wraitii

Let's use this new forum. Following my conversion of myconid's efforts to ARB, I have ported the water shader (and now, the water with shadows effect). In turn, I figured: why not give a shot at improving this? And hence I tried. First, a link to this album, which shows (in the first version) the many differences between the old and the new shader. I think we'll all agree that the new shader allows the "waviness" factor to mean much more. I've just added three pictures, and in particular, those two, which show the wave size scaling with waviness: I'd like to know if the direction I'm taking is allright with the rest of the team/most people, and if anybody has idea for improvements. Additionally, thanks to myconid's efforts, we have shadows on the water, and I have taken the liberty of having murkiness effect the transparency of shadows (I'm not sure how water works, but it made sense at the time).

Zoot, does it work now? (reposting the link) I'd recommend a clean-workspaces / update-workspaces.

I'm not dropping the non-nvidia users. It's just that nVidia users could benefit from a faster, more efficient shader at no cost. The GLSL parallax module uses "if" to determine if the distance is small enough to draw the parallax(for optimization). I can't do that with the ARB shader as is... Alternatively, I might be able to have the engine calculate this, and then send it as a define. But that'd be more of a hack, and I'm not sure how usable it is. I dunno. Any opinions?

@HIstoricBruno: not yet, but I'll upgrade my iMac on 10.6.8 to 10.8 quite fast is no major problem is revealed.

I'm not completely sure what causes this, but when setting "preferglsl = false", the choice of shaders for the GUI is the fixed function, not the GLSL shaders. I'm not completely sure, but myconid may have modified the fixed function, so the problem could come from that. I'll have to check. The decals problem looks like it stems from the unfinished terrain shader. I'll try porting this over when Myconid has decided on the ≈ final version. BTW, I'm still facing a problem with the ARB shaders... Since I can't have "IF", then the parallax is always active: this could slow computers down considerably. I'd want to try to implement something in the source code that would tell me if the nVIDIA extension is supported, and then if so, use the modified shader and not the basic one. I've actually already tried and succeeded at that, but it's a semi-important design change so I though I'd share. Particularly since in the perspective of ahving advanced graphic options to deactivate parallax specifically, you could have a tooltip for the case where the extension is not activated. Also, changing HWDetect to switch it off if the extension is not there and we want ARB shaders. BTW, I assume the game prefers ARB shaders because of their wider compatibility?

Allright, well I'll see that tomorrow, in the meantime you should be able to compile if you copy SVN's premake over it.

Ah, for some reason it updated with an osx specific version... Tried to clean-workspaces?

Yeah, it's because it would overwrite the files. you can probably use some option to force the overwrite, it's not a problem.

I had centralized a lot, everything in "Headquarters"... I'm going to decentralize a tad, or it'll get messy. I'm currently working on proper resource management, as I will need that for my economic manager to work (by that, I mean: I just started. Was busy porting fancy shader-y stuff.) I'm kind of backtracking from my "UnitInfoManager" and "BuildingInfoManager" idea... Storing in entity collection was the right idea, but my implementation is not always practical. These will probably remain in use to decide which unit/building to train/build, what is available, these sort of things.

The premake blunder should have been fixed... Do report if anything else is missing.

Ah, it's possible I have inadvertantly deleted som files when trying to use gitignore. You can use SVN premake meanwhile.

Allright, I've ported the water shader (slightly modified), experimental grass, moving trees and modelMapping as a whole. Download here. Edit: should check, but the ARB shader might have grass' alpha decreasing with each layer. T'was a test.

Ported the grass shader, and ensured the rest was working. I won't modify terrainCommon any more, since everything else is both complicated and an WIP.

I've finished porting the modelCommon shader. I'm moving on to the terrainCommon, but I can already tell the triplanar stuff is going to be a huge pain.

Okay, I got the AO and the self-light to work (along with the rest). AO looks so incredibly cool.

@zoot: I believe tickets are not used for "art" stuffs... I'll post in the forum, that'll be best. @myconid: that's probably the easiest... I just have to update your biwater with my patch.

Allright, so I've once again lost at Anno 1404's "build the cathedral" mission, so I'm off to try converting the shaders to ARB again. Edit: Still about the grass: you may want to try experimenting with lowering the alpha as the layers go up, or "thinning" the grass. could reduce some of the artifacts. I'm getting your last update (figured that upstream stuff).

Your first point is probably an ARB problem, because if GLSL is not preferred, it should use those shaders. Some things may have changed in terrain_common or terrain_base that make the ARB one crash. I'm going to try fixing that today. Your second point looks to me like the same issue: it's not yet implemented for ARB. Again, as the guy who decided he wanted to port stuff to ARB, I'll try that today. Is no-one else but me getting a wrong result with the AO? It doesn't seem to recognize the second layer of UV. BTW, hav you reached a decision about my water shader? It think it's an improvement, but it requires re-working most maps to take into account the new settings...

Myconid, testing your merged branch (using GLSL): -I get a "LOS framebuffer object incomplete: 0x8CDD" error, and indeed LOS doesn't work in-game (all black). -I still have an issue with the AO uv, it seems not recognized or something Otherwise it all looks fine, here's a small screenshot using my waterShader too:

Should have kept the same... I must have messed that up. These files should not have changed anyway... I committed them by mistake.

Okay, so I've committed (here still) my changes (merging them too) to yours. It should work properly, though I have not yet tried adding to ARB your stuff from smoothLOS or terrainmapping.

Did it the "no-braincell" way and restarted clean. Thanks to a very neat tool from Apple to merge files, I'll get everything back up in no time.

Well I'll refork from your merged branch and try to reconvert everything from ARB (not re-starting from scratch, though). I'll let you know.

Yup, it fixed it. I'll refork from your merged branch and work from that.

Well, unless you have a reason not too, I'd say it would be a good idea to put that in your code (I don't think it's much slower, and if it offers compatibility). I've seen this thread which seems to be the same issue. I haven't checked but I do not think there is any "newer" driver than the one in the latest system update, on Apple computers... I'm not running the latest on my iMac, but I'll update when 10.8 (mountain Lion) comes out in ~3 weeks Perhaps they'll at last support openGL 3.