[zykov eddy]

CraigFatman, on 28 March 2012 - 09:26 PM, said:

What next. Here is reflection mapping for walls. I've introduced a couple of "magic" textures which get automatically moved and resized to simulate reflection maps. Although static screenshots won't show its real dynamics, you may believe that walls with this effect actually look like shiny reflective surfaces.

I've seen this effect in action. It looks pretty damn awesome, I must say!
I'm wondering, how does the effect look in the mirrors?

[Jan Satcitananda]

zykov eddy, on 03 April 2012 - 03:59 AM, said:

I've seen this effect in action. It looks pretty damn awesome, I must say!
I'm wondering, how does the effect look in the mirrors?

Oh, no need to quote the whole post with the screens and shit...
Mirrors are unsupported by now, but the reflection mapping is recalculated for each rendering pass, so there shouldn't be any problems (one should deal with performance drops though).

[Gambini]

Glad to know this is still improving.

How feasible would be for you to "fake" the original software mode shadetables in polymost? That would be a motherfucking awesome feature I would use to make a mod with models (wrapped using only the original tileset) ala 8bits.

[Helixhorned]

No chance, GL modes use GL shading...

But isn't the obsolete rendmode 2 basically what you want: (kinda) fully perspective projected scene, but with software shading/translucence/who-knows-what-else? Its code is left in polymost.c, but compiled out because it supposedly never worked very well (I can't confirm nor refute that claim, since I used it maybe a couple of times in total).

Here's the relevant change:

r907 commit (TX) said:

Disallow setting rendmode 2... software polymost is so broken that there's not even a point to allowing it anymore

[Jan Satcitananda]

Gambini, on 03 April 2012 - 04:50 PM, said:

How feasible would be for you to "fake" the original software mode shadetables in polymost? That would be a motherfucking awesome feature I would use to make a mod with models (wrapped using only the original tileset) ala 8bits.

Dunno about Polymost, fat chance it could handle this. Maybe if the Polymer renderer supported custom shaders, I could write some shaders to mimic my lighting model and lookup palettes, as well as the additive transparency. I didn't investigate if it's really possible, however.

[Plagman]

It's already in the pipeline for Polymer to be able to use the real shade tables for 8-bit ART, but you're right that it would be tricky for Polymost. Custom shaders would be next to impossible given the way it's implemented, however. And it wouldn't let you mess with blending at all.

[Helixhorned]

Plagman, on 04 April 2012 - 10:45 AM, said:

Custom shaders would be next to impossible given the way it's implemented, however. And it wouldn't let you mess with blending at all.

Hhm, just to ask, are there any plans of changing that implementation? You know I have my beefs with it *exponential growth of them every time a new one is added* . Like coalescing a few of them maybe (are branches that expensive?).

Access to the blending table(s) from the scripting environment is in my pipeline, dunno if that would help...

[Plagman]

That implementation is fine, really; everyone ends up with a similar system, there isn't really a way around that. You're right that we don't want any real branches in shader code (all the ones that are there right now aren't actual branches). I don't think we'll be adding tons of bits in the future, anyhow.

Blending isn't programmable on GPUs, so there's that.

[Gambini]

Helixhorned, on 04 April 2012 - 12:54 AM, said:

No chance, GL modes use GL shading...

But isn't the obsolete rendmode 2 basically what you want: (kinda) fully perspective projected scene, but with software shading/translucence/who-knows-what-else? Its code is left in polymost.c, but compiled out because it supposedly never worked very well (I can't confirm nor refute that claim, since I used it maybe a couple of times in total).

Here's the relevant change:

Pretty much, yeah. I even remember when TX disabled it. However his reasons were valid, it is what i want besides the shitload of bugs... and besides it doesn´t use hardware acceleration. Plagman´s comment sounds encouraging. But there´s a lot of water to go down the river before i begin to like Polymer.

[Jan Satcitananda]

Ok guys, the show must go on, so let's talk about the latest things I was working on.

A new HUD feature on the way is the target scanner. These shots illustrate how it scans for items in view and shows the health of enemies. The frame around captured objects is animated and can be seen through any obstacles because it's rendered by means of on-screen graphics.



This intricate actor is thought to be a physical 3D surface, and it's displayed as a volumetric rectangle that can be arbitrarily rotated. To achieve this, I use a series of special sprites with various parallelograms to choose from. The thing needs some troubleshooting though before I can code physics for it.



Later improvement of lens flares is the introduction of a real-looking diaphragm which automatically controls the amount of light coming through the lens. The patches of light now replicate the shape of the aperture (hexagonal in this picture of the Sun). Later I'll capture a video showing how the aperture varies when the lighting conditions change.



And recently I've realized that I shouldn't use Bayer dithering for textures in my mod, especially skyboxes. The point is that such dithering is usually applied to the final image shown on a raster display, but a texture undergoes the perspective projection when rendered, what invalidates any advantages introduced by the Bayer pattern.

Look at these two pictures. The left one is Bayer dithering, and the right one is noise dithering I decided to use instead, since it introduces less unwanted artifacts, looks more naturally and the skybox edges are less noticeable. I plan to have all the skyboxes redone in this fashion to maintain the style.



