[Jan Satcitananda]

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=m3kXS1RxUGA

Not long ago I made this video to show what I'm currently working at. It is Lezing's New Generation Art, an EDuke32 enhancement featuring tons of improvements. The especial thing here is the advanced elaboration of software rendering mode. There are realistic lens flares, new animated crosshair, soft actor shadows, CON-coded multi-pass rendering with dynamic skyboxes and unlimited ROR support, made using WoW (wall-over-wall) technique. This one is capable to render room-over-room without any bugs (in the abstract). The development is in initial phase now, I think I should release my Last Pissed Time series before.

Thread on AMC: http://www.amcwebfor...hp?topic=8223.0





Update: visit http://lzg.duke4.net/lnga.htm for more info, latest videos and a playable snapshot!

[quakis]

Looks really nice, a lot of that stuff would really work well in Symphony; the sector/wall tricks for geometry, the dynamic skies and possibly those bright lights (for specific effects)

[Stabs]

awsome stuff, spec that RoR stuff, falres are great too

so much cool shit iam calling witchcraft on this one
BURN HIM!

[Jimmy]

Some of these effects are really friggin' cool and I'd love to use them.

I really like the enemy shadows, were those con coded?

[Jan Satcitananda]

 Captain Awesome, on Oct 23 2009, 12:37 AM, said:

I really like the enemy shadows, were those con coded?

Sure, the shadows consist of three sprites (layers), so I use espawn to produce them. These actors exist just for one game tic.

[High Treason]

Wow man, that goes beyond epic. How the hell is that even possible?

Nice work.

[Stabs]

so is this going to be incorporated into polymer/dukeplus or is this feauture is going to be segregated into a individual mod that will only serve to fragment the community further?

honestly get together and help the community as a whole, at the end of the day its mapppers like me and william gee that have to play around with this kind of stuff to make it a great gameplay experience.

this should be eduke32 / Dukeplus standard kind of stuff.

Deeperthought, TX, or Plagman, get this guy on board

[Geoffrey]

Now you can't mod without making sure the community as a whole benefits from your work? Let the guy work on his project the way he wants to, I can't wait to see what he comes up with. Mappers like you and william gee aren't required.

[TerminX]

The lens flare thing is really cool. How many tiles does it use? A simplified version rewritten in C might be a cool addition to EDuke32.

[Stabs]

after 13 years and a community diwndling fast its in the best ineterest to do things like this

its hard enough for poeple to install the HRP as seen before in recent posts so the more unified the better this stuff becomes

this is clearly a real breakthrough with the build engine i want to see it flourish, and it needs to be incorporated as a whole with the main player, eduke32.

i can only these improvements benefiting everything as a whole, we already have DP, hrp, & eduke as a kind of standard.

i really want to see this community come to life again and the more features incorprated into a whole the better.

its just a bigger fuck you to more advance engines with all the new features we can put into an old one, just look at terminator fututre shock, that became the oblivion engine.

[Jan Satcitananda]

 DanM, on Oct 23 2009, 02:18 PM, said:

so is this going to be incorporated into polymer/dukeplus or is this feauture is going to be segregated into a individual mod that will only serve to fragment the community further?

The multi-pass support works well with Polymost, so it may be released as a DukePlus feature when developed completely. I think it's the only thing that really needs to be realized outside the mod. It will make possible multiple mirror reflections and floor mirrors like in Unreal. The flares are vastly 8-bit mode oriented. Oh, and I'm trying to enhance sound to make it more realistic (true attenuation, sound reflections and delay depending on the distance). But this seems incompatible with multiplayer mode since it needs creating special actors for a specific position of the listener.

 TX, on Oct 23 2009, 03:12 PM, said:

The lens flare thing is really cool. How many tiles does it use? A simplified version rewritten in C might be a cool addition to EDuke32.

