An "unofficial" TSE demo.

#41 @Billy L:

Did you manage to get the water working well on FX5200? Maybe rehost that screenshot if you could?

#42 @Jonathan
Change forcedPixVersion to 1.4 in your client/prefs then you get the water to look lovely.
Sorry for a late respons !

#43 For some reason, on PS 1.4 it looks hideously ugly for me... I thought it would just be a lame shader, but from your results I'm wondering. I still can't for the life of me figure out why my card hates PS2 so much.

Oh, and when I used omega drivers, it worked with PS2 mode... but still had crappy frame rates :/

#44 In case anyone is interested, I've uploaded the latest TSE starter.fps port with an exe.

The new version can now be downloaded Here (23MB) Let me know if you have any problems.
(if you get a "missing directx dll" error message, you can download the file from "here")

If you have any problems or suggestions, please post them here.

- Joseph

#45
Hi Joseph,

Yes, as you can hopefully see (if I've worked out how to include a screenshot), it works a treat, great work....Now we've got a problem..It looks too good to go back to our TGE version of the game, aaaargh!!!!! We'll have tp prey TSE is at R1 by the time we're ready to go go go I suppose.

Great Work !

Harvey

www.stickmanstudios.co.uk

#46 Harvey, that looks great... I really do hope you use TSE for your project!

#47 Cheers Joseph!

Yeah, I don't think I have much choice...It just looks too good with the shader water. I've put it off so far, as as far as I know the player splash/foam emitters don't work yet etc along with other stuff to do with the water (stuff I need as the game's all based on water)...If it were a case of just porting the TGE game across and everything worked, with the added bonus of shader water, it would be a no brainer, but I've not even looked at the terrain stuff or anything else in TSE yet, .. *gulp* .. I'll have to try and get the levels that are built already ported across etc. I can hear the release date slipping from here ..

Oh well...here goes 8)

harv

#48 Harvey

I went to the site. This looks like a really cool game. Can't wait to see it.

#49 Hey thanks.

I've managed to port most of the stuff accross to TSE now, so looks like I'll be using the shader engine for the final release as it's a big improvement. Going to carry on in 1.4 finetuning gameplay, then port the game properly in a couple of months time.

Thanks again for comments, and Joseph for the FPersonDemo. It's helped greatly.

I've chucked a few screenshots on the site to show the difference if you're interested..

harv. 8)

#50 If all you want is pretty water... then there's no need to move away from TGE. I got a nice pixel-shadery water in TGE using CG. It looks as good as the TSE one, minus the refractions, but the reflection doesn't lag 1 frame behind like in TSE. There's also a bonus of being able to dynamically adjust the reflection "buffer" size, and benefitting of automatic LOD. I'll post some screenies on Monday, since I don't have the project files at home. I might post it as a resource, but be warned that it has a few issues right now (since we used it in a prototype, it was acceptable).

For anyone experienced anough and not willing to wait for a "nice" resource, it's pretty easy to add CG support to the fluidRender, since CG itself is very, very easy to integrate (look for the "Bumpmapped Interiors" resource to see how to get it done).

Getting TGE to render a reflected scene was a bit harder. In the end, I added a flag to the GameTSCtrl class called "reflection". Turning it on makes the GameTSCtrl search for a waterblock and reflect the camera matrix during the ProcessCameraQuery() call, and setup another clip plane based on the water plane before drawing everythine.
After the game world has been rendered, the GameTSCtrl will copy the rendered area to a texture. The FluidRender will look for this texture while in "shader mode", and pass it as wellas a normal map texture and some other parameters to the shader to get things rendered.

Then all I needed was change the PlayGui a little, so it contains two GameTSCtrls in it: the "reflection" GUI, behind everything else, set to a small size, and the normal GameTSCtrl, that covers the reflection buffer and shows the game world. Since the reflection GUI is rendered first, the reflection won't lag.

Of course, the CG implementation is very Windows-only, so OSX and Lunix versions of the effect would require loading ARB_Fragment_Progam extension or updating the TGE OpenGL to be able to use GLSL. But TSE is Windows-only for the time being, so...

