Graphics Update... BGolus and Varrak cleanup rampage

I like you two. You clever.

*quietly pushes nice anti-aliasing higher up your list of visual improvements you want to do*

We may eventually look into SMAA T2x, but it's pretty low priority. FXAA and super sampling work pretty well.

I feel like this ambient occlusion on the ground is still extremely diffuse. I expect the pixels under the tank treads to be much darker than anywhere else, so the tank feels connected to the ground, but at the moment it still feels to me like it's floating. Is there any way to tweak the falloff?

Yes there are of course settings to sharpen the AO effect, but that requires more processing power. We'll eventually have quality settings, for now it's at a quality plausible for medium settings.

It's diffuse because the unblurred AO is very noisy.

If you don't mind me asking, are effects such as explosions and water splashes, and such, high on the list at the moment?

It feels like everything has the same generic "explosion" placeholder effect, from buildings to units, and even ships.

Indeed it does. I'm so glad I managed to get a GTX 780 and i7. Your graphics are no match for me! Though I want them to be. You guys are amazing at this stuff! If you posted this kind of thread every day, I'd read it. ... And understand little, but still! @bgolus @varrak

Can it be linked to the actual bug where it's possible to see the edges of the skybox cube?

@superouman
Totally unrelated. Visible cubemap edges were a fact of life for OpenGL 3.1 and prior and has to be disabled in OpenGL 3.2 and later... we simply haven't because it hasn't been a focus. In DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2 games people had to resort to a handful of hacks to work around it or just live with it. In DirectX 10+ it's fixed by default.

I wish more people were like you (and myself - in our own respective field of expertise) : passionate, allways trying to improve your own skills, and most of all, sharing a lot with your co-workers or any other people willing to understand

Thanks @varrak @bgolus great thread

@varrak ; @bgolus

Not sure if you too are still watching this.

Can you please explain what is going on with this?




That planetary atmosphere effect when using the ctrl+m camera is really very annoying.

I realise this is a strategy game. Err... but well.. close in images annoy me when I get results like that.



Edit: It's an FXAA thing. I turned FXAA on.

I'm hoping this will be optimised - I play most games with FXAA off. (Hoping to squeeze some more performance out of the computer. Not sure if that's naiive or not. But I haven't viewed games at 3fps, so that counts for something right?)

Edit2: It's not completely fixed with FXAA thing, I got the same result with the same camera angles.

'viz ssao' is a fun console command.

For some reason the debug visual looks grittier than the final effect.

Another thing I'd like to mention. Have you noticed the grey edges around team-colored parts on units? The issue is especially obvious on the black team. The dox to the left in StormingKiwi's last image is an example of what I'm talking about.

Small run-in I had once with what looks to be a near identical problem, not sure if it's relevant or not:

The image shown when you enable viz ssao is the exact texture that gets applied to the scene. It's gritty because I turned down the quality settings until it looked like crap, then turned them up again until it became nearly impossible to notice it's grainy in game. Basically tried to get the settings to a place that would be plausible for all quality settings. At higher quality settings the grain goes away and it's nice and smooth.

The issue comes from interpolation, mipmaps just make it more obvious. For this game you're so rarely close to units that I haven't spent too much time trying to fix it.

Yeah, that's the same problem I was having. I guess valve probably had it fixed in the second method they supported (otherwise I'm not sure why it gave much better results).

EDIT: Also, just looking at the smaller units, it looks like a lot of them would lose nothing and gain a lot from using point sampling for colour (crisp edges between colours, perfect resolution for 'warning' stripes if the UV map is oriented at 45° instead of using low resolution diagonal lines in the texture, etc).
Is point sampling any more expensive / cheaper than interpolation? What might be some pros/cons of using it for units that I'm missing?

@aevs - The second tf2 method doesn't actually fix the fringing, it's just better at hiding it.
I updated the example to include that technique.

How is this mixing exacly working? You lerping red color by mask, or multiplying diffuse by red using mask?
Many times such problems can be fixed by textures. So if you have 2 peaces od geometry, one with standard color, other with team color, you will not have this issue if their UVs will be in some distance from each other (few px) and between them additional offset of same color as they have. This is how usualy I made it in mobile games, when you can't use complicated calculation to fix that and textures are small.
I see that in most units teamcolor is on "separate" gemetry blocks with own UV shell. There is not many with teamcolor and diffuse on same poligon. But this will make ArtTeam upset, to change all UVs and textures.