Summer 2009 contest demos uploaded

Dear friends,

The new demos are uploaded to Acknex Unlimited ( AU demo page ). Please vote your favorite demo.

Wow, there's really some very nice looking effects here!

Good luck everyone

Edit: voted Wavefield!

I'll vote for Shade-C.

Wavefield was amazing Voted!

Sea VTF by Emre doesnt work correctly on my pc (maybe because of 16:9 screen)
EDIT:
same problem here

acdfsm - This is really stunning, the sun, point and spot lights are throwing their shadows as they are supposed to and as everyone here ever wanted it from Conitec. Congratulations for implementing it! Though, I noticed some problems with the yellow spheres when the sun and point lights are blurred... the spheres were blurred, too... dunno why.

rayhairlightsoft - I really like it because of the unlimited dynamic lights and the negative lights. I am not so convinced by the balls and the hair shader but except that, it is charming!

seavtf - D3DX9_41.dll was missing and it doesnt show up the ocean although my PC is only one year old with a decent graphics card (NVidia Geforce 9600 GT). Shaders should'nt also be nice, they should also run on machines! So if you select certain algorithms make sure that you dont need latest or specialized hardware...

shadec - after seeing the acdfsm demo I was a little bit disappointed about the shadowmapping. The god rays are nice and I like the DOF in the indoor demo as well. The other shaders didnt hooked me, though. Sorry.

shadershowcase - although only Gamestudio shaders are used this demo is incredible and everyone doing demos for their shaders, even the Gamestudio team, should take this as a broad hint to present shaders and stuff. I really like the idea to have different scenes in which 2 or 3 shaders are mixed up to make a scenery. Especially the third scene is very nice! If I had a second vote, I would vote for this! Remark: I think some of the normal maps are inverted - have a look at the floor in scene #1.

toweronplanet - this was long in development and it is also a really interesing demonstration of how people can "abuse" shaders. Meant to do graphical calculations, shaders can also be used to do fast calculations on the GPU. toweronplanet is a perfect example for this and I like the way ChrisB did it. Although the calculations are rather slow (what is faster? calculations on the GPU, on the CPU with multicore optimizations or a hybrid?), the result is stunning. Respect, man.

wavefield - Amazing LOD effect on the ocean waves!!! I am not so convinced by the wave shores but the rest is stunning. The mood is also very attracting. Thumbs up! Although, I don't like that I have to have shadermodel 3.0 and 32 bit per channel rendertargets. In fact, I *have* the sufficient hardware but what about a shader model 2 fallback?

Good luck for everyone! Especially for that one I voted for ;-)

Byebye,
Christian

@HeelX & Puppeteer;
Just like i wrote readme file;
"If you see any error about dll, you can use old version of dll. (dllversion//march2006)"
You must copy dllversion//march2006//TextureNoise.dll to the demo folder.
"Or you can download "DirectX End-User Runtime-MARCH-2009" from here;"
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/detai...;displaylang=en

Please try again.
Thank you and good luck everyone.

voted for shade-c

I installed the DirectX 2009 March end user runtime and tried both texture noise dll's and it always looks like this:

They're up! Exciting!

I got them all to work. Difficult voting choice with the variety of styles and shaders, but in the end I think I made the right vote (not my own entry of course, but I don't want to say what I voted for until the poll is over).

@HeelX: Thanks, I think the one-by-one crits are helpful. They help the developers, and also encourage other voters to have a look for themselves through all of the entries before voting. I won't make any as I couldn't crit my own objectively, yet only criticising the others could appear slanderous About the unconvincing balls -- I liked the regular shape of using icospheres, but that proved troublesome for uv mapping (the anisotropic shader uses the uv-mapping to determine the direction of hair flow). The points where the hair flow should converge is consequently split along polygon edges, unfortunately. Probably ended up being a poor choice of mine, but I think the effect is still apparent at least.

Good luck to everyone! Of course I can't really wish everyone good luck because there can only be two winners, but I at least hope everyone else had as good an experience out of making their demos as I did

Jibb

@HeelX,
i don't understand. This is really look like a point mode.
it seems you pressed key_1 once a time.
Does the fillmode not change when press to key 1 again?
When the press key_1 first time, fillmode is point,
when the press key_1 second time , fillmode is wireframe,
when the press key_1 third time , fillmode is solid.
Fillmode is point in your picture;

@Emre: I had to removed the lines from the fx files to get it working-key_1 didnt work...

I pressed key_1 now for about 15 times... each third hit I get the wireframe mode and the two hits inbetween I get always point mode. It simply doesn't work.

Thanks a lot for the nice comments
I have to add though, that the cartoon shader (scene 2) and the terrain multitexturing shader (scene 3) was made by myself

You may be right about the normal maps, I don't really have much experience in creating those

@HeelX: just remove the fillmode lines from the water shader

Works now!!! Though, it seems the DOF is broken.

What exacly is this fillmode thing and in which file is it? =)

so hard to decide.

@Puppeteer:
"fillmode" is FFP parameter wich allows you to render just the vertices or edges of an object. You can find the lines at the end of the Water.fx file in the render passes.
Its sometimes really usefull for debugging...

