[Sheepy]

...whats happening with that these days?

[FireCrack]

May i beg to ask exactly what is over-exposure? is it some sort of blooming effect or what?

[Flaser]

Originally posted by FireCrack
May i beg to ask exactly what is over-exposure? is it some sort of blooming effect or what?

Yes it is - it makes light sources wash over the models next to them, there was an experimental build about a year ago that had a rude implementations, but AFAIK the version the SCP team wants will only bloom the glow maps and glow points alog with a couple of light sources (engines ect. ?)

[Ransom]

I'd like it to be an option to use the effect for everything, rather than just glow maps/points.

[Galemp]

Everything would make it appear that everything was glowing.

But using it on glowmaps and other light sources would be a cheap way to make real-time coronas in the right places.

[Ransom]

Originally posted by Galemp
Everything would make it appear that everything was glowing.

But using it on glowmaps and other light sources would be a cheap way to make real-time coronas in the right places.

Have you played Sands of Time? They bloomed everything in that, and I liked the effect.

[Flaser]

Originally posted by Ransom Arceihn

Have you played Sands of Time? They bloomed everything in that, and I liked the effect.

Aren't you talking about depth of field?

[Ransom]

No. I'm fairly certain Sands of Time didn't have any depth of field effect. They just bloomed everything, including dark bits, although admittedly it's mainly only noticable with brighter bits.  The effect is kinda hard to capture with screenshots. Clicky (Most obvious on the edges of the tree in the top right)

[Rictor]

yeah, Sands of Time has it, Guild Wars has it, the new Elder Scrolls has it, Deus Ex 2 has it.

and aside from all that, it looks awesome in and of itself within FS2.
I'm also interested in a status update, please don''t tell me its been dropped from the feature llist..

[Inquisitor]

I'd like the features we have to work consistently

[redmenace]

well this is sticks idea originally. It is pretty obvious now that he is not coming back.

[FireCrack]

IMO everything should be bloomed, then you have the nice glow coming off of shiny armour, but is supose you could bloom enviroment maps for that effect. Either way, would make the game look 100x better

[Omniscaper]

I think it would be awesome to have bloom and motion blur to kick in when afterburners are activated. But isn't bloom and motion blur a Directx 9 feature?

[Fry_Day]

Well, first of all, every effect is achievable with DX7-class hardware. It's just a question of how much rendering time you want to spend

As for the over-exposure effect, it's possible to do it with DirectX 7 (or 6) hardware.

The effect is very simple. First, draw the frame into a texture.
Do some stuff* (explanation later, but generally, darken it)
Then, blur the texture some.
After that, draw the frame again into the backbuffer, and add your darkened, blurred texture to it.

That effect is achievable on just about any hardware (As just about everything supports render-to-texture in some form, which the only prerequisite), but, it's not realistic to do it on anything less than DX8 class hardware (because it can be done much more efficiently, and old hardware is slow anyway), and DX9 hardware can do the effect more correctly (As there's a lot of cutting corners with old hardware because the dynamic range of pixels is limited), and even more efficiently (For example, Multiple render targets lets you draw into several render targets (textures or back-buffers) at the same time, which reduces a lot of the overhead associated with drawing the frame twice for each time it appears on the screen).
Generally, the effect can be done the way it was meant to be done only on PS3.0 hardware (GeForce 6800), and the only place I've seen it done that way is in the latest patch of Far Cry.
Of course, examples of the effect can be seen, for example, in Splinter Cell.


And, well, to sum things up, I need Visual Studio (I've been too spoiled by its IDE).

[Bobboau]

needs pixel shaders.

[Ransom]

I thought it had already been achieved at some point? I remember seeing a screenshot of it ages ago...

[Liberator]

Basically it needs either another render pass which is gonna kill framerates or PS X.X which will exclude at least a portion of the community.  Am I understanding it correctly?

[Anaz]

it was achieved ages ago by rendering the scene to a 64x64 texture, and then rendering that on top of everything else with a small alpha value.

[Rictor]

so...whats wrong with that?
I mean, from a completely non-techincal point of view...

[Sticks]

Yes, this was originally my task to complete, but unfortunately my time is really limited at the moment. Currently my job as a sound manager of a touring musical group has got quite a stiff hold on that. Rest assured, I am still keeping tabs on things, but I don't see myself having any significant time to contribute in the near future.