#51 I suggest you to release this as a resource, because as you said add CG support is easy but to render a reflected scene in TGE is another story! And before TSE is fully functional, add water reflection to TGE I think is important for those who can not wait for its final milestone to finish.

Steven

Edit: If you don't have time to do it, can you email the code to me. I can help to make it a resource.

#52

Quote:If all you want is pretty water...

Personally I think the ships would benefit greatly from normal mapping on the hulls and self-casting shadows from the sails/masts/rigging. Not that they don't look good already of course.

Presumably Atlas terrain (not in this demo?) would allow for larger maps, and with terrain blocks turned upside down it could make caverns too.

#53 RE: Manoel, Sounds like a great resource. As TSE is unfinished, I'd use that in preference if it we're very, very easy to implement (I'm an artist not a programmer by the way, that's the only reason)...Does it work the same way as the existing waterblock, only with reflections? ie. It can detect when it hits land so you can have the more transparent shore etc? Does it hit framerate much?

RE:Steven, if you helped make it a resource, and it was easy for me to implement. I'd be really grateful. I could credit you and Manoel on the game or something. I think loads of people would appreciate reflections of their TGE water.

RE: Andrew, I'd love to have self shadowing sails and rigging, normal mapping, use shaders for the hulls to make them look wet etc., realtime shadows from the destructible buildings and ships, and really go to town on atlas terrains. once TSE is released and finished, no doubt I'll make a full next-gen version. Probably release it as a freebee to the people who supported me by buying the TGE or basic TSE version of Buccaneer (whatever I end up releasing)..Thanks for the comments, much appreciated shipmate. 8)

RE: Joseph, sorry for taking over your thread a bit here, although it's pretty relevant... I'll start up a new one if you like?

Harvey

#54 Hey Manoel

You had any chance to post any screenshots yet for your reflective TGE waterblock? You've got me intrigued that's all 8) ........and I'm just deciding if I should commit to full TSE production of the game.

Cheers

harvey

#55 Sorry for taking so long... too many things to do lately.

Here are the screens:


I'll give a go at creating a resource out of it until the weekend. The major disvantage compared to TSE is the performance on shader-capable hardware, but the advantage is that only the water requires shaders (and will fallback to old style water if shaders are not found), not the whole thing.

Quote:
Personally I think the ships would benefit greatly from normal mapping on the hulls and self-casting shadows from the sails/masts/rigging. Not that they don't look good already of course.

Presumably Atlas terrain (not in this demo?) would allow for larger maps, and with terrain blocks turned upside down it could make caverns too.

I'm not putting TSE down at all. We got a TSE EA license here at work, and we're prototyping on it already, and plan to use it in future projects.

But when you have a game which major requirement is a pretty water (ours being a water-based racer), that goes on a low budget and is scheduled to be developed in 4 to 6 months at most, and you're given two choises:

1) Polish up a TSE build (adding shadows, making the light manager actually work, solving stability, performance and comppatibility issues) so it becomes releasable.

2) Hack TGE and just make the waterblock prettier, while using the TLK to make the rest of the game look less outdated (the lastest TLK features do make a heck of a difference, mainly the DRL resource).

Of course I chose #2. But if this were a bigger project (without need to scale back to much older hardware), with a larger budget and with a longer development time, I'd use TSE. I agree with something someone from GG said a while ago: TSE is for A titles, while TGE suits the indie and budget markets better.

#56 That's really awesome!

Edit: BTW hope you can post the link as well here when you finish it.

#57 Holy hell in a bucket of vodka, that looks awesome!

#58 Please start a new thread with this.... thank you :)

#59 8) will do Joseph, will leave your thread in peace 8)

wow. that looks really great Manoel. Very Impressive.

I'll keep an eye out for your posts, although my email is

harvey@stickmanstudios.co.uk

if you fancy letting me know when you've posted anything etc.,...

Thanks all

Harvey

#60 Holy sexier-than-Half-life2 Batman!