I've voted for ShadeC, but another examples are really interesting too.
Good Luck Everyone!

I solved it by replacing the line 716
Fillmode=(fill_mode_var);
with
Fillmode=3;
that way I could see some awesome water shader
What I didn't like about it is that looking up from underwater looks a little weird...

I wish I could vote three times.

1. Wavefield
I like watershader. I love this shader. The mood is great, the coloring is well tuned. But, sometimes the reflections on (specular) some waves looking a bit like plastic, or a big Wackelpudding. But I voted for this project.

2. ACDFSM
Ok, shadwos. Technical, a nice shader. But in such a contest you need to showcase your work properly. And the presentations, sorry, sucks. No own models, no real demo, no real interactivity.

3. RayHairLightSoft
Nice presentation. I like the hair shader. It reminds me of the Oblivion hair shader. Technical and optical a nice work. But, I have only one vote and I simply love watershader.

4. Shadershowcase
Nothing special. In comparison to the other contest project it is not very much. Some, not very beautiful, klicked together scenes with standard shader applied. No own artwork, worse, no nice artwork. There are a lot of better free models outside.
Even the island scene is nothing special. Everyone who owns the com edition could click together such scenes.
Sorry for the harsh critic.

5. Tower on Planet
I realy like procedural created stuf. I like the demo a lot, but I remember a previous version of this with another tower "architecture". It had a nice cave/way from top to the end of the tower. I missed it. If I had a third vote, I would vote for this project.

6. ShadeC
Some realy nice shaders. But the presentations is a bit weak. The interior demo looks relative nice and polished, but the exterior demo looks a bit "klicked together" and uninspirerd.
I competitions to some other projects is can't beat the presentation of the shaderwork. But nevertheless, technical this are some very good shader.

7. Sea VTF
Hm I had some problems, too, but solved the Fillmode problem. After the bad first impression, I saw a realy, realy great watershader. It is not perfect and the Depth effect behaves weierd, but the the color the reflections, the presentation at all is great. If I had 1.5 vote I would vote you.

ACDFSM: interesting shadows, but a very ugly presentation. And you really should have asked me for my dll, as I did some fixes which finally allow a pretty good resolution for the sunshadows without any errors... It seems to have some problems close to the shadow casting objects and I am not sure about your bias, it seems quite high? But definatly good work, a nice readme and it seems easy to reuse

RayHairLightSoft: looks nice and clean and seems to be some good work, it just misses something to make it more special. It is kinda boring somehow.

Shadershowcase: sorry, but it weather shows a nice scenery nor any interesting effects. But I like the menu and the information panel and so on.

ShadeC: I would have prefered to see some textures and more of the water. Detailed textures most probably also would have hidden the low shadowresoltion and the resulting problems a bit. I like the refraction effects in the outdoordemo and the volumetric light. But the presentation is weak and it is missing somekind of an über-shader to make it really special.

Sea VTF: Very nice water and a nice presentation. Nothing more to say.

Tower on Planet: I love that stuff

Wavefield: some very good looking waves, great lighting, nice details like godrays and those animated, wet stones. Another very special thing about it is that the switch to the underwater effect takes care of the waves... The only things I am missing are some particles and underwatercaustics.


It is very hard to decide what to vote for, but I think I am doing the right choice
I btw enjoyed most of those readmes a lot. Very cool how much information some of you put into them.

I'm kinda sad that I didn't have more votes. I really liked all of them. Some didn't present themselves as well as others, but the shaders themselves are all awesome work.

damn- its seems that there are some problems with the caustics: you can activate them by using the runtime shortcuts -switch the PP-effects to middle with 2+F3 and then to high 2+F2...

Hello friends,
Sorry for problem. i don't understand why. Exe file works finely on my computer. I was confused for Fillmode's problem. But anyway, thanks for all nice comments. And Hummel, thank you very much for explain of the Fillmode.

The shadows of acdfsm are great but the level is weak.
The seavtf looks a bit strange to me. Maybe the shaders are just exaggerated.
ShadeC is very promising but the indoor shadows are too blocky.
Shadershowcase is nice but needs better artwork and shadows.
The tower (on planet) is impressive but I dont know a good application in a real product for this.
Wavefield looks great. Only the harsh lod of the water destroys the illusion.
I was surprised by rayharilightsoft. It is very well made and offers lots of features I did not see in Gamestudio so far. Very well done Julz! You got my vote. I really did not understand why you dont have more of them.

Many demos have problems when I switch resolution (F5) or when I switch to full-screen. And most of them dont offer wide-screen resolutions. This is annoying and not applicable to real projects.
Sometimes I realized another strange effect: Demos like the wavefield run very fast in a window but are slow in full screen mode.

Thanks for the kind words, Frank! And for the vote! There's still more than a week to go, so you never know what'll happen

If you have any issues during the switch to full-screen in my demo, just hit "m" to re-initialise the render targets. This is normally done automatically when it detects a change in screen-resolution, but the transition to full-screen seems to take too long for it to work properly sometimes.

Jibb