As an addendum, you can compare some special sprite icons I had drawn in 2009 with newer ones on this little presentation slide.

[Gambini]

Really cool stuff. I was going to say though, that that dithering is starting to bother me, but then I read you´re already working on that.

With regards to the effect icons, I´d say that 2, 3 and 5 were better in 2009 than now.

[Micky C]

I can't understand much of what you said, but it's great to know there's still progress being made on this.

[Fox]

CraigFatman, on 04 October 2012 - 01:24 PM, said:

That's one badass HUD. What it looks like if you collapse the ammo or inventory tables if unavaiable?

CraigFatman, on 04 October 2012 - 01:24 PM, said:

This intricate actor is thought to be a physical 3D surface, and it's displayed as a volumetric rectangle that can be arbitrarily rotated. To achieve this, I use a series of special sprites with various parallelograms to choose from. The thing needs some troubleshooting though before I can code physics for it.

That's one ugly hack I have been stuck with too. Perhaps someone should create a code to find the coordinate of an actor displayed on screen? It's not hard for 8bit, but troublesome for polymodes. Maybe I could give it a try some day...

[Daedolon]

CraigFatman, on 04 October 2012 - 01:24 PM, said:

So you've just did something we all have wanted to accomplish for years but without luck.

[Jan Satcitananda]

Micky C, on 04 October 2012 - 07:47 PM, said:

I can't understand much of what you said, but it's great to know there's still progress being made on this.

I just can't avoid using all that terminology when talking about the current development stage. It should sound more comprehensible when I come to the game design itself...

Fox, on 04 October 2012 - 08:43 PM, said:

That's one badass HUD. What it looks like if you collapse the ammo or inventory tables if unavaiable?

That's one ugly hack I have been stuck with too. Perhaps someone should create a code to find the coordinate of an actor displayed on screen? It's not hard for 8bit, but troublesome for polymodes. Maybe I could give it a try some day...

One can fully retract that HUD panel, no options for collapsing separate tabs. All of them should be of some use most of time, I think.

And having special commands for projecting coordinates to the screen would be really handy, I agree. Now I have to use the trial and error approach to determine various offsets for the accurate projection.

[Jan Satcitananda]

Recently some huge progress was made for this project, so it's pretty close to a new release, although there will not be any new levels or items. Actually the whole TC could have been finished within a year if I could work on it every day. But it's not the case.

As you might remember, this mod employs another kind of transparency, which doesn't darken the background pixels, simply adding colors together. Such additive blending is indispensable for a number of effects, such as realistic lens flares and HDR rendering. However, certain things like enemy shadows, decals and smoke effects require darkening of the background, and thus can't be reproduced by pure addition. Still there are ways to extend the capabilities of my palette system.

Earlier I had developed an ugly hack forcing the transparent purple color (usually not displayed in sprites) to be selected via a lookup palette and perform color remapping in a strange way to simulate multiplicative masking, but I couldn't get rid of severe color distortion (that technique could reproduce only up to 90 colors out of 255). So... now the same transparent color simply darkens the image by one or two shades (reverse and direct translucency respectively). When several darkening sprites are combined together, deeper shades can be achieved. I've redone some lookup palettes to be used within multi-layer sprites, so now there's neither more nor less than the support for alpha channels stored as separate tiles.

Here's the HRP shrinker spark I've adapted to LNGA palette for testing purposes (otherwise the mod will not contain any HRP assets) and placed into the Bank Roll level (E3L2). The left part features the green 'additive' and the black 'multiplicative' layers separately. The right part is the combination of both. The second picture shows what happens, when the mask comes after the main sprite (the "rear view").



This way is still slow and inconvenient, but performs with nearly perfect quality. The only limitation is no support for colored masks, but that doesn't really matter, since alpha channels are grayscale as a rule. Also the high dynamic range can't be handled by this technique (in cases when background pixels are clamped to white). Otherwise, this is a step forward in terms of game visuals, making possible sprites with smooth edges and other things requiring semi-transparent pixels. As for texturing methods in general, there are already reflection maps, displacement maps, some kind of lightmaps, mip-maps for some tiles, alpha channels, so perhaps only specular maps and bump maps are yet to be simulated in LNGA. Also I've got an idea for a quick-and-dirty realization of precalculated parallax occlusion mapping.

So this is how I've reworked the enemy shadows to meet the new paradigm. Actually such shadows can be made ubiquitous since they produce minimal artifacts. The second shot demonstrates that they are shown correctly even on slanted surfaces by means of a 2D approximation. Also note that all items on the level are now shown on the radar as dots (possibly, the target scanner gadget should work this way).

[zykov eddy]

CraigFatman, on 07 January 2013 - 02:58 AM, said:

The second shot demonstrates that they are shown correctly even on slanted surfaces by means of a 2D approximation. Also note that all items on the level are now shown on the radar as dots (possibly, the target scanner gadget should work this way).

Holy shit.
How did you do that?

[Loke]

I can't get over how good that HUD looks.

[Gambini]

Incredible as always. So, it still works all in software mode? How you sorted out the external tiles you mentioned, like alpha channels and such? It´s that tilefromtexture thing?

