Elysian Shadows

I don't use the complete code files from the book. I use the code SNIPPETS of OpenGL inside my own framework. Like I said, while the code files do suck, the explanations and knowledge are crucial.

And what features in the book are not yet supported? OpenGL 4 drivers are already out.

TheBuzzSaw wrote:I don't use the complete code files from the book. I use the code SNIPPETS of OpenGL inside my own framework. Like I said, while the code files do suck, the explanations and knowledge are crucial.

And what features in the book are not yet supported? OpenGL 4 drivers are already out.

Right, they are out, but no one uses them.

Are you suggesting that no one should? My point is that everything in OpenGL 3 is pretty much available to most gamers today.

TheBuzzSaw wrote:Are you suggesting that no one should? My point is that everything in OpenGL 3 is pretty much available to most gamers today.

After rereading my comments and then your replies I now understand your last question. I guess I do come across that way and that is not my intention at all. My apologies for sounding as if no one should look at the 4.x functions. My intentions were purely motivated to those who might have a hard time trying to figure this out. That they should start out with OpenGL SuperBible 4th edition ( If there were to buy any of them that is ) and work up from there. 4th edition OpenGL is fairly easy to learn. [In otherwords, learn the 2.1 to 3.2 Functions first to grasp the idea of what OpenGL is before going to use the higher version functions. ]

Again, my apologies if I came across the wrong way.

I agree. Learning 2.1 first eases the transition nicely.

Wow, I haven't touched OpenGL mostly since 1.4! I bought the red book on that years ago, now it's just a prop to raise the hight of my monitor I'm guessing that OpenGL 3 is more like DirectX 10 and 4 is like DX11.

Well, here's another update to show what I've got so far. I can toggle render profiles so deferred and light pre-pass is both possible in the engine. I'll probably take a side step from the rendering stuff and get to work on quad trees / octrees. But here's a video demonstration that shows two rendering modes (make sure 720p is on):

Lovely.

Instantly subbed.

can this engine do many polys without significant slowdown?

Dayum, the lighting is beautiful!

Sub'd.

SPR_Phantom wrote:Instantly subbed.

can this engine do many polys without significant slowdown?

The building is over 300k polys and is 90% of the total for the scene. I haven't done any culling/filtering for optimization yet. It's doing 60-90 fps consistently, sometimes dips a bit below 60 when the lights are very close and light up almost everything on the screen. I'm using a Radeon 4670 card.

As with all deferred renderers, lighting efficiency is a bigger concern and it largely depends on how many pixels on the screen need to be lit up. I'm using large point lights and they cover up a lot of pixels, but it's only 30 lights. Basically, if you want to have good performance, you can either have hundreds (or even thousands) of small lights on the screen, or several dozen large lights.

I took a look at the lighting setup from another XNA engine that ran too slow on my computer. I thought, "well maybe the lights are too large" and decided to set them up exactly in my program. To my surprise, it actually ran well, and they looked a lot cooler! So that other engine had some nice ideas but it wasn't very efficient.

Thanks for the subs, guys! I appreciate the support.

CC Ricers wrote:

SPR_Phantom wrote:Instantly subbed.

can this engine do many polys without significant slowdown?

The building is over 300k polys and is 90% of the total for the scene. I haven't done any culling/filtering for optimization yet. It's doing 60-90 fps consistently, sometimes dips a bit below 60 when the lights are very close and light up almost everything on the screen. I'm using a Radeon 4670 card.

As with all deferred renderers, lighting efficiency is a bigger concern and it largely depends on how many pixels on the screen need to be lit up. I'm using large point lights and they cover up a lot of pixels, but it's only 30 lights. Basically, if you want to have good performance, you can either have hundreds (or even thousands) of small lights on the screen, or several dozen large lights.

I took a look at the lighting setup from another XNA engine that ran too slow on my computer. I thought, "well maybe the lights are too large" and decided to set them up exactly in my program. To my surprise, it actually ran well, and they looked a lot cooler! So that other engine had some nice ideas but it wasn't very efficient.

