to satisfy everyone (and there sisters)
after racking my brains for hours ive finally solved the issue of it being to dark
http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/CC/03_09A.jpg
this marvoleous piece of programming skill was achieved by
changing
<SUN dir=“1.9 0.7 0” />
to
<SUN dir=“1.9 0.9 0” />
sheesh 
youre still making the mistake of judging the game by static screenshots. this is a game that is desgned to be seen in motion. view the videos and then respond, until then your posts are illinformed.
Zed, it kind of takes a lot of balls to post static screen shots of your program and then say people are making a mistake in judging it by the static screen shots. I mean that is all you provided so what else can I judge it by, and I don’t really feel like going through the hassle of emailing you for a video.
So please post a video up or a demo, I’d like to judge it in its proper format.
Still doesn’t look good imo. There is too much darkness vs. too much lighting. You are approaching game dev from gfx practitioner which is wrong as I’ve tried to tell you. The fact that you’re concerned with right shadow casting tells me this. You have to start making tradeoffs vs. gfx accuracy. The self-shadowing and lighting that you do does not look good for your outdoor scene. Right now, it’s like shining light into a dark room. The places hit with light are shiny while the places next to them are nearly or fully dark. This is the high black/light contrast that is wrong with using doom3 like engines for outdoors. I don’t know how to better explain this to you. Goto gamespot.com and pull up some games screenshots of past games and study and learn from them.
You have to learn how to take in criticism and improve your game and not be defensive all the time. I could care less what you code up. I told you because I care. I could sit by like others and not tell you anything and you won’t learn. You rather have that?
while your stuff surely is cool, I as well think for outdoors, the classic shadow/lit approach isnt convincing. while you will get relative sharp shadows lets say in the desert or clear skies summer, normally there is too much scattering going on. soft shadows definetely dominate outdoor scenes.
hence I am with the people that said for outdoor precalced lightmaps are still quite important. just take trees or any vegetation, which normally should dominate outdoors, they will not give you such dark areas, like seeing every twig and leave as shadow.
clouds do a great deal of illumination, and of course reflection from ground/objects, simply as sun is too strong to be just absorbed by the first thing it hits on.
so for outdoors I guess some mixing of ambiocclusion maps/ lightmaps, with some sort of faked soft shadows (no techexpert, just thinking artist way) would look much more convincing. at least when I think of other “cheaper” shadow effects like just proj texturing, their “softness” looks more real, of course not unified and often not casted correctly on other objects, but well, I guess there is ways to achieve that as well.
bf2 while I havent played it yet, looked quite nice from the screenshots.
You have to learn how to take in criticism and improve your game and not be defensive all the time
i can take valid critism fine + will readily admit to being wrong (as i have done on these forums before)
http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/exhibitA.jpg
http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/exhibitB.jpg
http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/exhibitC.jpg
though i have a feeling that even if i present photoreastic screenshots it wouldnt be enuf
he classic shadow/lit approach isnt convincing. while you will get relative sharp shadows lets say in the desert or clear skies summer, normally there is too much scattering going on. soft shadows definetely dominate outdoor scenes.
hence I am with the people that said for outdoor precalced lightmaps are still quite important. just take trees or any vegetation, which normally should dominate outdoors, they will not give you such dark areas, like seeing every twig and leave as shadow
true shadows cast throught scattering objects (like trees) cast fuzzy shadows, though in my game all objects (so far) are hard object spaceships/buildings etc + they do cast hard shadows rember the sun is a long way away and the shadows it casts tend to be sharp.
heres my game engine from last year (same shadow technique but at a lower quality) rendering vegetation
http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/CC/futureA.jpg
http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/CC/futureB.jpg
case closed (by tommorrow i should have a video posted + then u can judge) the game in action
Exhibit B + C are taken on a very clear day with the sun low in the sky. That’s when you get sharp shadows.
But fair enough, you’ve put up a valid defense.
I do think your screenshots look brilliant though - just a bit hyper-real - which is what global illumination techniques are being constantly invented to solve. You do agree that some form of global illumination would make your game look more realistic, don’t you?
Personnally, i think the terrain you had last year:
http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/CC/futureA.jpg
is looking much, much better than your recent one:
http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/exhibitA.jpg
I think it’s all due to color balancing and your choice of textures. The colors in “futureA” are less bright/less saturated, and generally, more realistic.
Even the photos you posted (exhibitB and exhibitC) do not exhibit pure green grass, but brown-greenish grass.
Another thing that might be missing is the lack of variety in your textures. In exhibitA, it looks like you’re only using two textures (grass and dirt), and you’re interpolating them based on the slope of the terrain. If you add more textures (another type of grass and another type of dirt/rock), and subtely alter your interpolation conditions with some noise, it might look a lot nicer.
Y.
You do agree that some form of global illumination would make your game look more realistic, don’t you?
sure i agree realtime GI would be far better but we’re years away from that (maybe with the cell + 1000cores u can do it)
Another thing that might be missing is the lack of variety in your textures
yes thats correct, with older stuff i was blending with more detail textures (4) vs now (2), the reasons being speed, since each light requires another pass on the terrain (ive found 4textures in gameplay == ~20%slower than 2 textures), during gameplay to be honest u dont notice the number of textures in the terrain, these and other things are only apparent with screenshots.
im not denying what im doing (shadowmaps) is faultless but the majority of issues that ppl have brought up (to dark) etc have nothing to do with the technique + can be easily changed with a few artistic parameter tweaks
one thing I’m interested in, zed, if you don’t mind: what technique are you using to generate your shadowmap frustum(s)? Is it perspective shadowmaps, or having a nest of shadow maps, each covering twice as much area as the previous one, centred around the viewpos?