[Forge]

Looks like alot of work with incredible results.

Proper words fail to come to mind at how amazing that is. All I can say is, "Wow!"

You should put together a team for the purposes of making a full episode to demonstrate and take full advantage of those features.

[Jan Satcitananda]

zykov eddy, on 07 January 2013 - 07:28 AM, said:

Holy shit.
How did you do that?

You might have realized that the slanted shadow is just made of facing 2D sprites with dynamically recalculated height (yrepeat).

Gambini, on 07 January 2013 - 02:45 PM, said:

Incredible as always. So, it still works all in software mode? How you sorted out the external tiles you mentioned, like alpha channels and such? It´s that tilefromtexture thing?

The software mode is still the only mode supported. And that tile was actually prepared by hand in Photoshop and then put into an ART file.

Forge, on 07 January 2013 - 04:25 PM, said:

Looks like alot of work with incredible results.

Proper words fail to come to mind at how amazing that is. All I can say is, "Wow!"

You should put together a team for the purposes of making a full episode to demonstrate and take full advantage of those features.

By the way, I'm feeling that I'll never finish this thing unless I carefully select which ideas should be realized and to which extent I should continue developing them. The point is that I had commenced this TC back in 2009 and redone a lot of things since then. I continue making small changes to the fonts, the lens flares have been reworked several times, the lookup palettes still keep changing, and withal I'm too lazy to get to coding the solver-based game physics for the rest of effects. But I'd agree that some collaboration would greatly facilitate the progress at later stages of mod development, just the matter of time, I suppose. Of course I'd be pleased to see any fan-made levels and custom effects based on this mod.

Maybe now I'll be doing things like drawing a crosshair for the flamethrower... the other crosshair yet to be designed is one for the assault rifle. Anyway, this comes prior to designing the weapons themselves.

[Player Lin]

CraigFatman, on 07 January 2013 - 06:42 PM, said:

The software mode is still the only mode supported. And that tile was actually prepared by hand in Photoshop and then put into an ART file.

This is the reason I'm damned love this mod, even I still hope if it ever supports OpenGL ones. Nice work, man!

[Jan Satcitananda]

That's me again, lol. Unfortunately, last year I was virtally disabled due to various health problems, as a result, this project has had another year of stalling. What a pity, 2013 was a bad year for me. But recently I've got to continue development. Thank you guys for all the encouragement. Not very much to talk about so far, last week I was digging into original Duke Atomic code and preparing it for some cool improvements before I'm ready to introduce my own items and game mechanics. I've shifted the game balance a bit to make it closer to the final TC version so I could test some shit right now. Namely, redoing the devastator into flamethrower, also doing some experiments with chaingun, RPG and freezer. Besides, I've finally drawn all the crosshairs for weapons, the flamethrower being the last one (featured on the screenshot). The weapon drawing code is yet to be introduced, however.

Also the mod now benefits a lot from new CON commands like showviewunbiased instead of horrible showview and screentext instead of horrible gametext. I hope I will be able to use native multiplicative blending as well, it will open a whole new world of spectacular effects.



Currently trying little modifications to actors, for example, sharks now stay upside down when killed. I'm going to divide the aliens into a number of 'clans' varying by species and culture, the sharks probably representing a completely separate clan. Each clan may be either friendly or hostile to Duke (as well as other clans) depending on his actions.

[Gambini]

Still amazed by the way your bloomy effects look in 8bit! keep it up and glad you have healed!

[Hendricks266]

CraigFatman, on 27 February 2014 - 05:10 PM, said:

I hope I will be able to use native multiplicative blending as well, it will open a whole new world of spectacular effects.

That should be possible, since the blending tables are completely user-defined.

[RichardStorm]

This is THE ultimate mod for duke. Amazing !

[Jan Satcitananda]

Hendricks266, on 28 February 2014 - 06:01 PM, said:

That should be possible, since the blending tables are completely user-defined.

Yes, I've defined a custom blend table already, but atm it doesn't seem to be used by rotatespritea... the sprites do change their blends, however. Gonna mess around with my enemy shadows, perhaps.

[Forge]

glad to hear you're doing better

[Hendricks266]

CraigFatman, on 01 March 2014 - 04:04 AM, said:

atm it doesn't seem to be used by rotatespritea

That hasn't been implemented yet. I took a look at what it would take and it's not something I could quickly fix. I would have to study Helix's code and apply it to the screen drawing stuff.

[Jan Satcitananda]

Forgot to mention an important compatibility note. For those who were (was?) trying to launch the current release in newer EDuke32 builds, use the (undocumented) -rotatesprite-no-widescreen command line option to get the HUD graphics correct. The HUD was screwed up because of me ignoring the flag which alters the way sprites are scaled on the screen. For technical reasons LNGA mod has no widescreen support, so the upcoming release will do all the graphics in 4:3 format. Also don't even try to launch it in the 64-bit version. =P

So far I was tweaking the menu look, done a nice aurora effect in the background which fits the space theme pretty well, I suppose. Still I wish I could update my site with a new snapshot a little quicker...