2 Bottles of Beer? Thats not enough ! sry for OT

Since the SSAO fragment shader is a building block, it can be easily exchanged by other techniques, which I am considering (not replacing but support for more than one technique). So, other, faster techniques might be possible in the future.

Another way to speed up SSAO in general (independent from the used algorithm) is re-projection of previously sampled AO terms and Monte Carlo-integration over time. This way less samples are taken at each discrete time step with a higher quality for samples which have been seen in the past x frames.

The threshold-blur stage is now shader model 2.0.

For another reason, I changed the way I pass coarse normals (for reducing memory consumption). A positive side effect was that I don't need to reconstruct them anymore in all PP stages (because they are stored on an own 888 target). This resulted in less arithmetics. Plus, I changed the gaussian weights in the blur stage so that I get now the same image quality with 5 texture lookups now instead of 7 per pixel per pass (H and V).

I am also investigating the arithmethics involved in the bilateral upsampling in respect to scalar nature of the AO terms (they are monochromatic! - the original paper was targetted on upscaling RGB colors only). If I am right, I think the upsampling will afterwards be two times faster for the cost of one additional half-sized 8888 rendertarget.

Third, I think the AO shader can be modified so that it can be used iteratively, using one PP stage per AO-sampling. This allows a dynamic configuration of the quality (which is hardcoded at the moment) and maybe also PS 2.0. Maybe. Don't bet on it

So these are the news and my thoughts, - so lets start coding!

The bilateral upsampling is now x2.3 times faster, thanks to less lookups. Instead of calculating for each HiRes-pixel the upsampled result by examining the 2x2 neighbourhood of coarse samples, I calculate on half the resolution for each coarse sample its 2x2 HiRes counterpart. The coarse neighbourhood is still examined, but only once for all 4 HiRes pixel and not each time for each HiRes Pixel.

I got on my notebook with chipset graphics an immediate performance boost of up to 10 fps (results may vary on faster machines, though).

Still working on the heavy 0.5 release (in the case you were curious)... the new A8 release candidate comes soon to the public afaik and I hope I can finish the new ssao release this year! Tons of good stuff in there, though, I am still struggling with some nasty problems, - but beside that, Zapan reported that it runs (and looks) quiet good in their Zombie game!

*möp* request for A7 version *möp*

It will be A7 compatible.

Go for it: SSAO for A7....... & A8 v0.52

Ok, everything regarding the development of the next version (0.6) will take place here. The development direction is pushed from different sides - some commons users here and one actual team, developing a commercial game, so new features will not only affect quality and speed, but also compatibility to Gamestudio in general and content creation/usage.

The first new feature is caused by this: automatic sprite decal-support. If sprite-entities have the DECAL flag on, they get ignored in the SSAO stage and won't contribute to the softalpha mask, because it is assumed that they are "glued" to the surface behind them. This is how it looks like:



In general, entities can be excluded manually, too, but I doubt that this makes much sense, because AO is shimmering through them, then.

So, if YOU have any feature requests, don't hesitate to post them!

Next: (automatic*) GPU bones support (A8/pro only).

Best regards,
-Christian

*: depends on JCL finding that undocumented flag