Thought i would give you a short status update:

Deferred Shading for low end gfx cards is working (Radeon 9800, Geforce FX). I will now start to add support for automatic detection of MRT capabilities and switch to high end deferred shading if MRTs are supported by the gfx card. This will give much better results as R32F textures will be used, but will also be a little slower. I will add an option to turn mrt support on or off, so you can decide if you need high end gfx or if it should run on a broad range of hardware.

I also started a little side project i do for university (create a mp shooter in 2 weeks as a proof of concept). While working on it, i stumbled over some nasty bugs in shade-c, which i fixed (hopefully). However i still have trouble using particles together with the new deferred shaders however. Also they don't really work well together with shadows. If this is fixed, i'm one big step further.
Also, for some reason view entities aren't rendered when sc_setup is called.

Also i noticed that sun shadows are not really suitable for big levels/flight sims. They work pretty good for first person shooters or 3rd person games...as long as you walk on the ground. So i will add pssm support for sun shadows to create nicer shadows (they will also be slower...but low end shadows are already supported by shade-c, so it's time for some advanced stuff Don't worry, you will be ablet to switch between low and "high end").

I think i will release a new version once automatic mrt detection is implemented and the particle bug is fixed.
I wanted to release a new version yesterday, but there are to many bugs right now and no real improvements (apart from the shadows working on low end systems).


Oh yeah, while working on my project, i also created a new terrain shader. It supports global color- and normalmapping, an unlimited number of detail color- and normalmaps, environment illumination mapping, specular lighting, 8 dynamic lights and shadowmaps.

Still have to work on it a little (ambient lighting isn't working the way it should at the moment), but here are some screens of it in action:

Does any demo already work this way?
I ask, because I couldn't test any of the contest entries, because they all used shader 3.0.

As far as i know my contest entry "only" needs ps 2_a .
However it still uses r32f textures for the shadows, so that might be the cause for it not working correctly on your pc.

There currently is no demo showcasing the low end shadows.
I will add options to my game for switching to low end shadows however. So you will get your demo, along with a tiny multiplayer shooter And as i have a fixed deadline, this won't take too long

WOW!

that was easy enough

I took your code, and adapted it to this:


then change the normalmap to this:


Next change the camera arc to 110...


and BAM! this is the result:




Now I knew about changing the camera arc, but that wouldnt add the curving in my geometry as you can see happening on this image... I'm really happy now thanks!

Only thing though, it does seem to make the game look refracted (on a tiny scale)... I guess it's due to the "refraction"-shader But would there be a more smooth way?
If you dont know what i'm talking about, try the above and see for yourself.

kind regards,

To get rid of the aliasing that's bothering you, create a normalmap that is at least as big as the screen. As with every other texture the normalmap will be blurry and have artifacts if it's scaled up beyond it's initial width and height.

Ideally you would also not create a square normalmap, but a 4:3, 16:9 or 16:10, depending on you resolution. That way the pixel aspect ratio will always be correct and you won't get any refracting artifacts in your map

So for a screen res of 1024x768, create a normalmap that is at least 1024x768 in size. As long as it has the same aspect ratio it should work just fine.

I am enamored with this new terrain shader........WOW.

the new terrain shader is beautiful

@joozey

The typical mtlfx file comes with a good fishlense shader already if you check it out.

Helghast you mean ?

Anyway, yes, but I had NO idea how to change the settings, this works with an image, lots easier to me now

thanks though, i'll look more into it

regards,

oh yeah helghast (not sure why i thought joozey wanted to know) anyways, i adjusted it just by opening the .fx file and about halfway down there is a variable set to a hexidecimal value, That changes the strength of it.

nice, thanks for the hint I'll see what gives better results to me eventually (I dont care about performance right now :P)

But as i'm using Shade-C anyway, thought I might wanna do it in there anyway

regards,