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The ManFisher public alpha has been released on itch.io


Nils

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You have already been told.

Nils wished to not discuss the particulars meta to the game, but instead focus on the engine and it's usage thereof. You refused and kept going on with the topic that was asked to not be discussed.

Thus, because you kept bringing up a topic that the original creator deigned to be off topic, you were continuing to post off topic posts.

He did not request the posts removed explicitly, but as moderation, I opted to make a call to facilitate his desires. If he asks me to reinstate the post, I will, but ultimately the point is: you are posting things off topic, and you need to stop. Post on-topic or don't post in the thread at all.

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@DuionSo why did you not ask me these things directly? I haven't had any communication with anyone on the forums other then publicly written here in this thread. But it seems you may make up your own mind and to choose to curse people for this? What I can see now that you have gone too far. When you make a good gesture but slap one in the face right after, should he be thankful to you? I think not. I am no longer interested in any of your opinions in this thread Duion, especially when these come out as vipers in tall grass. It's enough.

Take good care, and greetings from China (+8 timezone)

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15 hours ago, JeffR said:

@Nils

Apologies. I have removed the further Off-topic posts so this thread can get back on topic.

As per Duion's original last good point, did you do anything special to nail the look of the ground cover/foliage?

There's really not all that much special about the ground cover. Not sure if the shadows are fixed for 3d objects in later builds, that was the first thing that needed to be fixed in 3.6. The 3d shapes should have their normals as much pointing upwards as possible, so that from every angle these looks a bit the same. Then you'd bring in the darker areas on the diffuse / albedo maps by hand (for example the stems of grass at the lower parts) - since the SSAO should be on enabled but won't be able to do enough. Take care in generating the imposters, if those are an issue you could also add a billboard LOD in the shape it self. Animation can be solved with texture animation (there's much possibility with scrolling/rotation). That's all really. Hope this is helpful. If I have the time maybe I can write a little tutorial (for most the above is probably enough though) Cheers!

Edit: corrected few typos 

Edited by Nils
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If you enable shadows for 3 shapes as ground cover only do this for certain shapes that don't fill up the terrain (like grass) and are spread out. As T3D uses only one CPU core and is already busy drawing the cells/blocks, shadows are a great performance hit since they add to the draw calls. Also don't let 3d shapes in groundcover draw shadows when these are relatively large in size, you might start to see popping in/out of shadows in certain angles because it's looking at the whole groundcover cell in it's frustum, not at the singular shapes. You could decrease the cell size of course, but that will just give more performance hits. In the end it's just a lot of work getting it all balanced out. It would great to have the shadows separated from the rendering per cell, and having all shapes casting them; but in that case you'd really need multi core support for that 😄 (or just a tiny world/map).

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3 hours ago, Duion said:

So the wind animation of the ground cover shapes is simply a texture animation and not the vertex color thing the rest uses that will work with the wind emitter?

Yes, that's the cheapest way; but much more limited of course. Texture animation is used quite a lot on the map in foliage etc. If multi core would be supported then certainly would consider other solutions. 

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So it is just a hack and not using the wind emitter like the billboards, I just thought someone with a bit more coding knowledge can tell me what is going on inside the engine and why groundcover shapes have no wind animations, probably a performance thing, since painting all the shapes with vertex paint may be overkill and the 2D billboards probably just move a bit left and right, similar to texture animation.

Maybe the texture animation could be linked with the wind emitter, so it gets stronger with strong wind and stops when wind stops, but C++ coding is a bit too complicated for me, I already failed making the sun bokeh shader you use as well work with multiplayer and I could not understand why there is no such thing in C++ like a global variable you have in Torquescript where you can just take a value from one function and use it in another.

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Billboards are created by the engine and 2 of the 4 vertices are transformed by code for the wind effect. 3d shapes are handled differently in groundcover; and completely different compared to forest. Groundcover is initially developed by GG while forest originally comes from Sickheadgames; these are completely different systems. A forest item has a unique identity & transform in the world while groundcover is generated with a seed and rendered per cell. You can't do the same with forest as with groundCover, with the scale of ManFisher for example you'd seriously run into issues. With much smaller maps/levels surely you can paint probably all with forest and have it animated by the forest wind emitter. 

Updating some values of materials can be done in script; no need to change the engine code for that.

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