Originally posted by zed:
[quote]You do agree that some form of global illumination would make your game look more realistic, don’t you?
sure i agree realtime GI would be far better but we’re years away from that (maybe with the cell + 1000cores u can do it)
[/QUOTE]And what about pre-baking only ambient GI (i.e. skydome lighting) ? That way you keep all the benefits of sharp and dynamic shadows for sun/spotlights etc, and nobody would complain anymore about 100% black parts in shadows
Costs one more texture access of course.
Trying to explain visually (thanks to google images):
pre-baked ambient lightmap
pre-baked ambient + dynamic lighting for diffuse & specular
I looked carefully, but on the website there is no demo, oly screenshots! (not even the linux one as binary or source code)
BTW, i’m happy to see that i’m not the only one OpenGL’er that takes linux seriously, keep up the goo work! 
Cheers.
finally online
http://rapidshare.de/files/4699884/04_09B.avi.html
one thing I’m interested in, zed, if you don’t mind: what technique are you using to generate your shadowmap frustum(s)? Is it perspective shadowmaps, or having a nest of shadow maps, each covering twice as much area as the previous one, centred around the viewpos?
at the moment a single standard shadowmap. ive trying a few perspective shadowmap things
*PSM - tried about 1.5 years ago couldnt get working based on the info in the paper (spent about a day on it as well)
*LispSM - got working in the game but dont use, seems to have cases where the result is worse than standard SMs
*the rest i havent tried, tsm (others), and aint to interested in to tell the truth what i have at the moment is good enuf. (im a person that works on the 90% good is ok, i dont want perfection as the final 10% usually takes longer to achieve than the first 90%, so instead of farting around getting that extra 10% i prefer to do something else, this is with everything i do, eg writing songs, recording guitar whatever. first take. bam thats it)
ive used the multiple frustum method in the past as well (and do recommend it esp if u just have the sun + maybe a few lights, but in my game with all the extra lights the extra performance hit isnt acceptable. though this might change in the future, as i havent started to optimize yet, finally got some time to add VBO support this morning , anyways its in the engine and will prolly be reenabled later on)
Costs one more texture access of course
not to mention all the extra texture data.
My original idea was for the planet to be spherical and u fly around it, unfortunaly when i made a testcase this didnt work out gameplay wise as it took to long to fly around the planet.
It would of been nice to have a spining planet, one half in night and one half in the sun.
i still havent ruled out having night/day periods in the game which does rule out prebaking in the suns lightdata
the smoke is nice. it doesn’t cast shadow though.
in ambient occlusion you are not completely prebaking the sun, more or less the stuff that hardly ever catches light, as the images ZBuffer showed, the sun is in the second shot, not in the ambient first.
and you could “blacken” the ambient at nights easily too. however since you probably do your engine specifically for that game, with the strong sun… it may not be really worth it. but if you were to add more complex geometry, like not just simple convex stuff sticking out, but something like a big building complex, the larg “shadow” areas would then ruin the detail in the objects.
thats why artists never use just a single light, completely ruins shape perception, when the dark is just “flat”.
for the same reason you will see that most artists will present their models with some GI or HDR lighting these days, as it just looks a lot better, and conveys shape better.
all this is just making something good even better, really you did a good job.
but think of how texture artists have prebaked lighting into the textures by just painting them as if they were lit, the days before normal mapping. then they had “shape” info still in the ambient parts of the model, surely the shadows were light independent but they still existed.
Originally posted by zed:
finally online
http://rapidshare.de/files/4699884/04_09B.avi.html
looks very cool. Although I see how you can get away with using a single standard shadow map - your terrain is very small, and the viewpoint doesn’t seem to ever get very close the surface to see the artefacts.
looks really impressive! the graphics don’t fit together all the time, but you already said you’re a coder not an artist
the smoke is nice. it doesn’t cast shadow though.
true translucent things (glass/smoke etc) dont cast shadows. i could add this with opaque shadows (requires only a small change with the billboards) + also have the shadows cast different strength shadows depending on their translucency eg smoke == 50% shadow glass == 10% but this will incur (i guess) a 20-30% performance hit. i may include this as an option when i get time later on.
but think of how texture artists have prebaked lighting into the textures by just painting them as if they were lit, the days before normal mapping. then they had “shape” info still in the ambient parts of the model, surely the shadows were light independent but they still existed.
and it does often look good eg compare quake3 to doom3 (without normalmaps) and im betting quake3 looks better in screenshots, but in actual gameplay cause of light interaction doom3 feels more ‘inmersive’
looks very cool. Although I see how you can get away with using a single standard shadow map - your terrain is very small, and the viewpoint doesn’t seem to ever get very close the surface to see the artefacts.
true but thats the nature of the game i want a small area think defender, if your game has a much larger area eg MMOPRG/flightsim with multiple frustums u can basically extend the area to the far clipplane.
funnily enuf if i replace more water with land the fps goes UP cause the water shader is more expensive (ill have to look into this)
Zed - I like it. It looks fun - although perhaps a little chaotic… The smoke looks really cool…
I am also a huge Linux advocate…you gotta post a demo to try.
Nice job!
Ok totally off topic but in that picture of yourself u look like sawyer in lost
Originally posted by zed:
true but thats the nature of the game i want a small area think defender, if your game has a much larger area eg MMOPRG/flightsim with multiple frustums u can basically extend the area to the far clipplane.
funnily enuf if i replace more water with land the fps goes UP cause the water shader is more expensive (ill have to look into this)
very handy that a small terrain is in the nature of the game
so I take it anything over the water doesn’t cast a shadow?
also, I take it the water is just a pixel shader - there’s no geometry in it? (apart from the inevitable single quad)
[edit: removed unnecessary drivel]