Currently, there are three tiles shown on the screen (the coma, the streaks and the light patches) and a hidden omni actor placed in the map. To show bulky (fire etc.) or nearby emitters correctly, I made new flare tiles with five levels of defocal blur for each of four elements resulting in 20 tiles. The effect uses rotatesprite16, but needs replacing the translucency table with the color addition table.

Since I started using showview for scene rendering, I noticed annoying bugs with it... showview fails on 0 0 320 200 coordinates for covering entire screen. With 0 0 319 199 it works, but leaves the stripes of HoM. There are also interpolation issues clearly seen on moving projectiles. And I can't zoom it in/out using setaspect. I guess it needs some revising.

[quakis]

 CraigFatman, on Oct 23 2009, 06:10 PM, said:

Oh, and I'm trying to enhance sound to make it more realistic (true attenuation, sound reflections and delay depending on the distance).

Nice to know you're also exploring sound, which is probably a major feature when it comes to creating atmosphere etc. I'm not sure if you've played them, but in the Thief games, if you're indoors and there is ambience sounds taking place outside, you won't be able to hear those until opening a door leading outside. I really love that effect, and deffinitely more pleasing personally than hearing sounds coming through thick walls. If you choose to dwell into sound manipulation, maybe you could look into something like that (which is probably what you meant when you said 'sound reflections')

[Jan Satcitananda]

 quakis, on Oct 23 2009, 11:37 PM, said:

If you choose to dwell into sound manipulation, maybe you could look into something like that (which is probably what you meant when you said 'sound reflections')

Sure, any obstacles on the way of the sound should attenuate it. Various types of walls (depending on picnums?) may have different attenuation factors. Thick walls may completely mute direct sounds, perhaps leaving only reflected 'echoes'. As long as we can test a line of sight between two points, that's easy to check. Duke supports sound amplitude levels from 0 to 150 (for 16384 to 6784 unit distances), so if the sound is more than 43 dB attenuated relative to the max volume, it can't be heard at all. Truly, it's quite a narrow range.
Every sound may present in the GRP in different fashions: direct sound (original one), diffused sound (with some kind of reverb applied), muted sound (with higher frequencies filtered out). The second one may be used for reflections, and third mimics a sound passed through an obstacle.

[Mark]

On the subject of sounds, why did the reverb effect disappear from Eduke. I would sure like to have it back again for footsteps at least.

[Stabs]

Do you think it would be possible for it to support fonts?

we could have a really nice crisp clean hud & menu with nice vector made icons, the way half-life works

[zchri9]

This looks really cool. The animated cross hair and mini-map are pretty cool.
Good Luck with the mod, CraigFatman.

[Plagman]

 CraigFatman, on Oct 23 2009, 07:10 PM, said:

There are also interpolation issues clearly seen on moving projectiles.

Can you try the most recent build from this page:
http://dukeworld.duk...ke32/synthesis/

A while ago I fixed an interpolation issue when using showview from EVENT_DISPLAYROOMS, so please let me know if it doesn't fix your problem.

[supergoofy]

actually the latest r1535 can be downloaded from:

http://hendricks266.duke4.net/eduke32/

[Jan Satcitananda]

 Plagman, on Oct 24 2009, 06:23 PM, said:

Can you try the most recent build from this page:
http://dukeworld.duk...ke32/synthesis/

A while ago I fixed an interpolation issue when using showview from EVENT_DISPLAYROOMS, so please let me know if it doesn't fix your problem.

I use the latest build, interpolations still look a bit wrong. Projectiles move smoothly, but in some frames they are shown out of order.

Quote

actually the latest r1535 can be downloaded from:

This one has the same problem.

[Jan Satcitananda]

Here's my very complex 12-layer structure with eleven WoW effectors utilized. This window consumes over 1200 walls, so it makes impossible making huge levels with such level of architecture since the engine can't employ multiple instancing of the same sectors in different map locations. And i'm going to make some multiple instancing support. Maybe I'll manage a system capable to give different precalculated lighting to various instances.

