[ajax-wounds]

 they have dyanamic shadows. i read a post about that someplace else and reloaded my copy to see but there are dynamic shadows in the game for moving things and characters and vehicles

[Subspace Anomaly]

I just found out that RAGE the new mega awesome super 3D Engine from ID has no dynamic shadows. They use lightmaps. AHAHAHAHAAHHAAHHAAHAHAHAHAHHAAHHAAHHAAHHAHA

Not true. It uses shadow maps.
Maybe statics like terrain or buildings are still lightmapped, but everything that moves has shadows on it, including self shadowing.

[Luis Dias]

I just found out that RAGE the new mega awesome super 3D Engine from ID has no dynamic shadows. They use lightmaps. AHAHAHAHAAHHAAHHAAHAHAHAHAHHAAHHAAHHAAHHAHA

Yeah, just look at the game, it looks so bad...

[Valathil]

The video i saw had no shadows except the prebaked ones. Maybe a hardware thing DX 11 or sumthing

[Luis Dias]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DcKLmZYWFw

[Rodo]

I get an option to "Remove the Topic" for this thread in particular.

[redsniper]

FreeSpace Open is better than a AAA, brand new, id FPS engine, is how I choose to interpret this.

[pecenipicek]

FreeSpace Open is better than a AAA, brand new, id FPS engine, is how I choose to interpret this.

big news there

[Luis Dias]

What? Don't make me laugh. Please.

[redsniper]

Stay classy Luis.

"What's this? Someone posts something that seems unreasonable. Well it surely can't be a bit of exaggeration for the sake of levity. No no, this guy must mean what he says with absolute certainty. He must be a moron, and I must inform him of how wrong he is. Furthermore, I must be sure to use the most condescending tone possible, so that people will be more receptive to my argument."

But sorry, I forgot. HLP, srs bsns, no fun allowed. Got it.

[JCDNWarrior]

The whole idea of megatextures is great in my opinion, I wonder if something like that can be emulated with LODs (like more LOD levels?). I personally really enjoy(ed) RAGE and hope there's lessons in texturing to be taken from it.

[Luis Dias]

Sometimes it is difficult to be sure of someone else's tone. I've been on the wrong side of that stick as well many times.

[The E]

The whole idea of megatextures is great in my opinion, I wonder if something like that can be emulated with LODs (like more LOD levels?). I personally really enjoy(ed) RAGE and hope there's lessons in texturing to be taken from it.

Probably not. The problem with MegaTexture is that it's very very good at doing vast streamed environments, for the kind of mostly empty, mostly static kind of graphics you get in FSO it's decidedly unsuited. Not to mention that asset creation gets a lot more complicated, from what I heard about the technology in Carmacks' presentation.

[Cyborg17]

So, one thing I'm wondering is how glow maps are going to interact with shadow maps.  From the screenshots I've seen it seems like the glow maps might also be under the shadow maps (though, I could be completely wrong, since I can't look for myself).  Is it difficult to make glow maps show despite shadow effects?

[The E]

That is what is happening right now. Glow maps are not affected by shadows in the slightest.

[Cyborg17]

Awesome.

[Luis Dias]

Megatextures would only be useful in another "moon mission" like we find in WiH. Even then however, a better texture work could easily provide a much easier alternative.

In a third alternative, I remember a technique used in an old game, "Black and White" to get different textures based on the zoom level (or distance to shape). There is a larger texture that assures that the overall world doesn't look tiled, and then there are smaller textures that take care of the details. The smaller textures fade and disappear when you zoom out to negate the tiling effect.

(I use a similar approach in my architectural renderings so that the greenery does not appear tiled and exactly equal for hundreds of meters).

[Valathil]

Its called detail mapping. The first Deus Ex did it also

[pecenipicek]

isnt it basically LOD's applied in a different sense than the usual?


(i'm not too familiar with 3D engines outside of FSO and FSO-related nuances)

[Valathil]

no you cant really say that its more like mipmapping but instead of doing one BIG texture thats sampled down as you go away from it it layers a tiled small but high resolution map over the low res texture thats already there. A model analogy would be that at a certain distance submodels are not drawn at all.