[Omniscaper]

Scotchy FINIDHED his Galaxy class and I'm converting it this moment. I was just wondering if glow effects are a possibility to compliment the glow maps?

Glows and bumpmapping I think would be the final graphical touch that would perfect FSO's FS miracle package.

I'll have some screenies of the Galaxy up by monday ( got a wedding shoot tomorrow and fathers day celebration Sunday)

[WMCoolmon]

Which type of glows?
- glows that apply light to nearby ships (Not likely to be implemented)
- glowmaps (Implemented)
- glowpoints (Implemented)

[Turnsky]

ever play bridge commander, WM?.. he means a sort of "glow" around the brightly lit part of the starships (nacelle glow, etc)

[WMCoolmon]

Ehm, they look like glowmaps to me. Is there something I'm missing?

[Trivial Psychic]

Omni may be refering to overexposure, so that the blue glow from the warp nacelles will give a slight blue haze, even when not viewing the glow sections directly... at least that's what I think he's talking about.

[WMCoolmon]

Overexposure was implemented awhile back, but the builds aren't up anymore and the sourcecode was never posted.

[kasperl]

Dangit.

Sticks is still 'round, isn't he? If he could re-implement it, that would be nice. Perhaps an alpha layer on the glowmap to determine what parts to overexpose.....

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Ehm, they look like glowmaps to me. Is there something I'm missing?

Yup:





Why is it hard to impelment?

[Setekh]

Basically, it's not straightforward to separate out the parts of the image that are meant to be overexposed and then apply the filter to them. Go look up the overexposure threads in this forum by Sticks and have a look at the way they're implemented - if you can think of a better way, join the team.

[DaBrain]

Is it possible to use overexposure only for the glow maps ?
(And IHMO for the interface )

[Lightspeed]

and suns.

I think you should have a menu to select WHAT should be overexposed.

[Drew]

that looks like particals or volume ligting to me

[Flipside]

Actually, in theory, all it requires is to take the glowmap layer, drop the resolution, blur it, and then render that very faintly over the frame.... in theory.
AFAIK Bloom IS on the SCP's list of things to do.

[Turambar]

then do it!

[Flipside]

LOL I'm not a coder, but hold in mind the fact that this would have to happen at least 30 times a second, so it will probably be limited by your graphics card specs

[WMCoolmon]

Originally posted by Setekh
Basically, it's not straightforward to separate out the parts of the image that are meant to be overexposed and then apply the filter to them. Go look up the overexposure threads in this forum by Sticks and have a look at the way they're implemented - if you can think of a better way, join the team.

The problem is, the big one is in the SCP priv forum. For anyone wishing to work on this, I quote Sticks:

The relevant code is in gr_d3d_start_frame() and gr_d3d_stop_frame as well as gr_d3d_render_buffer. Cheers mate!

I know Bobboau was messing with this, Bob, do you have the ol' tarball around?

Edit: BTW DaBrain, those look worlds better than the ones I was looking at.

[DaBrain]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon

Edit: BTW DaBrain, those look worlds better than the ones I was looking at.

All thanks to the glows


Edit: A little 1 min mockup (I know it's not very good.)



Is this the effect ?

[Liberator]

Originally posted by Flipside
Actually, in theory, all it requires is to take the glowmap layer, drop the resolution, blur it, and then render that very faintly over the frame.... in theory.
AFAIK Bloom IS on the SCP's list of things to do.

Truly, right now we've got

primary render pass
glow map render pass
spec map render pass

That's 3 render passes for the one image.  Now multiply that by an acceptable frame rate, let's say 30, and that makes 90 images that have to be rendered every second to make the game playable and look like we want it.  If we add Bloom as a 4th render pass that make for 120 images minimum that have to be drawn. That's the minimum.  If you have AA on that doubles or even quadruples to an image count of 480 images per second rendering.  IMO, Something that needs to go to the top of the TO DO list is figuring out a way to reduce the number of render passes so that all that work is done is as few a render passes as possible.  It may require putting the glow and bloom maps into some form of compressed texture that allows multiple versions per file.(see Homeworld 2, their textures have glowmaps and spec maps in the same file.)

[phreak]

im not going to pick out the number of things wrong with that post

[Bobboau]

actualy there are only two render passes, defuse/glow and specular, the rendering of the ox layer would be trivial, the bigger problem would probly be a good way to blur the image properly, iirc this was what made the last OX build less than spectacular. (it realy just looked like glow mapps were applyed twice)

I guess I can take a crack at getting this working again, I didn't want to step on Sticks' toes, but he seems to have unapeared