 Marked, on Oct 24 2009, 02:57 AM, said:

On the subject of sounds, why did the reverb effect disappear from Eduke. I would sure like to have it back again for footsteps at least.

The reverb works for me. Maybe, now it utilizes EAX effects...

[William Gee]

That's really impressive.

[Micky C]

how long did it take you to make that window?

[Jan Satcitananda]

 Micky C, on Oct 25 2009, 09:23 AM, said:

how long did it take you to make that window?

Several hours in LEBuild, I guess. At first, I've prepared the geometry using boolean intersection, loft object shape script and the extruding tool. Then there was some hi-tagging and extra tagging (to make overlapped walls connect correctly), a bit of troubleshooting (geometry was rendering incorrectly from certain points of view until I revised the portal plane offsets), texturing and manual shading.

[Jblade]

That shit is insane. What's your PC's specs, just out of interest?

[Jan Satcitananda]

removed

[Jan Satcitananda]

 James, on Oct 25 2009, 05:43 PM, said:

That shit is insane. What's your PC's specs, just out of interest?

I have Core 2 Duo running on 2.62 GHz. It's a pity that EDuke32 doesn't support multithreading, some things would be almost twice faster. The shit looks smooth until 1024x768 though.

[Jimmy]

 Geoffrey, on Oct 23 2009, 06:56 AM, said:

Now you can't mod without making sure the community as a whole benefits from your work? Let the guy work on his project the way he wants to, I can't wait to see what he comes up with. Mappers like you and william gee aren't required.

I'm going to have to agree here. At least let the guy finish or cancel his project before you bother him about releasing everything to the public. I wouldn't tell the guy not to do such a thing if he wanted to, but to tell him he's doing a bad thing by not sharing isn't fair.

[TerminX]

 CraigFatman, on Oct 25 2009, 07:12 AM, said:

I have Core 2 Duo running on 2.62 GHz. It's a pity that EDuke32 doesn't support multithreading, some things would be almost twice faster. The shit looks smooth until 1024x768 though.

And just what would you suggest putting into another thread? About the only use for multithreading in EDuke32 that I can think of (other than mouse input on Windows, which is already in another thread, and possibly keyboard input in the future for increased console interactivity under heavy loads) would be hightile texture loading. I've long speculated that loading hitches could be circumvented entirely, in favor of the occasional texture pop up--similar to what RenderWare does, which is why in GTA, you see a blank space before a texture loads instead of experiencing hitching--but I can't think of many other good uses for multithreading here.

[Jan Satcitananda]

 TX, on Oct 26 2009, 10:13 AM, said:

And just what would you suggest putting into another thread? About the only use for multithreading in EDuke32 that I can think of (other than mouse input on Windows, which is already in another thread, and possibly keyboard input in the future for increased console interactivity under heavy loads) would be hightile texture loading. I've long speculated that loading hitches could be circumvented entirely, in favor of the occasional texture pop up--similar to what RenderWare does, which is why in GTA, you see a blank space before a texture loads instead of experiencing hitching--but I can't think of many other good uses for multithreading here.

I guess, multithreading is kinda worthless thing here unless we use software rendering.

I've been thinking about making separate threads for actor processing and scene rendering. When a bunch of frames is being rendered onto the screen, another one may be preparing by the second core. But this would result in severe drawbacks to avoid desync (at least, we won't change any map parameters from the display events anymore).

A more practical use of multithreading, useful for very detailed scenes rendered in high resolutions, is some sort of Split Frame Rendering: each core may process only a part of the screen. The maximum performance increase would be achieved when splitting the frame into vertical bands by a number of physical cores. For very high framerates, Alternate Frame Rendering may be the best choice. Of course, we'll need more RAM for additional tsprite, umost, dmost arrays etc., and this circumstance limits the maximum practical thread number.

[Mblackwell]

Rendering is processed on the GPU. Also splitting threads isn't exactly an easy task. Any time you split a task to another CPU you create room for more bugs to creep up due to an increase in code complexity (and race conditions but let's not go there).