SSAO v0.6 for A7 & A8This is the 0.6 release of SSAO for Gamestudio A7 & A8!It has been in development for about
1,5yrs now. After working on the new version for nine months, it has improved in many areas: it is
~21% faster than it's predecessor, it introduces a CHM
manual, and automatic
GPU-bone support, and a
new demo (gpu animated characters with SSAO, DOF and PSSM shadows), and support for
decals, and
user events, and functionality for attached post-processing chains that want to
re-use the depth- and normalmap, which is generated by SSAO, even if SSAO is disabled.
Core features- Compatible to A7.86.6 & A8.30.3, shader model 3 required
- Easy integration into any existing renderchain
- Supports fog and particles; static meshes; solid-, alphatesting and softalpha entities; decals (new); animated sprites
- Automatic GPU bone support (A8 pro only) (new)
- Works with (blurred) stencil shadows and PSSM shadows
- Can sample depth- and normal map, even if SSAO is disabled (new)
- Lots of showcase demos included + source
- CHM manual (new)
- Free to use in any project (MIT license)
Download (2011-10-10)SSAO v0.6 source + demos ~44MBDonationIf you like this software, if you find it useful or if you use it in a project (that maybe goes commercial), - and you would like to help me to find the time to work and improve this, please consider
a donation via PayPal Behind the scenesThe main targets for the current release were driven by structural- and performance related changes. While introducing GPU bones, I noticed that the amount of surface shaders exploded. I was also sick of having doubled code in all shader, so I wrote a unified shader which is being compiled during startup several times in different flavors for the support of all surface types and cpu- and gpu-animation support. I also pass compiler #defines to the shaders, which caused a huge boost on the performance in general, and, depending on what you dis- or enable, you get lots of extra frames. I also made the encoding scheme for the upscaling stage based on a texture lookup, which gave me also a instant boost. Plus, I made the sky pixel rejection right now, so, the performance is now also dependent on the amount of sky you have, so, SSAO will now run in space- or racing games, where the sky makes 50% of the screen two or more times faster! Another big win is the newly introduced manual.
Forecast & Call for projects The upcoming features are now listed in the manual! The list is quiet huge and if you need some of them in a hurry, don't hesitate to contact me! It would be really cool to be in touch with developers, who actually use it, because they give me almost all the time hints how to improve it.
Kudos The GPU-bone support was mainly targetted to be used for the zombie hordes in
Call of Death, thanks to Zapan who actually came up with that feature request. The release takes also advantage of some custom engine features added by JCL, thank you very much for that! I also want to thank Slin, JustSid, Superku, Firoball, PadMalcolm, Jane, Kitsu and ChrisB for their assistance to make this possible! Also thanks to the whole community, I love you
A8 ftw!
Have fun and best regards,
-Christian
P.S: don't forget to post bugs and comments
and in the case that you don't like it, tell me why!