Genesis Device Update 2

[Luuk van Venrooij]

A few weeks have past so a little update about my project is in order :D. I have been working on foliage. My system has the following features:

- You can specify an unlimited number of foliage types.
- Each foliage particale consist of 12 triangles and is randomly generated.
- The foliage types are randomly distributed according to a coverage maps.
- The viewdistance edge of the grass is blended to prevent popping of new grass.
- Uses shaders to simulate wind effects.
- Can render large ammound of grass (18000 gras particals).

Ill let the screens do the rest of the talking:)

http://img50.imageshack.us/img50/6430/47909456lb9.th.jpg (http://img50.imageshack.us/my.php?image=47909456lb9.jpg)
http://img50.imageshack.us/img50/1772/88973006cg8.th.jpg (http://img50.imageshack.us/my.php?image=88973006cg8.jpg)
http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/1828/38973778ax1.th.jpg (http://img231.imageshack.us/my.php?image=38973778ax1.jpg)
http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/9360/17302074wd5.th.jpg (http://img405.imageshack.us/my.php?image=17302074wd5.jpg)

I`m now working on my some post processing effects and plan to release a now demo in about 2 weeks.

grz

Luuk

[chronozphere]

eh man... that stuff just looks awesome :thumbup:

But i would really recommend you to add trees and a sun + lens flare :P



- The viewdistance edge of the grass is blended to prevent popping of new grass.


What is 'viewdistance edge'?? :?

Are you doing this project alone or in a team?? and what kind of game will be created with this??

I'm looking forward to a demo/more screenies.. but i dont think my machine can handle it. :( I'd love to see the wind effect in action.

[Robert Kosek]

Very good looking I might add! How efficient is it? :D

[technomage]

very nice :D
keep up the good work :)

[Galfar]

Looks very good,
are you using some terrain LOD algorithm (terrain view distance seems a bit low or its just the fog setting?) ?

[NecroDOME]

grass looks nice :)

[Sly]

eh man... that stuff just looks awesome :thumbup:

But i would really recommend you to add trees and a sun + lens flare :P
I'm a believer of lens flare not having a place in games. Lens flare is an artifact of the glass lenses in cameras. If you were really a part of the world, would you be running around with a camera stuck to your face? :)




- The viewdistance edge of the grass is blended to prevent popping of new grass.


What is 'viewdistance edge'?? :?
It would be like a far clip plane, but instead of it being a sharp cut-off plane, he has blended the grass out over a short distance. We do this in our games by having grass "grow" as it gets closer to you. Some games do it by having the grass fade in the closer it gets. It hides the annoying 'pop' you see when grass or objects suddenly appear as they come into range.

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Thanx for all the nice comments and Sly for awsering some Q`s. To awnser the other Q`s:



Are you doing this project alone or in a team?? and what kind of game will be created with this??


I`m working on this project alone and one day hope to create an oblivion like game with it :). People (Coders and artists) are welcom to join :D



How efficient is it?


Rendering 150000 triangles (terrain, grass, skydome, water) per frame @ 1280x1024 all effects on using 2x fsaa and 16x aa on a gf6800 @ 30 to 60 fps so pretty efficient I think:)



are you using some terrain LOD algorithm (terrain view distance seems a bit low or its just the fog setting?) ?


I dont use lod for the terrain to avoid nasty popups. I use an octree with horizon culling for the terrain. Viewdistance is about 500 meters. Its not that far, but I think its pretty belanced like it is now.

Ive uploaded a 1 minute movie to show it in realtime. This was captured using fraps @ 1280*1024. Grass animation is disabled because It still needs some tweaking.

LowRes (25 mb):
http://www.sharebigfile.com/file/101572/DemoApplication-2007-03-06-11-28-05-35-1--AVI.html

HighRes (65 mb):
http://www.sharebigfile.com/file/101588/DemoApplication-2007-03-06-11-28-05-35-2--AVI.html

Grz

Luuk

[WILL]

Wow, Luuk! You guys are doing an awesome job.

Very realistic indeed! :thumbup:


What are the general specs of your development platform? P4 3.06 GHz with the latest and greatest of nVidia cards and 8+ gigs of RAM I'd imagine? ;)


Also, I'd like permission to post this on my PascalGameDev (http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=PascalGameDev)channel on YouTube. I think this will bring great interest to making games in Pascal if others knew that you could do something like this with the language, libraries and tools.

[Luuk van Venrooij]

Thanx Will:).

I`am designing the engine for the newer hardware range. geforce 6600 and up and the equivelent ATI models. Note that only high end versions will be powerfull ennough. A geforce 7300 wont do much good:). My own card is a geforce 6800 abd it runs pretty sollid on that. It will probebly run on lesser top model cards but as time progresses more new features will be added:). For CPU I would think a 1.5 ghz and 512 mb of mem should be ennough.

You can post the movie on your youtube channel.

Grz

Luuk

[chronozphere]

I'm a believer of lens flare not having a place in games. Lens flare is an artifact of the glass lenses in cameras. If you were really a part of the world, would you be running around with a camera stuck to your face? Smile


Yeah that's right. But i think it is 'one of the more good-looking' artifacts that you can have in your game. It might make the sun a bit brighter. :)

[WILL]

<center><object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/D0B8soKiSp8"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/D0B8soKiSp8" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object></center>

:D

[JSoftware]

Amazing graphics. Reminded me about Tribes 2 in some way. Damn would I love to fly low over that terrain in a shrike :D

[Robert Kosek]

WOW! :shock: Now that's an impressive piece of work right there!