Thanks for the subs, guys! I appreciate the support.

So what modeling software you use for the models ?

On a side note, all my land is being generated. Water too. The only textures I have are for the water mask and the terrain texture. But I'll be changing those two so they are generated on the fly as well.

Great work on the XNA. I am not a fan of XNA because MS IDE costs an arm and leg for their IDE and the free IDE known as SharpDevelop doesn't work with XNA 4.0 very well. Those Express Editions of the MS IDE are for a 90 Day Trial. All the versions pop up with that message that says you MUST register and pay for the software after 90 days. Its in the fine print. So I never bothered to go any further with it.

If it was not for that, I would probably use XNA as well. Anyhow great job.

janequorzar wrote:

CC Ricers wrote:

SPR_Phantom wrote:Instantly subbed.

can this engine do many polys without significant slowdown?

The building is over 300k polys and is 90% of the total for the scene. I haven't done any culling/filtering for optimization yet. It's doing 60-90 fps consistently, sometimes dips a bit below 60 when the lights are very close and light up almost everything on the screen. I'm using a Radeon 4670 card.

As with all deferred renderers, lighting efficiency is a bigger concern and it largely depends on how many pixels on the screen need to be lit up. I'm using large point lights and they cover up a lot of pixels, but it's only 30 lights. Basically, if you want to have good performance, you can either have hundreds (or even thousands) of small lights on the screen, or several dozen large lights.

I took a look at the lighting setup from another XNA engine that ran too slow on my computer. I thought, "well maybe the lights are too large" and decided to set them up exactly in my program. To my surprise, it actually ran well, and they looked a lot cooler! So that other engine had some nice ideas but it wasn't very efficient.

Thanks for the subs, guys! I appreciate the support.

So what modeling software you use for the models ?

On a side note, all my land is being generated. Water too. The only textures I have are for the water mask and the terrain texture. But I'll be changing those two so they are generated on the fly as well.

Great work on the XNA. I am not a fan of XNA because MS IDE costs an arm and leg for their IDE and the free IDE known as SharpDevelop doesn't work with XNA 4.0 very well. Those Express Editions of the MS IDE are for a 90 Day Trial. All the versions pop up with that message that says you MUST register and pay for the software after 90 days. Its in the fine print. So I never bothered to go any further with it.

If it was not for that, I would probably use XNA as well. Anyhow great job.

I use Blender 2.5 for the 3D modeling and retouching. Mostly it's been touching up existing models I downloaded from several places, because I'm not extremely good at modeling (and it takes a lot of time away from the programming). Just recently did I start getting used to the Blender interface.

It's cool that you're generating the content as it loads in the program. I haven't done a lot of work with terrain, much less auto-generated content, but I would want to get into doing that eventually. It's probably a whole different challenge than what I'm making right now.

I can't remember when the Express versions of MS Visual Studio required that you pay after using it for 90 days. It must have been a long time ago, or really hasn't been the case. For XNA I've used Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone completely free. Aside from the nagging screen to register the product (which I did) I've using it for several months with no problems.

Ahh Blender. Yea they totally redid the interface for that. 2.4 and older is not the same as the new streamlined 2.5 + versions.

Just giving a heads up on my progress, I refined some of the effects like blur and bloom lighting, and finally applied some way to cull out models to save on rendering time. More recently, I have a simple model animation system worked out thanks to a few tutorials. But man, loading animated 3D models is a pain in the ass! So far the only models that have loaded correctly were the tutorial ones, because they were already pre-made.

So I know that the code is correct, but the actual part of creating and setting up the animations in Blender still has some problems exporting compatible models. I now have a lot more respect for game artists for what they do, especially since I took a computer modeling class before.

Great work! This is seriously amazing, great lighting. What are you using for animation? Are the models strictly frame animated or are you using some sort of bones? I recommend you work with bones and skeletons, it's just a little bit harder to set up, but well worth it when you do. Makes procedural animation and physics sims such as rag doll much easier.