[The E]

You are probably (or rather, definitely) not using the correct shaders.

[Valathil]

How many times do i have to mention that this thing will be tunable and disableable before everyone gets it. This isnt even 50% finished by my reckoning for christ's sake why should i worry about doing fine tune settings now when i havent even figured out to do all kinds of light sources yet. I mean thanks for the suggestions on how to make it more customizable but do you really think im doing this and havent thought about what could be tuned in a feature i completely thought up and implemented by myself? I mean you could have asked anyone a month ago if there would be shadows in fsopen and everybody would have said NO WAI. So really, settle down till i finish it. This is going to take a while. As I said before im doing this alone and i dont have unlimited time to work on this. The Test builds im providing are as a courtesy to the community and a way to test the code on different hardware setups not really a performance test if it can run on integrated intel gpus or the like. So if your pc cant handle this it never will regardless of any parameters i would expose for tuning. Sucks to be you but thats the way it is.

[Black Wolf]

Has anyone else tested this with the Modular Construction Kit? In particular, with larger constructions? The shadows absolutely kill them on my PC, not sure he it's me, or a result of their inherently shadow intensive shapes.

Also, getting some oddly specific slowdowns with my cargo platform - with one on screen, framerate drops to a rocksteady 30.0. He there are 2, it falls off to an equally solid 20.0. This is from a solid 60 fps. Are there reproducable for anyone else?

[Kolgena]

Well, 60, 30, and 20 sound like you have vsync on.

I seem to get slowdowns per object on screen. 3-5, I'm fine. Any more than that, and my framerates dive precipitously. This may be related to your modular construction kit, since, presumably, each girder/corner is its own model.

[Subspace Anomaly]

Has anyone else tested this with the Modular Construction Kit? In particular, with larger constructions? The shadows absolutely kill them on my PC, not sure he it's me, or a result of their inherently shadow intensive shapes.

Also, getting some oddly specific slowdowns with my cargo platform - with one on screen, framerate drops to a rocksteady 30.0. He there are 2, it falls off to an equally solid 20.0. This is from a solid 60 fps. Are there reproducable for anyone else?

Those shadows are done per objects not per lights, so with many objects out there slowdown will be huge. Also resolution is the same for small fighters as for big ships.

I don't really know if it is better to compute shadow maps per objects or just for whole scene ( it's about speed vs detail ), but apparently it's still early stuff.

Just to give some more feedback, tested it on old machine (it's dualcore with 2600 AMD gfx) and default executable right now struggles to give useful performance (with no media pack). With 512x512 it's mostly fine, but small fighters have their shadows barely visible on capitals ( Mirmidon on Hatshepsut ).

[The E]

Actually, that is not correct. The shadow setup, for the moment, takes the first directional light (that is, the first sun in the mission file) and renders the entire scene from that lights' viewpoint into the shadow map, which is then used as input for the regular renderer. If it was only calculated per object, you would only get self-shadowing.

[sigtau]

Which reminds me, in the last few missions of the main FS2 campaign (those that take place in Capella), that really, really, really tiny sun is the first sun in the mission file, so all light gets cast from that sun, whereas the other suns are much larger and on the other side of the skybox--which looks very odd.

Probably something FSU needs to fix, rather than the SCP, so just thought I'd point that out...

[The E]

Well, one of the things Valathil is working on is to increase the number of light sources that can cast shadows. So that may not be such a big issue in the future, at the cost of more performance.

[Subspace Anomaly]

If it was only calculated per object, you would only get self-shadowing.

Actually every object get's it's own depth map. So for all ships (apparently debri or asteroids are not included) all the other ships, debri and objects  that are in certain direction and distance are rendered. So it's not entire scene per object, but it's not entire scene for everything either.

You can check it out, every render_ship call does this thing. It's by no means bad idea, it's just luxury that not everyone can afford.

[Valathil]

The negative space wedgie is actually right and this is another point where you can put on the performance screws "self shadowing only"

[Zacam]

All Off-Topic Discussion can happen here: Re: Not-so-secret Secret Project

New builds, patches, and issue reporting ONLY. No Feature requests. No Feature Complaints. Any Off-Topic post get's a week off.

[Crybertrance]

I have to say, GODD WORK VALATHIL!
I am enjoying a good 50~60 FPS (without VSync) and 40~50 FPS (with VSync) using the latest patch...
However, there are some strange issues regarding the shadows, for instance, when a capital ship (Corvette and up), is near the player the framerate is as smooth as silk, however when the ship is at a bit far off (say 7000~8000 meters) I am experiencing a gereat performance loss (about 25~35 FPS, without VSync)

I just whipped up a mission in FRED where there was only a Hades Destroyer (HTL) and notihing (no background, asteroids,etc) else...I am still experiencing the same issue..

I have a Radeon HD 5770 (1 GB)
AMD Phenom II X4 and 4 GBs of RAM.

Other than that, Im REALLY enjoying your work!!

[Valathil]

Might be because LOD'S are not really correctly handled right now.

[Fineus]

Valathil; Firstly *fantastic* job on this... my jaw really did hit the floor when I saw those videos in action and I'll be trying this out ASAP for myself. That does bring me on to my second point though:

Do you think you could upload the alpha to somewhere a bit more stable? I've tried all of the links you posted and they've all 404'd on me. The mirror link for the v.5_alpha_2.rar does work so I'll start with that but I believe you've revised the release since then. I'd sure appreciate a stable link to the latest copy.

That said, really well done. Self-shadows is one of those realism issues that has always bugged me about FS2 but seemed like it'd never get fixed. It's amazing to see how far you and everyone else involved in the SCP are pushing the engine.

[Crybertrance]

Might be because LOD'S are not really correctly handled right now.

In the ship labs, i can find little to no difference in framerates with different LODs, its just in-game...

EDIT: Even debris have some weird shadows in the ship labs (not noticeable in-game though)

[Crybertrance]

Valathil; Firstly *fantastic* job on this... my jaw really did hit the floor when I saw those videos in action and I'll be trying this out ASAP for myself. That does bring me on to my second point though:

Do you think you could upload the alpha to somewhere a bit more stable? I've tried all of the links you posted and they've all 404'd on me. The mirror link for the v.5_alpha_2.rar does work so I'll start with that but I believe you've revised the release since then. I'd sure appreciate a stable link to the latest copy.

That said, really well done. Self-shadows is one of those realism issues that has always bugged me about FS2 but seemed like it'd never get fixed. It's amazing to see how far you and everyone else involved in the SCP are pushing the engine.

Here you go:

http://www.mediafire.com/?vv0720047lyydj3

[Fineus]

Thanks Crybertrance but I'm getting a 404 screen from that link

[Black Wolf]

Try it again Thunder (Seriously, again?) - it works for me.

[Crybertrance]

Thanks Crybertrance but I'm getting a 404 screen from that link

There is something wrong with your internet connection then, works fine on this side...

[Fineus]

Having tried Firefox and IE I still get nothing - not even connecting directly to mediafire.com

Would someone be kind enough to host it somewhere else? I'm having no trouble with any other website...