Thread to collect technical ideas for later implementation

[Kai]

Hi
I just realized that we lack of a thread to collect technical trick or things that could be of any value. So i think i start ^^

A few month ago i played "shadow of the colossus" for the PS2, a really stunning game in all aspects.
It was really hard to find more detailed information about ther tricks , but i finally found a site that gives a very deep view into all the technical tricks.

Because all those elements are designed to work on the PS2(and so are aimed for a DX8 or below hardware), maybe its a good idea to implement some ideas like the scene blur (which looks very impessive) or the particle lit.

http://www.dyingduck.com/sotc/making_of_sotc.html

[Carsten]

Hi Kai!

Ahhh, I remember this game -- you've shown me screenshots before!
Indeed, it's very interesting read, thank you very much for that link!

I've recently started to actively investigate in scripting and a GUI system for Ca3DE, and as a consequence, I currently can unfortunately not dig into the details of any effects, but it is certainly a good idea to collect such cool tech stuff here for later implementation!

[Kai]

Okay im currently looking into the watershader. So far there are of course dozens of approaches, while this is nearly an art for itself.

HL2 claims to have one of the finest shaders for water.
I found their developer Wiki , that gives a lot of information about the settings of their watershader
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Water_Shader

A nice approach with the True Vision Engine, which is always open scource when finalized. Using a parallax mapping type to get a rough water surface (which is one of the situation i would really say its a good idea to use)
http://www.truevision3d.com/phpBB2/view ... t+ocean%3C

What else.. okay this one (i think) is something Carsten really likes. A quite mathematical approach on how to render out nice surfaces, really heavy theory stuff but quite good, and aiming for very moderate hardware..
http://www.graphicon.ru/2003/Proceeding ... per316.pdf

Another paper about the most impressive way of creating a real 3D water surface. I think i saw a demo a year ago, this concept was pretty forward. It used a screen space based tesselated surfaces. So if the cam zoomed in or out the result was always a perfect 3D distorted surface (procedual approach).
This way is very useful for big and waved surfaces, like oceans etc.
http://graphics.cs.lth.se/theses/projec ... rid-lq.pdf
A personal idea would be, to create a ramp based version of this system. Along the coast, the waves a quite small or light, but the more you move outside, the higher the waves are visible... just my idea

[Kai]

I found out another interesting thing relating to the skyboxes in Farcry:
Instead of using a special cubmap strip, they use 3x 512 images.
A skybox covers 6 sides but in FarCry it only used 5 sides (no bottom)

2 of 3 images a square sized, but they have horizontal line that divides 2(!) images.
The trick is, that they covered 2 parts of the skybox (they are 2:1 dimensions) sides in one texture, while the third one is the top of the box.

So the skybox in Farcry is virtually only a half qube, horizontal chopped and uses 2 textures for the 4 sides and one for the top face.

[Carsten]

Jepp, the two 2:1 images are probably 1024*512 or 512*256 pixels wide and have two skybox sides next to each other, while the third is only 512*512 or 256*256. This concept can be taken even further and is known as "texture atlases". The goal of such atlases is to reduce the number of individual textures, which in turn reduces the need to switch (activate another) textures during drawing, which is a time consuming operation.

Unfortunately, texture atlases work only really well with textures that are never repeated in any direction, like decals, skyboxes, etc. For example, Doom3 has several frames of a particle explosion all in one texture, which is another example for the same technique.

Thanks for adding this to the records, though! Something to keep in mind!

[Kai]

Found another quite interesting site that offers an engine with nice watereffects. But what keeps my eye was the detailed explanation of what techniqes are used at all.
Its a nice overview of features just for water ^^
http://gameprog.it/hosted/typhoon/water.htm#FFT

I think there are also quite a lot of other infos about the technology of this engine, although i must admit that some screenshots of water look very "plain" only few spots of nice reflection, but when they show up it looks awsome !

Of course they use a lot of post render effects .. but hey we are still at the start ^^

Note that this engine is also made by a single person
The demo shows how a few sound, a bit eyecandy and nice music can do an pretty techdemo, even if its not really impressive in some areas (terrain is ugly textured, no flora)...

[Carsten]

Great info -