Generic introduction && some development questions

[hex539]

Hi all, name's Robin.

I heard about this project earlier today through Phoronix and it sounds really interesting. I'd like to get involved in the development side of things, as I have quite a bit of experience in graphics programming (some in AI, too, but not enough to be of assistance I think).

I've cloned the SVN and it all looks very easy-to-follow- although I've only been looking at the terrain and water rendering sections so far. I wrote some small improvements to the fresnel calculations for non-fancy water, including calculating them per-vertex instead of as a constant value, as a little test to myself, and I wondered if anyone would be interested in them? And if so, how may I submit?

Also, is anyone working on terrain self-shadowing? It looks like it's missing from an otherwise production-quality shadowing engine, and I think it would make steep inclines and cliffs look slightly less... Flat. If nobody is, and my code is deemed good enough, I'd be willing to give it a go.

Thanks for any replies or sneers of disdain,

Robin

[feneur]

Welcome to the Wildfire Games forums Robin. I think your assistance would be very useful, and no one is working on those issues as far as I know. To get more info on how to submit your code etc please see http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/GettingStartedProgrammers and for other useful info see the main page of our Trac wiki: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/

[hex539]

Aha thanks, I did look at those pages but I skimmed them and didn't notice that link near the bottom of the former. I'll clean up my code then send a patch to be reviewed.

On a side note, I know I'm a little late to the bandwagon here (9 years, to be precise) but I have to congratulate you guys for the work you've done here. In its current state, this is looking way better engineered than a lot of the commercial RTSes out there and the fact that it's OSS makes that twice as sweet.

</ramble>

I'll see about uploading my first diff now, thanks for the pointers.

[Ykkrosh]

Patches on Trac are very welcome . (Might take me several days to get around to checking and committing them though, since I want to concentrate on some other work first.)

Non-fancy water improvements are good, since we want to continue supporting low-end hardware - ideally it should match the approximate colouring of the fancy water as closely as possible (since people writing maps don't want to tweak the settings for both modes), just without any of the fragment shaders. I have no idea how possible it is, though.

I'm not aware of anyone actively working on graphics code now (very little has changed since about 3.5 years ago) so there shouldn't be any conflicts.

Terrain will cast shadows already (though #504 means it breaks if you're unlucky with the frustum culling) - are you thinking of that or something slightly different?

[hex539]

The current code displays the water as very transparent, whereas the fancy code draws it nearly opaque; I have corrected this in the patch I am submitting right now, so the only differences are slight changes in hue (although because of reflections they can never be identical). Cube-mapped water (using the skybox as the cubemap) might be a good way to go with this, since then the results will look almost exactly the same excluding refractions and object reflections.

About the terrain shadowing: What I meant was the physical map grid casting shadows onto itself- which I'm not seeing any evidence of. It might just be the system I'm on, however (MSI CR500, 1.9GHz*2, 3GB RAM, Geforce 8200M), but I haven't seen what I'm talking about in any of the screenshots either.

[Ykkrosh]

See this one - I believe the shadow on the left just above the water is cast by the hill. Shadows ought to be identical unless you either have ancient hardware (like pre-GeForce3) or buggy drivers (which seem quite common).

You should be able to create a map in Atlas, raise a steep square section of terrain, stick some objects at the top and bottom to make sure it doesn't get buggily culled out, fiddle with the lighting settings, and see the terrain-on-terrain shadowing. At least it works okay for me . You can also open the in-game console (not in Atlas) (with the ` key) and enter "?renderer.displayFrustum=true" and it should display the shadow map on the screen.

[hex539]

Yeah, I'm seeing it now. I guess I just didn't put the lighting settings on right. I see what you mean about the culling too.

Having had a quick peek using the command you suggested, is it the case that hills are using shadow volumes whilst everything else uses shadow maps?

(If I have any more development questions, I will ask in the appropriate forum- this was supposed to be an introduction thread )

[Ykkrosh]

They're all rendered the same - CRenderer::RenderShadowMap calls m->terrainRenderer->RenderPatches and then renders the models too.

(Ah - I guess I should say hello, then )

[Jeru]

Hi Robin,

On a side note, I know I'm a little late to the bandwagon here (9 years, to be precise)

You're not late and you are very welcome to hop on the bandwagon.