A concern for me is framerate - will these effects run at sufficent horsepower for the rest of the game to run smoothly?

Stevie

#3 I have parallax mapping up and running in TSE. It works great.

Well, performance is ok. Of course it depends on how much surfaces you will use it. If you use parallax mapping for nearly everything in your game... you know what I mean.

#4 Terrain improvements.

#5 All the effects are cool... no doubt...
Altough done by others with TGE i just keep saying this to myself:
"Aaaagh.... Bumpmapping... at last!"

#6 Yes I have parallax working on tse too. Nabbed the fx files needed from a dx example. Also added some shadowing to it but this needs to be pre-computed at present so level load up is longer :o(

#7 No, thats a decent example shot i got off a site. I'm just waitin for GG to get it all in at their pace. I can't wait for it too. ALthough i guess im also pretty excited about shadows. Would be nice to finally get some good ones.

#8 Let me say one thing: For effects like parallax mapping and similar stuff, don't wait for GG doing them for you. There are many examples out there and it's totaly easy to get them running in TSE. It's just "hard" for the first time. I've you implemented one or two shaders by yourself this is not a problem anymore.

The GG Guys made it so easy. That's great.

#9 Hm.. well, i'd liek to look into it but i'm pretty new on all this.. might just be waisting my time. Is there like, alot sort of engine work ya need to do as well or is it all shader?

#10 Its all shader. The TSE architecture does not dictate the ONLY way you can do shader effects...it gives you choices where in the code you want to "hook in".

This allows you generally to take sample code that you find and examine how it works. If it looks like it is using some combo of the shaders already provided in TSE...then use them. If it involves somethign more complex then you may have to hook in at a lower level...but doing so its not painful...the system was architected around making this very task easy.

#11 I'm waiting on water effects, i wanna see those :)

#12 Your displacement mapping looks great Jacob. I'm hoping that by the time my game is complete the average graphics card will be powerful enough that I can use this stuff everywhere. Then we'll really see a quantum leap in the realism of game graphics. Anyway, good work!

#13 Heh, despite how badly i wanna take the credit, as i said i didn't do that. I just posted that picture as a nice example of it.. I don't know enough to get my own working yet. :(

#14 Durnit, you try to give people credit and they just won't take it! :)

On this topic one of the things on my list is to implement a type of displacement mapping in TSE called "relief texture mapping". There's an example in the book "The Cg Tutorial" - an excellent shader book by the way. Relief texture mapping allows you to model full 3d objects with an incredible level of geometric detail using only a bounding cube of actual geometry. Basically you're adding six displacement maps together - one from each of the six sides of a cube.

Their example is a finely detailed statue. It's all done with only six polygons. Of course they're six pretty heavyweight shader polygons but it sure beats the >10000 polygons you'd otherwise need to represent this level of detail. Nice stuff.

#15 Well, i actually did some reading on releif texture mapping and it basically sounded like more trouble then its worth. Would be good for certain lil tricks here and there but overall is too costly on performance.. Oh and i found some parallax shader that i tried out in TSE.. It... SORT of works.. It seems to change behaviour for each surface. On the orc base from tse it doesnt work at all except for on the roof and for some reason there its loading the wrong normal map.. but nowhere else of cource. On one of my own interiors it works good but sets itself to a certain brightness and isn't effected by light.. but.. its somethin i guess.. ;)

#16 Terrain improvements, sound updates.. that's what I'm waiting for.

#17 I'm hoping for a proper polysoup exporter. Perhaps a new generic format that most 3D apps can export to and supports more sophisticated materials and UV export than DTS so you can bulid interiors, terrain etc manually and not have to rely on the bult in editor. plus non convex collision types to give developers more flexibility in how they develop their games and not having to rely on the tools that come with torque.

Otherwise progress seems to be coming along nicely on the engine front.

#18 CPU speeds are reaching the end of what's achievable with current technology. To get more speed in a cost effective way, it seems parallel computing is the way of the future. An example being Playstation 3 which is being designed with a parallel processor system according to early reports.

A new Xbox will have to be designed to keep Xbox competitive with Playstation 3. Parallel processing chips will thus get mass produced bringing the price down enough for the mass markets to be interested. Perhaps 5 years from now, the PC will probably come with multi-processor parallel processing as standard.

Competitive future game engines must then be mutithreaded to take advantage of multiprocessor systems. I'm not suggesting that TSE go muti-thread now because most home users still have single cpu systems, but developers should design the engine architecture keeping in mind that at some point in the future, they may well want thread-safe source making it relatively straight forward to implement threads.

#19 Yeah there will be both Pentium and athlon64 CPU's with dual cores out next year, plus you can allready run video cards in parallel thanks to the geforce 6800's SLI capabilities

gives you up to 87% performance increase over a single 6800 system.

Pretty crazy that a dual ultra will run doom 3 at over 100 fps 1600x1200 32bit in high quality mode

#20 Adrian
And maybe doom2 will to beat the incredible 500+ frames per sec. framerate. What a new way to be totally happy 8;))))