[pecenipicek]

yeah, pretty much
and it probably wont get any fixups, due to hery's absence till almost the end of september

[Kiloku]

in general, if you dont know anything about modding people, please dont use it, since it most likely wont work for you.

I admit I don't know about modding, but I don't want to make this work just for "ooohs" and "aaahs" when I see the "pretty effects". As many of you said, this is experimental, and needs to be tested. And unless I done something wrong (I don't think I did, btw), it isn't working for me. I followed all of Rodo's instructions, created a mod folder called "postproc", the mod.ini with the MediaVPs, both .sdr files on the Data/Effects and both missions in Data/Missions. I activated the post-processing flag, and it still didnt work, it's the same as playing without post processing at all.

I'll detail my system configurations and video card later, because I have to leave, sorry.

[pecenipicek]

one of the missions uses keys to trigger the effects, the other one uses timed sexp's

[Rodo]

Yes the testing part is something that seems to be lacking and coders can't do all the work themselves, I praise you ^^

as pecenipicek said, there are two special missions that you need to play from the mission simulator, I would recommend pecenipicek's one since you can trigger the effects yourself pressing 1, 2 or 3.

also worthy checking:
do you have an Nvidia card or an ATI?
might be a problem with the ATI drivers, they are known to cause trouble IIRC.

[pecenipicek]

yeah, i think this doesnt actually work on ati's. didnt get the time to test it on my laptop's 3650...


also, i'll whip up a more complete test mission soon.

[Kiloku]

Yeah, mine is an ATI. I never had any kind of problem, though. I did wait for the timing in the first test mission and tried the keys in the second test mission. None worked.

ATI Radeon HD 3600 Series
Windows XP Professional SP3
Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 @2.20 GHz
2 GB RAM

C:\Games\FreeSpace2\fs2_open_3_6_11d.exe -mod postproc,mediavps -spec -glow -env -mipmap -nomotiondebris -missile_lighting -normal -3dshockwave -post_process -dualscanlines -targetinfo -orbradar -rearm_timer -ship_choice_3d -weapon_choice_3d -3dwarp -warp_flash -snd_preload  -ambient_factor 5 -no_emissive_light  -spec_exp 11 -spec_point .6 -spec_static .8 -spec_tube .4 -ogl_spec 80

[Rodo]

yeah.. that's probably the ATI thing.. I got the same settings you have so it should work.

[Reprobator]

That work great with my ati now. (radeon hd4870 gs)
I just saw one issue :
WHen you activate the post process thing, the driver forced antialias and the aniso thing doesn't works anymore...
If we could still have these, this would improve the beauty of the thing.
Anyway having those option in the game without having to force them with the drivers would be way more comfortable.

[pecenipicek]

anisotropic filtering is implemented nicely iirc, that slider in the launcher actually does do something.

[Herra Tohtori]

anisotropic filtering is implemented nicely iirc, that slider in the launcher actually does do something.

Yet the actual results of the AF set only on Launcher suck compared to same level of AF set via driver control panel. At least on my NVidia gpu (GF8800GT).

[pecenipicek]

dunno. i in general have failed to notice AF most of the time in pretty much any game, unless, my viewpoint was very near the floor.

[Reprobator]

that's strange i didn't notice diffrence with af and aa slider to 16x and 0x
I thought it didn't work because if i do not force it with my driver i can swear there is no aa at all.

[Hery]

The problem is: no, none of that can happen because the only thing this method can differentiate between is the UI versus the rendered frame.  Full-screen post processing effects are the only things possible, unless someone wants to go through the code and actually try to figure out a reliable way to layer the effects.  Something like that, though, is going to be horrendously difficult to accomplish, and will result in a huge video memory drain.

We can use G-buffer to locally change effects intensity. The problem is that it might not work very well on older hardware, but I think that it is to early to worry about it since we don't have a line of deferred shading code.
Additionally, HDR seems to be ideal solution for all problems with choosing default bloom intensity.

Edit: About the motion blur, is there a way to change the algorithm so that it takes into account your framerate?  The blur should be strengthened for high framerates and lowered for low framerates (step size difference) - this will consume more vram though.

I really don't think that bounding motion blur intensity with delta time has anything to do with vram

For a true Crysis-quality motion blur you'll need to do more than that, though, and this hack won't be sufficient - unless you have an ungodly huge amount of video memory.

As I told in my previous posts, that is the simplest and the most naive implementation of motion blur. Additionally, that implementation is not optimized at all. Achieving Crysis-like quality is difficult since even more complicated algorithms have some serious pitfalls.

I thought it didn't work because if i do not force it with my driver i can swear there is no aa at all.

That's normal. AA needs to be implemented "manually" in order to use it with post processing.

Could a version of it without interlacing be done?

Of course, I will separate film grain from interlacing.

How can I make the motion blur effect more subtle?

Currently, only in separate missions using sexps. The problem will be ultimately solved when I will make post-processing effects fully configurable via tbl files.

Also, is it possible to implement SSAO now?
Or distortion shockwaves for explosions?

Both of these will need some amount of work but they are possible to implement.

All reported bugs will be fixed soon

[pecenipicek]

SSAO is useless for us, since that effect is ungodly resource intensive, for not much benefit. and since most of the people can actually do proper 3D AO can be baked into the textures no problems.

Hery, please contact taylor and discuss with him about making a proper material system, since this is all basically just kludging on top of kludging.

[portej05]

Hi Hery,

Thanks for the update!
When you get back from vacation, could you jump on #scp (Esper) at some point so we can have a chat about where we're going with all of this!

Your unified shader diff has done its time in Antipodes, and is now in trunk.

thanks!

portej05

[Zacam]

For those of you having any issues with downloading the builds, I have them all mirrored in MediaFire now.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=41b2114aa4782081ab1eab3e9fa335cadeb48e60159b8df2

[Hery]

"New" post-processing: click
*.sdr files go to the effects directory
*.tbl file goes to the tables directory
*.exe files go to the main FSO directory
*.patch file is mainly for developers

For users:
1. new bloom implementation: better quality, better performance
2. removal of motion blur (it only caused problems and didn't look good)
3. post-processing effect defined in a table (post_processing.tbl). You can easily change default values as well as introduce simple effects without changing fso code.
4. bloom intensity can be set using flag -bloom_intensity (default value: 75)
5. many bugs fixed

Please attach debug log to your bug reports. It will make it easier and faster to solve problem.

For developers:
1. texture class to easily manage textures used in post-processing
2. render_target class to easily manage FBOs
3. object pools for texture and render_target classes
4. object-oriented design of post-processing implementation (post_processing, bloom, simple_effect, etc classes)
5. new shader type: special_shader (supports multiple passes, can be used both in main rendering and post-processing)

I want to let other parts of FSO take advantage from texture and render_target classes. I'm going to do this while implementing resources manager.
The code in introduced in patch is undocumented. It also probably doesn't support MSVC6. These problems will be solved before it will be committed to the antipodes branch.

Screenshots:
http://img117.imageshack.us/img117/2466/screen0047.jpg
http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/1716/screen0048.jpg

[Reprobator]

Ok, i've give it a try and it breaks cockpit compatibility, to be precise :
we have with that build clipping issue when we use a cockpit pof.
It do not behave as other builds. the cockpit pof should not clip with other object (dunno how it's done) but now it collide with objects etc..
It didn"t happen with your post process previous build too.

[Hery]

I should have expected that. I know where is the problem, it will be fixed soon.

[Reprobator]

Oh cool