I can't wait for tech demos or early beta/alphas of your work just so I can see it for myself on my system.

[WILL]

So whats next on the 'to do' list?

Trees, birds, waterfalls?

When we gonna be able to see some life-like creatures/ people running around? ;)

[NecroDOME]

Well, if you only make a terrain and grass had have you could have a nice performance, but when you insert trees n stuff I think you get a great loss in performance. So i'm wondering how you gonna solve that. less triangles on terrain/grass??

[Luuk van Venrooij]

I`m completely done with the grass now:). These features have been added:

* you can set the viewdistance and density of the grass now in the setup
* a filter has been added to smooth the grass in the distance
* animations now work correct

Here are 2 screens of the smooth filter. First with filter and then without. The grass with the filter is much smoother near the sky
http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/4936/86347209tf2.th.jpg (http://img256.imageshack.us/my.php?image=86347209tf2.jpg)
http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/8951/35219286bw6.th.jpg (http://img87.imageshack.us/my.php?image=35219286bw6.jpg)

Also here is a new short movie of the animated grass.

HighRes (6.5 mb)
http://www.sharebigfile.com/file/102853/DemoApplication-2007-03-07-14-02-21-68-1--AVI.html



So whats next on the 'to do' list?


The next thing will be HDR rendering and bloom post processing. After that trees and other meshes



Well, if you only make a terrain and grass had have you could have a nice performance, but when you insert trees n stuff I think you get a great loss in performance. So i'm wondering how you gonna solve that. less triangles on terrain/grass??


Like I said before topmodels of the geforce 6xxx and radeon Xxxx series are the minimum of what Iam aming for. Everything about the engine will be next gen. I now run the engine with almost everything on max with a resolution of 1440x900. @ 30 to 60 fps on my 6800. As I ad more things the settings on which I will be able to run it will of course decrease. Below is a screenshot of all the different rendering settings you can make. If for example I turn of FSAA and set AA to 8 I have an fps of 100 to 80. So I have pretty much room to add more things and let it run smoothly on the minimum hardware specs.

http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/2854/47759717rd5.th.jpg (http://img87.imageshack.us/my.php?image=47759717rd5.jpg)

[chronozphere]

wow... that video looks impressive :thumbup:



Amazing graphics. Reminded me about Tribes 2 in some way. Damn would I love to fly low over that terrain in a shrike Very Happy


Yeah i've played that game too. But these graphics are 10x better.
I couldn't get tribes 2 working online so i only played the training missions, wich were quite hard i think. But there was some nice music :)

[czar]

The video looks marvelous. You may have already said but is this in OpenGL or DirectX?

[Luuk van Venrooij]

I use OGL :)

[savage]

Are you using SDL or some other cross-platform api as well so we can see this baby running on Linux and MacOS X etc?

[Luuk van Venrooij]

The engine dll only uses windows api stuff in the rendering class. Rewriting that and the application using the dll should be all but that wouldnt be that much work.

[Luuk van Venrooij]

a friend of mine bought a new pc a few days back with a quadcore processor. He is always testing stuff for me and he told me that only one of the cores was being used. Since quad and duocore machines are getting more and more common and each nex gen engine today has it I started working on a multithreaded design for my engine today.

Here are some screenshots of my progress so far.

THis is on my own pc, an amd 64 bit 2 ghz with a single core and a gf6800. You can see it is being fully used like you would expect. The total bar represents the total CPU use over all the cores.
http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/3405/singlecoreqp3.th.jpg (http://img120.imageshack.us/my.php?image=singlecoreqp3.jpg)

The next image is from an intel duocore with a gf 5900, here I split the the engine in 2 threads. Both cores are used, but not to there full extend. Still experimenting why that is:). Also the engine runs on vista here. Perfomance is a bit bad here since it is run in windowed mode with crappy drivers. Also a gf5900 is a slow and card:)
http://img61.imageshack.us/img61/4741/duocoreln2.th.jpg (http://img61.imageshack.us/my.php?image=duocoreln2.jpg)

The last one is made on an intel quadcore with a gf 8800:D. One single thread so only one core is used and a total of 25 % of total power. Note the high polycount, the grass density was set to maximum here :D. Still pretty good perfomance when rendering about 250000 grass polys :D.
http://img61.imageshack.us/img61/1012/quadcoregn1.th.jpg (http://img61.imageshack.us/my.php?image=quadcoregn1.jpg)

Is there anyone of who has some experience with programming for multible core btw? Some tips could help:).

Grz Luuk

[JSoftware]

How do you render the grass? VBO?

Static geometry or affected by physics or wind or etc?

[chronozphere]

- Uses shaders to simulate wind effects.

So i assume it uses static geometry with vertex/geometry shaders to simulate the wind ;)

[Luuk van Venrooij]

I first used displaylist for fast testing, then I switched to static VBO. VBO proved to be slower then displaylists so I switched back to displaylists. The animation of the grass is done in the shader and is controlled by wind direction and force it applies to the grass. the grass also has a variable which controls it resistance to the wind. So differend kind of grass can "sway" differently in the wind.

Here is a movie a a friend of mine made with his gf8800

HighRes (66 mb)
http://www.sharebigfile.com/file/104431/DemoMovie-03-08-07----G8800---HighRes-avi.html

Grz Luuk

[Robert Kosek]

Luuk, all I can say is that it looks absolutely fantastic! That is so neat that you used a shader for the grass' motion. I should really learn their full capabilities, because I never once thought you could do that with a shader!