Call for bugs

#1 The nly bugs I can think of off the top of my head is:
1. noticed a while back that 2 suns made things all screwed up. Not sure if thats still like that.
2. Models don't work right with normal maps. That was discussed to death in that ugly lighting thread.
3. Camera is very jittery.

For feature suggestions:
1. Seperate images for specular highlights. I made a thread about this a while back and i'd be a very happy boy to see it made. :)
2. Better particle system. While the stock particle setup is decent, I think something more advanced is needed for a graphical beast like TSE will become. Need to generally make more control over the particles, such as movements. Alot of simple things like swirling particles can't be done very well at all, but would be very nice. Particles are an important part of eyecandy and need to keep em up to date. ;)
3. A motion blur and depth of field feature put in. I dunno how to do this myself and would like to see it.

Oh, and i should hope ya can squeeze in parallax mapping. ;) I posted the shaders for it a while ago and your free to use it if ya like, or change it, whatever. :)

#2 I've pointed out bugs before, so i'm sure you've got those. Here is my list of things i'd like to see improved/fixed/added:

1) Load times... which seem to be caused by the material datablocks more than anything.

2) All the tools and utilities (mission editor, GUI editor, debug interior rendering modes, network traffic graph, etc) should be taken off single key presses. It become painful to debug something then switch back and find all these things up and running. I did this myself on my install (all these things are set to SHIFT+CTRL+????), but it should be the default behavior.

3) Add the "internal release" build configuration to the project.

4) Document the hell out of the material system... the current help document is sevearly lacking.

5) DTS shapes are not effected by interior lighting.

#3 Thanks guys. A lot of what you mention is already in the works.


@Jacob - could you explain more about the camera jitter that you mention? I haven't seen any problems with it. If you could also explain "seperate images for specular highlights" that would be good. Is the current system of modulating the specular by the texture's alpha channel not enough?

@Tom - what do you mean by the "internal release" build config? How does that differ from the "release" config?

#4 There are a couple of places in the Torque where the preprocessor macro INTERNAL_RELEASE is used to enable features. In particular the debug(), setInteriorRenderMode(), and setInteriorFocusedDebug() console functions.

#5 Oh and seperate images for specular would be nice for a couple of reasons.

- My artist, at least at first, didn't like stuffing specular info into the alpha channel. It seems to confuse him.
- You can preview the diffuse texture without the alpha getting in the way.
- You can use jpgs for diffuse textures and still be able to do specular... which is a huge savings in file size for some images.
- The option for per-pixel colored specularity using the full R,G,B channels.
- Some limited reuse.

Internally you could repack the specularity back into the alpha channel if needed as an optimization.

#6 Er hello what about milestone 2....or did I miss something?

#7 @Brian
Well, i've noticed that when moving around in a free camera mode, the screen seems to sort of tear and jitter alot. I notice it most when I change my view from looking in an interior to outdoors. I've also seen it quite a bit when moving around, my camera seems to stop for a split second while in motion, then leap forward. Its nothing much, and might actually be to blame on something else.

As for my specular suggestion, Tom said basicaly exactly what i was thinking with it. I would really like to have a full RGB image to determine my specular color instead of one single parameter that colors the entire thing that specific color. It would give alot of control over alpha channels. And i for some reason just don't like working with the alpha channels much.

But what you could always do for it is make a sort of toggle for it. If an artist would rather use a seperate image, have them add something like specTex for it or if they have specular set to true but no specTex, have it just read off the baseTex alpha channel. That way everyone has full control and can do whatever they perfer. ;)

#8 Could you give a list of what features are ready for testing? I keep looking around but all I can find is the basic listing under TSE that lists the milestones. If I knew what I was trying to test I could help find bugs easier.

"You can't hit a target if you don't know where it is."

#9 Just in case ya guys forgot this one:
www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=28787

If you assign a material to your player, setskin() ceases to function.

