[Flaser]

what is HTL???

Hardware Transformation and Light.

As far as I remember the technology made its debute around the same time when Vodoo died out (....and some of us still had 3D-Accelerator cards hooked onto our videocard!). It's an efficient manner to draw complex geometry by sending the card all the data in prearranged batches. (No I have no idea how it's done, or what the formats or for that matter instruction sets are, but Google and Wikipedia are your friends.)

The reason why everyone refers to high-poly models as HTL models is the following:
When the engine was upgraded (from FS1.2-->FS-SCP) and support for HTL implemented its power was quadrapled at least if not multiplied by an entire magnitude.
Since new models coming out at the time were made for the "HTL-builds", they were dubbed HTL models....hence the name struck for any high-poly ship.

From a modelling point of view when building HTL models (ergo models for FS-SCP) the biggest change was that instead polies the critical factor became the number of textures....hence it became optimal to cram everything onto one or two gigantic textures (1024^2, 2048^2) instead cutting it up to a dozen smaller ones and spare memory. As for polies, you can be pretty detailed....(though modellers will always scorn it if you're wasteful :b)

[wolf]

Hardware Transformation and Light.

As far as I remember the technology made its debute around the same time when Vodoo died out (....and some of us still had 3D-Accelerator cards hooked onto our videocard!). It's an efficient manner to draw complex geometry by sending the card all the data in prearranged batches.

Well, not exactly. All pre-geforce cards could just do the drawing of triangles. CPU calculated where these triangles should be drawn and what color should they have, according to where lights were. Geforce was the first accelerator with HTL, which allowed it to could calculate position of models and their lighting by itself, so CPU had more time to do other things.

[Mars]

Hey, wikipedia says somthing weird:

Hardware T&L is not required for most games out today, but for games like TRON 2.0, regarded outdated in today's terms, T&L is needed for certain effects.

So how do other games have hi-poly models?

[pecenipicek]

Hey, wikipedia says somthing weird:

Hardware T&L is not required for most games out today, but for games like TRON 2.0, regarded outdated in today's terms, T&L is needed for certain effects.

So how do other games have hi-poly models?

somebody royally ****ed up that article.

[StratComm]

Wow, did Wikipedia really say that?

[Mars]

Yep, it really did, will somone who understands HTL please correct it? All HTL means to me is a new graphics card and pretty games.

[Ace Pace]

Yep, it really did, will somone who understands HTL please correct it? All HTL means to me is a new graphics card and pretty games.

HTL can be summed up as being basic built in functions for displaying and modifying models/textures. As the name implies(hardware transformation and lighting) it deals with displaying of models and some built in functions to display them differantly.

Nowdays HTL, the term atleast, has been superseded by programmable shaders, which do everything HTL did and more. Or so I understand, I shy away from coding graphics. 

If you have anything from the GF2 and up, you're HTLised, but you might not have shader pipelines.

[neoterran]

The first cards with programmable shaders were the geforce 3 and the radeon 8500

[Ace Pace]

The first cards with programmable shaders were the geforce 3 and the radeon 8500

Yes, but those were still fairly fixed function DX8 stuff. Not to work with. You gotta look at DX9 stuff to be really programmable.

[neoterran]

well, the shader instructions in pixel shader 1.x were shorter than they were in ps 2.0x up, but i mean, come on, they were'nt fixed function. they were definately programmable.

[Ace Pace]

well, the shader instructions in pixel shader 1.x were shorter than they were in ps 2.0x up, but i mean, come on, they were'nt fixed function. they were definately programmable.

Not having coded graphics myself, I can't exactly comment but I as I understand, PS1 was still fairly limited in what it could do and was fairly limited.

<-- makes note to one day learn HLSL.

[neoterran]

it's not as good as pixel shader 2.0 = true

it's fixed function = false

it's fairly limited = partialy true. I have a geforce fx graphics card and so i can't really use my pixel shader 2 abilities in most games because of the fact nvidia messed it up. I play oblivion with a mod called "oldblivion" which is really a loader that modifies areas of memory at runtime to use pixel shader 1.x instead of 2.0(a). The game still looks pretty beautiful and runs a hell of faster. That's a testament to how decent shader 1.x is.

I would say that if we had any graphics person on board who knew/had the time to program shader support for opengl for fs2_open, we could get of new and better effects and make the ships look a lot better, even with only shader 1.x. The game looks great without ANY shader support ATM, but shaders would really be huge.

On a related note, i got the author of the Doom "Bloom" mod to take a look at his code to see if he can get it to work with fs2_open, so we may be able to bring a HDRish type effect to freespace 2 for nvidia cards. (this makes ships going into subspace look a lot better, and lasers look better, for one)

Hopefully the effect will look closer to HDRish lite.

[Ace Pace]

Thanks for the information. I have to say one of the more annoying things that will be needed before we can stick shaders on is probebly a relook at engine core.

[neoterran]

well, i'm a C# programmer. I learned C# as my main language and I understand Java mostly. But C++ is confusing for me. There's all kinds of things that are done completely differently and things I don't understand. I spend a weekend looking at the CVS code and it was like looking into the eye of Sauron. I definately need more C++ experience before I could even attempt any decent changes. Adding shader support to the current codebase would be a big task even for an experienced coder. Just ask Taylor.

[Ace Pace]

well, i'm a C# programmer. I learned C# as my main language and I understand Java mostly. But C++ is confusing for me. There's all kinds of things that are done completely differently and things I don't understand. I spend a weekend looking at the CVS code and it was like looking into the eye of Sauron. I definately need more C++ experience before I could even attempt any decent changes. Adding shader support to the current codebase would be a big task even for an experienced coder. Just ask Taylor.

At my current path(school dictated) I'll end up a C# programmer but I intend to have a good grasp of C at the least. Too much is still based on that.

[taylor]

<-- makes note to one day learn HLSL.

If you're doing that for FS2_Open then be sure to learn GLSL, not HLSL.  HLSL is for DirectX and GLSL is for OpenGL.  NVIDIA's Cg can be compiled into both, but since we're probably dropping D3D support, I'm not making a big deal about the new shader code for OpenGL using GLSL instead of Cg.

[Ace Pace]

<-- makes note to one day learn HLSL.

If you're doing that for FS2_Open then be sure to learn GLSL, not HLSL.  HLSL is for DirectX and GLSL is for OpenGL.  NVIDIA's Cg can be compiled into both, but since we're probably dropping D3D support, I'm not making a big deal about the new shader code for OpenGL using GLSL instead of Cg.

Alright, thanks for the hint. So I'll probebly aim at Cg. Don't count on me anytime soon as I have of ground to cover and I'm actully mostly interested in documenting the project. For some reason it makes my nose tingle.

Yes, you may all go 

[neoterran]

well, i'm a C# programmer. I learned C# as my main language and I understand Java mostly. But C++ is confusing for me. There's all kinds of things that are done completely differently and things I don't understand. I spend a weekend looking at the CVS code and it was like looking into the eye of Sauron. I definately need more C++ experience before I could even attempt any decent changes. Adding shader support to the current codebase would be a big task even for an experienced coder. Just ask Taylor.

At my current path(school dictated) I'll end up a C# programmer but I intend to have a good grasp of C at the least. Too much is still based on that.

if you know C/C++ it's probably easier to understand C# than the other way around. Although there are no pointers in C#(okay there are, but they're frowned upon), there are Generics for Collections instead of Templates, and various other structural and syntactical changes. Also there is no foreach in C that i'm aware of 

[TrashMan]

Does my Athena model qualify as a HTL model?

[karajorma]

Wasn't it a MK II rather than an attempt to high poly the original?