ok played a bit more, the radial DOF works quite well for my particular game ( fast action, no up direction, ie the viewpoint is constantly changing, though perhaps not so for a FPS/car/platformer etc ) so perhaps it might suit your game ( personally DOF gives far more visual impact than bloom or HDR ).
now since i dont need the depthtexture then i assume its better to revert to what i had of a main window FBO of
FramebufferRenderbuffer( GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT_EXT
instead of
FramebufferTexture2DEXT( GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT, GL_DEPTH_ATTACHMENT_EXT
aint it, ie it doesnt need to keep an extra depth texture around or have i misunderstood?
knackered - i can remember playing Space Harrier and Afterburner ( + i hated them both imensely at the time, afterburner was $1 a pop IIRC + whilst it was nice to sit down the game (and spaceharrier) relyed to much on the wow effect of the psuedo 3d graphics, needless to say it looks extremely dated now.
i did download a video of Panza Dragoon Orta now that looked nice, i see theyre casting a ray in front of the dragon + when it hits a wall etc, will put the sights on that (so u know what youre shooting), i did this approach in an old version of captain courgette, but now in space i have a similar problem as the DOF something could quickly past the line of sight ( so it focuses on that ) but then its gone + youre back to focusing on the space behind.
but anyways cheers for that ive now decided to just focus the sights X distance ahead of the player, unfortunatly this means often u wont hit whats under the sights, but a good player should account for this after a while of playing, also if youre firing 10 bullets a second the tracer like effect should tell u where theyre going. another option i tried is like gears of war (where its marketted as a FPS but in reality it shoots from the first person perspective, which is nice + easy from a development viewpoint but doesnt look as good as being able to rotate/move the player/sights around the screen)
also ive decided to raise the enemy count greatly ~1000 ( + what u said about most of my stuff not being fun is true, but i have to say last night i was playing CC + it was actually ok, still not brilliant but its definitely more enjoyable)
Zbuffer
For the human eye, anything that is farther than about 10 meters is at the same infinite focus, so realistically, no DOF for a space setup
i dont think thats right, in fact just looking outside i can see it aint (then again i have an astigmatism in my left eye, so perfect focusing aint my strong suit)
while im at it-
how to texture a sun?
im thinking of using that 4d noise shader that was linked to on these forums a while ago, or does someone have any better ideas?