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Graphics Improvements


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29 minutes ago, vladislavbelov said:

Why? I'm working mostly on Atlas, Graphics, GUI and Renderer components. It's not so much I think

Can I have an actor viewer that doesn't take ages to load ?

Can we have brushes to paint trees or other objects ?

 

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@vladislavbelov can we some button to group object in-atlas without doing the grouping templates manually? Can we save those grouped objects?
Can we have an add units in other animation than idle? Sometimes mappers (not-me) make huge maps with a lot of objects, running the game becomes virtually impossible and a sure kaput, thus, whenever the mapper wants to make a little showcase of the map it has to cross-fingers and move/order units slowly to give the feel they are moving or doing something. So, what i ask, is: Can we have a units placer while on a different animation stance without having to simulate the map? 

Can we have a favorite list of objects? Or some sort of panel that indicates which objects are placed? Perhaps even a counter could fit well too 

Can we have terrain brushes with more settings and variations? Like triangles, polygons where we can add more axis 

Is it possible to reduce the size of the squares on the grid? Don't know if the size of each square it's used by the path-finder, but i think if each square were half the size or lesser, terrain brushes or paint brushes could allow to more or better modifications of the map, or at least it could give a smoother transition between different paint textures.
Sorry don't know how to explain this very well, neither i can't make an example using atlas, neither i don't know the implications of the size of each square in the grid, don't know if it is performance or path-finder... 
 

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I think you guys are misunderstanding what "soft shadows" means. In the context of graphics, 'soft shadows' means 'variable penumbra shadows'. In real life the size of a shadow's penumbra increases based on the size of the light and the distance between the shadow caster and the shadow receiver.

So for example a tall tree casts a blurrier shadow than a short one:

screenshot0055.thumb.png.f2013f21d88cf2d6a34167e22abafb43.png

Or a giraffe's head casts a blurrier shadow than its legs do:

screenshot0056.thumb.png.1a57e5a0383ebca8a145ee39f296c115.png

And you can see here how the shadow smoothly becomes blurrier from the base of the tower to its top:

screenshot0057.thumb.png.694c1f902195cec8339c7dbe675b48f1.png

The shadows are still sharp, but they look dramatically more realistic in terms of creating the impression of distance.

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18 minutes ago, aeonios said:

The shadows are still sharp, but they look dramatically more realistic in terms of creating the impression of distance.

Those do look awesome and more realistic. Thank you for clarifying. Your earlier screenshots did not convey this effect effectively, but these create a nice affect. Maybe I think it blurs slightly too much, but I'm nitpicking at this point. ;)

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2 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Those do look awesome and more realistic. Thank you for clarifying. Your earlier screenshots did not convey this effect effectively, but these create a nice affect. Maybe I think it blurs slightly too much, but I'm nitpicking at this point. ;)

Meh, it's difficult to get something that works well in all situations, but imo it's better to have too much than too little. Too little and unit shadows and towers don't get any penumbra at all.

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1 minute ago, aeonios said:

Meh, it's difficult to get something that works well in all situations, but imo it's better to have too much than too little. Too little and unit shadows and towers don't get any penumbra at all.

I think the reason why we need it - increasing realism of the game picture. We don't add effects for effects. If you want to make it very noticeable, you can add it for any graphic benchmark. Currently penumbra effect is too blurry in comparison with real life IMO.

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Alright, I reduced the blur scaling to 1.0. Any less than that would defeat the purpose, but 1.0 seems to work fine as far as I can tell. As they say, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Mapgen turned out to be somewhat more involved than I expected, but nonetheless I've gotten some excellent results. I was intending to work on ardennes forest but ended up modifying the alpine valley generator to produce maps in the style of the handcrafted version. I needed the mountain range generator for ardennes anyway and it ended up producing some really stunning maps with really interesting divisions of space.

screenshot0006.thumb.png.3dda5acf5940a280bcb8b255b2da077b.pngscreenshot0007.thumb.png.b860024bc2ec3df4e1d1b3eb48eeb2f6.pngscreenshot0008.thumb.png.a1aaa0840a0a1a873ba5a986833f0959.png

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5 hours ago, aeonios said:

Alright, I reduced the blur scaling to 1.0. Any less than that would defeat the purpose, but 1.0 seems to work fine as far as I can tell. As they say, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Mapgen turned out to be somewhat more involved than I expected, but nonetheless I've gotten some excellent results. I was intending to work on ardennes forest but ended up modifying the alpine valley generator to produce maps in the style of the handcrafted version. I needed the mountain range generator for ardennes anyway and it ended up producing some really stunning maps with really interesting divisions of space.

screenshot0006.thumb.png.3dda5acf5940a280bcb8b255b2da077b.pngscreenshot0007.thumb.png.b860024bc2ec3df4e1d1b3eb48eeb2f6.pngscreenshot0008.thumb.png.a1aaa0840a0a1a873ba5a986833f0959.png

That looks nice. The old alpine valley was one of the ugliest maps we have...

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  • 3 weeks later...
12 minutes ago, gameboy said:

OK, Beautiful job, I think everyone has approved your work. I think we can release this patch. What do you think of it, my friend, @aeonios

No. We're still on feature freeze for bugfixes for issues people are having with a23. Also some people are still experiencing crashes when glsl is enabled, which we can't fix so I need to revert the 'prefer glsl' option before it can be committed.

9 minutes ago, gameboy said:

I forgot one thing: what do you think about the implementation of graphics anti aliasing MSAA in the game? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend your precious time.

I haven't gotten there yet. Any AA will be a serious pain to implement and MSAA is particularly expensive since it makes every anti-aliased texture 4x as large. I'm considering implementing a variant of FXAA using depth and normals to exclude any non-geometric edges. That will also be a pain to implement since it requires writing normals which the shaders currently don't do and which requires an extra texture target that we don't have set up. Any sort of AA also has to consider water reflections and refractions which use separate textures which makes things an even bigger pain.

I'll probably get around to it eventually but I have more important things to do right now that are less difficult to implement.

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