#10 There's an annoying bug with the GUI editor. If you hit F10, it won't paint the screen until you've tabbed in and out of the app, or hit "alt", or have done something to pump the event queue.

It's not that bad, so I haven't bothered to look for the cause. But, it's a little critter running around.

#11 I can confirm Jacob's jittering problem. When I walk around interiors in 3rd person, the camera stops for a split second then jumps forward. It happens constantly every couple of seconds. I can give my specs if you want.

A useful feature I'd like is the ability to apply decals on interiors. Like putting a graffiti texture on an interior's side wall or putting a "stain" texture on sections of walls. A more automatic material system would also be helpful.

Nick

#12 No question - I would like to see some of the elements in the /game/fx subdirectory restored. A quick check shows that while most of the rest of the functionality has been restored this section lags big time.

Of course I realize that many many of these features now have new ways they can be done which take advantage of the GPU, but a couple of key ones could be done to get us all rolling.

How about lightning, fxShapereplicator, and fxFoliageReplicator? That would restore the look of the game worlds and provide a basis for people to see how to port many of the TGE resources to TSE as well.

Even if you replace them later with faster more powerful shader based systems later it would still be a good thing to show how the current ones could be converted in order to get people into the mindset of how to convert many of those resources...

#13 Fix the interior debug rendering modes... in fact this is already on my list of projects to do and submit patches for.

#14 I'll second, third and forth the debug rendering modes. Those features tell us more about our problems than anything else we have.

A minor bug that may be related... In the editor, the yellow box surrounding a selected object is never culled. By this I mean that if I begin moving the object through a nearby building, terrain, or anything, I still see the entire box making it very hard to tell where Im lining it up at. I used to (TGE) be able to adjust an objects location until the box would just start to disappear into the next object/terrain, and know it was very close to lined up. No longer.

Do give us 1-2 more fx items. There simply are not enough examples in the code for most of us to add what we need. Melv layed such an awesome groundwork for us in TGE that much was accomplished by just referring to how he did it in fxWhatever.

#15 One reason we haven't ported some of the fx items is cus there are much better ways to do such things on shader hardware - we'd rather do it the Right Way once than fix it then redo it.

#16 I've definitely seen some camera "lurching" behavior when testing on a Geforce 5500 in my water testbed. The behavior dropped a lot when I turned off ps 2.0 rendering. I'll look into that some more.

Camera jitters when looking through a portal outside will be alleviated hopefully a lot when Ben's new terrain arrives.

#17 Actually, I tested it with no interiors at all, just an empty mission with a flat terrain and the camera still jittered. Just thought I'd let you know...

#18 TSE seem pretty stable for EA, so I haven't found any real bugs.

The only new features I'd like is to have the ability to switch material mappings on specific objects during run time. And a dyanmic cude map object like the Source engine's cube map objects...

I hope the first gets considered, since it's a feature most TSE games will use(if not need).

Edit: To be more specific: The Source engine has cubeMap entities to generate cube maps from their world position. All objects then use the closest in LOS cubeMap object for it's cube map. I think something like this in TSE would be a good non game-specific feature because: it's not as CPU/GPU intensive as real-time cubemaps, objects don't have the same cubemap all the time, and the cubemaps can be placed and automaticly generated by the mapper.

#19 Not a bug with the Shader Engine but I'd like to see the TBE working with TSE, I found a thread about this a while back and I still don't think its yet been successful.

#20 Feature requests: Shader instanced objects, such as grass, rocks and trees...Ben was doing some great work a while ago on a po' man's speedTreeRT. This would really give a lot of visual impact to the engine.

Support for the .fx format for shader dev.

The only real issue i've had is chewing thru the documentation (with the understanding the material system will change) and the normal issue for static shapes. A clean, easy to use and well documented material system is essential to the success of the engine.

The specular issue (specular color and attenuation) brought up above could be put together in a couple minutes by a shader coder using a custom shader, but that's a topic for another thread.

edit: added a link to a new thread about the specular map shader