[Flaser]

No pressure, of course, but I think it'd be rather nice if ships actually cast real-time light... how far away is that from happening? Like, you know on the fancy new Fenris/Levy, they have the glowmaps... in a shadows build, they would create colored light that would also make shadows at different angles. Sorry if this doesn't sound clear; it makes sense in my head.

Check out how Omni made his glowmaps for his Star Trek models - having the lighted parts already cast into the texture.
Actually he used a variant of the very same mapping for 'realistic' shadows on his huge asteroid.

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@Bobbau:

How much of your work is D3D specific?
AFAIK you mostly program that, so a how much of the OGL stuff will have to be rewritten?
...or does this overhaul mean that OGL and D3D will once again have similar optimisation?

Already, thanks for revealing the workings of your magic shop.

[Ghost]

But who wants prerendered lighting? I mean, sure, for something like that, it'd be plenty effective and much better for your computer, but I want ships and asteroids and stuff to actually have light thrown onto them if they fly by a light source on a ship.

[DaBrain]

@Bobbau:

How much of your work is D3D specific?
AFAIK you mostly program that, so a how much of the OGL stuff will have to be rewritten?
...or does this overhaul mean that OGL and D3D will once again have similar optimisation?

Already, thanks for revealing the workings of your magic shop.

AFAIK Bob's material system will be API independant.

[gevatter Lars]

Maybe it has been said....but I can't use the search function so I ask it here....with this new texture system...what can be done? What is different to the current one and will we have things like bumpmaps?

[DaBrain]

As far as I understood, almost every shader effect is possible.

But there's a lot more. Detail textures, which are extremely interesting for SoL, cause it's a efficent way to make landscapes look decent without too much memory usage.

Or even glowmap animations without frames. Like color, strenght or contrast. All this should be possible.

Even as simple phong shader will make the ships looks a lot better.

[Bobboau]

DaBrain's mostly got it right, it's mostly API independent, what I'm doing is abstracting the stuff that both do and haveing a common interface between them. 95% of the work is outside the API. I'm actualy trying to minimize the API abstraction as much as posable.

now the material system on it's own will not allow shaders, it will allow for every fixed function effect posable (more or less) but on it's own shaders will not be inherently suported. BUT the material system is were shaders WILL go after all bugs in the materials system are all worked out.
but the glow map animation, detail mapping, yeah that'll be a snap.

[IPAndrews]

Those pictures are amazing Omni. Goober is right though, that stencil shadow build just teases us. Thanks again to Bobboau for the work he did on that build. Easily the most impressive addition to the game engine that never actually happened . I am left wondering, if (courtesy of the new materials system and BSP rewrite) stencil shadows made a comeback, what would the performance hit then be. Would we have to revise our poly counts downwards again and by how much? Since all this stuff is processed by the CPU not the GFX card right? Of course the question is sort of rhetorical since it's impossible to comment on the performance hit of code that hasn't been written. I'm just thinking out loud  .

[Flaser]

Those pictures are amazing Omni. Goober is right though, that stencil shadow build just teases us. Thanks again to Bobboau for the work he did on that build. Easily the most impressive addition to the game engine that never actually happened . I am left wondering, if (courtesy of the new materials system and BSP rewrite) stencil shadows made a comeback, what would the performance hit then be. Would we have to revise our poly counts downwards again and by how much? Since all this stuff is processed by the CPU not the GFX card right? Of course the question is sort of rhetorical since it's impossible to comment on the performance hit of code that hasn't been written. I'm just thinking out loud  .

That's unnecesary, it would be far better to just properly set the LODs than to downgrade models.

[DaBrain]

No content downgrades please.

If a computer is too slow to use the comming features with the content we have, they should just disable those features.


The material system should slightly speed things up though, but only as long as you don't add complex materials.

Some effects will be faster as shaders than as fixed functions. Ironically the cards which are limited to fixed functions are slower. So the speed-up probably won't even matter... 

[Fineus]

I'm inclined to agree that I'd prefer to see the best possible detail on the best possible machine but with options to disable / enable functions rather than pandering to those with less powerful machines and denying others of what could be.