*goes and pouts in a corner* OOOkayyyy, I guess I'll wait if I gotta
lol, just a suggestion, I kind of figured that's what you guys were doing, which was why I was puzzled when you kept saying beta, technically it still is though so, until then

thanks for the support Trooper119, and yes you are right on both accounts, but just be a bit patient with us, we'd rather get something out that will be "done" rather than a very bad tech demo (hence the "alpha" demo, that we called beta). If any of you guys have questions or suggestions we'll listen to em.

also, lc, if you can give me an update on the bloom shader, and how it's going.

As you probably already know, I'm one of the many people who have been following this thread with a lot of interest. Now I just had another look at the latest trailers on myspace(with the cutscenes) and I suddenly realised that this game is even smoother than I realised before. Needless to say I am really looking forward to the release!

cartoon_baboon

well as far as the bloom shader goes, i wont have it done until monday, as i have no access to my office computer until then since im out of state right now, but on monday i should have it uploaded, since its pretty much already done, i just need to do some optimizations.

well, i have time to wait until monday, that's absolutely no problem. If it were something like the middle of next month, we'd have a problem with adding it, but since it will be here this soon there is nothing wrong. I'm looking forward to what you have pulled off, is everything working?

@cartoon_babbon: cool, and thanks very much your kind words are appreciated.

mdeveloper_b everything has been working since my last screenshot. the issue i believe that chrisb's version had is 2 things
1. his overlayed render probably affected the whole screen. being that the quad overlaying the screen has to have a skin that is a power of two square, there is always some stretching. since the non blurred parts were still prolly visible, that stretching probably made aliasing noticable, couple that with only a couple of tex2d lookups (which in his defense is for speed reasons) it probably made a funny looking blur.

2. the level issue is probably due to an object that gets purged at the end of a level being set as the .bmap, this is the wrong way to do it. it should be set to a global bmap that is never purged, that way it stays inbetween levels.

all this into consideration there is not a problem pulling off bloom with that plugin.

and?

1. you can remove the aliasing problem if anti aliasing is being used (via the video card's settings)
2. you can reset the bmap meaning that you can disable the bloom and all effects

1. the aliasing problem can be fixed simply by making the unbloomed parts invisible, and making the bloomed parts very blurred.

2. you never have to "reset" the bmap, you just keep the same global bmap thruout the game, and if you want to turn bloom off you just make the quad invis. I might have to double check to see if that part works properly, but even if it did there is still a way around it. i gaurentee it.

for the aliasing, the bloom shader does this automatically, or no? I myself have no way of doing it if it weren't.

the aliasing was caused by a low res picture of the seen being partially transparent but visible over top of the seen, with the right shader, this wont be an issue. if you want to get an example of whats happening, take a picture of the engine running at 1024x768, then another screenshot with it at 640x480, take the second one and put it over the otherone in your favorite image editing program, make it partially transparent, and you'll see the same effect.