getting the best display

[s2odan]

Quote:
Holy crap. When I first saw this I thought you were being a smartarse and you'd taken and actual picture and overlaid the hud on it. That's amazing.
hehe, ;)R.E. Shaders, If you think you can do it, then go for it But I have nfi how you would convert the fractal stuff into a form for glsl but I presume it could eventually lead to some nifty things like fractal clouds ;)But someone on IRC mentioned how older cards would have trouble with that, but theres nothing to say it can't be optional.

[s2odan]

Here's a video of the terrain, my CPU barely made it back from this one

[Coolhand]

fluffyfreak wrote:
@s20danWhat do you think about doing colourisation/texturing in the shaders?A good half of the terrain generation time is getting the colour for each vertex as it has to go through the noise system again.Instant win performance wise.
i have mentioned this before, and would be willing to provide a good set of textures for this, for different surfaces, i have no idea really why the coding devs are so set against this idea, or at least are not even willing to discuss it. I'm sure you could get better looking terrain for the same amount of processing time, or a win-win on both fronts. to me, honestly the planets are ok, but they don't look particularly realistic much of the time, there's a lot of room for improvement and a lot of that could be done by craftily incorporating bitmaps. ...guess i'm just wasting my time even mentioning it though.

[robn]

Coolhand wrote:
i have mentioned this before, and would be willing to provide a good set of textures for this, for different surfaces, i have no idea really why the coding devs are so set against this idea, or at least are not even willing to discuss it. I'm sure you could get better looking terrain for the same amount of processing time, or a win-win on both fronts. guess i'm just wasting my time even mentioning it though.
Its the same story - there's a limited number of devs, each with their own set of interests and amount of time they're willing to contribute to the project. Using textures for terrains may objectively be the right way to do things but if nobody is interested in writing the code or feel that their time is better spent elsewhere then there's not much more to be said.Personally I don't know enough about terrain stuff to be able to comment on the "correct" approach. If s20dan & fluffyfreak (& others) want to hack on fractal terrains, that's their choice.This is exactly the reason we encourage ideas to be added to the issue tracker. Right now there may be nobody interested in it, but perhaps one day there will be. Putting the idea in the issue tracker ensures that it is not forgotten.

[durandal]

Are you plan to use static textures for every planet in galaxy?

[fluffyfreak]

durandal wrote:
Are you plan to use static textures for every planet in galaxy?
No that would slightly defeat the purpose of generating them. No reason that you can't use a pool of source textures with splatting and colourisation, then another pool of detail textures on top of that perhaps to further improve uniqueness. Or something.

[s2odan]

Quote:
i have no idea really why the coding devs are so set against this idea,

Quote:
Are you plan to use static textures for every planet in galaxy?

Quote:
No that would slightly defeat the purpose of generating them.
'Nuff said....Procedural yes, static no. I've even said this to you Coolhand on more than one occasion

[fluffyfreak]

Coolhand wrote:
i have no idea really why the coding devs are so set against this idea
Having just read a couple of the other threads I can sort of see why. There's already 2 to 4 people testing the game on hardware without decent shader support, mostly laptops using those f@#king Intel chipsets, so whilst taking all of the terrain generation and rendering over to shaders would be fricking sweet... it would stop people from playing :(The alternative is to maintain separate shader & fixed function pipeline (FFP) systems, which takes more developer time and you might even see gameplay diverging between them. For example, I'd be quite interested in porting the terrain generation & rendering to the GPU, including updating the physics to give more precise terrain collision for landings etc. Now that's not going to work on machines using the FFP, so they'll get the CPU based system we currently have which will mean not only will planets look different but because of the different generation ability / features of CPU vs GPU you'll actually get different terrains. They'd probably be broadly similar, but I do mean "broadly".I have spent most of today reacquainting myself with texture splatting and I might go onto that after I've done my current... thing

[fluffyfreak]

s2odan wrote:

Quote:
No that would slightly defeat the purpose of generating them.
'Nuff said....Procedural yes, static no. I've even said this to you Coolhand on more than one occasion
Yeah but I think that was Durandal

[s2odan]

Oh yeah :)But I was referring to collhand's message just up there.. *points up* :)But anyway... Have you had any thoughts on how you might do this?

[s2odan]

Quote:
Now that's not going to work on machines using the FFP, so they'll get the CPU based system we currently have which will mean not only will planets look different but because of the different generation ability / features of CPU vs GPU you'll actually get different terrains.
Thats a shame. Is there a way around that? Like how system and secotr/galaxy generation was all moved from floats and doubles to int32 to get around precision issues between the platforms..?

[fluffyfreak]

s2odan wrote:


Quote:
Now that's not going to work on machines using the FFP, so they'll get the CPU based system we currently have which will mean not only will planets look different but because of the different generation ability / features of CPU vs GPU you'll actually get different terrains.
Thats a shame. Is there a way around that? Like how system and secotr/galaxy generation was all moved from floats and doubles to int32 to get around precision issues between the platforms..?
I wasn't thinking of it as a technical limitation in the same way but more of a sheer processing power difference. Without trying it my best guess is that you'd still be able to do the same thing, land in the same place, but that you might use algorithms that are better suited to GPU so the results themselves will be superficially different.I.e; we could all land in mexico, but those with GPU would all look the same, and those with CPU would all look the same, but GPU and CPU generated landscapes would be different in more than just the amount of detail.Without trying to implement it I couldn't begin to guess. Perhaps the CPU system will translate perfectly to GPU and this speculation is worthless after all As for texture splatting, yes I've had a few ideas and done some reading, it's possible to do it via FFP too. Not as well, but still possible.