[Axem]

Oh no, now everyone will know that Laporte hijacks the Atreus and then she rams it into the...

I've said too much...

[The E]

 

So Swifty, wizard that he is, has taken another pass at our bloom effect, including doing a complete HDR render pipeline.

[Black Wolf]

"Holy ****ing ****!"

Literally my exact words, spoken out loud, after looking at that first picture.

[X3N0-Life-Form]

sonofa !
So that's what the bloom-related commits were about

[BritishShivans]

Mother of ****, the Nelson looks like it's from a different engine altogether.

[Kobrar44]

Would I be mistaken if I said HDR is best observed in a video?
EDIT: What is the ship on the right on 1st picture? It looks familiar but I can't find the relevant model on p3d anymore.

[AdmiralRalwood]

Looks like Aesaar's new Hyperion to me.

[niffiwan]

Holy crap, just went and played Bearbaiting + High Noon, engine glows & explosions look phenomenal! (and there's a slight over-shinyness issue, but WHO CARES!)

Code is here if anyone wants to compile & run it themselves 

[Commander Zane]

Shiiiieeet. That looks nice.

It seems like it doesn't affect skyboxes either?

[T-Man]

Does look beautiful got to say (looks next-gen in fact; could also mistake it for an UE4 image or something like that. Impressive).

Have always had a thing for bloom effects (have them set to almost max value) so shall definitely enjoy this. Hats off to ya Swifty!

[Droid803]

dayum
shiny

[Swifty]

HDR is really nice. Being able to hold color/luminance values greater than 1.0 let's me be able to scale the intensity of glowmaps, particle effects, explosions, and glowpoints in the shaders and have it effect the bloom. So instead of having to do an oversensitive brightpass (Like what last gen games tended to do), we just look for any values greater than 1.0 and put that in our bloom buffer. The way blur was implemented in the engine didn't look very good either so I do a multipass solution where we generate the MIP maps of the bloom buffer and do repeated blur passes on them do get a nice wide blur. I'm glad people like it as I'm pretty pleased with the result myself.

But honestly, this was just a cog in my greater plan. The end goal is physically-based lighting in Freespace Open. After looking at Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous, I decided this needs to be done if Freespace Open needs to stay on top of the game. HDR was pretty much what was needed to get a wider range of lighting values you get from physically-based lighting models. I'm really happy this is working and now I can move on to getting gloss map support working.

[Rodo]

Seeing the progress in this game is scary.
How far are we from skynet-level intelligent AI making it into the game?

[Phantom Hoover]

Although as Aesaar points out the bloom isn't being applied to beams, which looks a bit drab. Any chance of that being implemented soon?

[Swifty]

It was easy to adjust the model rendering and particle rendering shader by scaling their color values by a factor of 2.0 or 3.0. It was the path of least resistence so that was done immediately so I can test out the HDR bloom. I'll get to the other stuff eventually.

[Aesaar]

I just want to say that you're awesome and so is this.

[AdmiralRalwood]

I just want to say that you're awesome and so is this.

[Mongoose]

Okay where is this beautiful game from and what has it done with FS.

[Black Wolf]

Now that I'm (a bit) more composed about all this: What's the performance hit like?

[niffiwan]

From my (admittedly unscientific) testing by looking at the FPS counter in DEBUG, comparing 3.7.2RC5 to the HDR code with shadows disabled, HDR runs faster than RC5 

edit: fix bracketisation