Graphics Update... BGolus and Varrak cleanup rampage

Here's a comparison animation of SAO SSAO enabled and disabled with better settings than the original images Varrak posted.

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM me likey lots...

Edit ..
Being an aussie i should have said "Crikey"

I'm a bit confused about the sky boxes. I thought those were just full blown 32-bit textures and not just dxt1 textures:

Code:

$ tools/papadump media/pa/terrain/sky/textures/skybox_01_front.papa 
1 texture:
0:
name: "/pa/terrain/sky/textures/skybox_01_front.png"
format: TF_A8R8G8B8
width: 1024
height: 1024
mips: 10
srgb: 1

Great, great stuff. Well done guys.

I remember a question a while back showing the 'concept biomes' particularly of desert, etc, and someone asked when the game would look like that. The answer at the time was that the models are exactly the same between the two, and it came down to lighting/shadowing which was more sophisticated in 3ds max.

What are the key steps you want to achieve with the graphics stuff prior to release? Do you have a few key goals in mind?

Thanks - always love these tech updates even if I don't understand all of them!

You are correct, they are uncompressed now, they used to be compressed when we first added them which made them look even worse. Technically we could encode them in YCoCg DXT5 format and save some space without losing much if any perceptible quality, but I think we want to eventually replace the existing sky box anyway.

Personally there's more I want to do with water: Reflections, refraction, more stable water line, etc. But this is fairly low priority. Lit water and general lit transparency is much higher on my list.

We've also discussed exploring some form of fake Global Illumination. This is a big reason why the 3dsmax renders look so much better than the game, it does GI by default. This is a big area of research currently in games, with many games over the last few years using some form of pre-baked GI or early forms of dynamic GI. Nearly every PS4 / Xbox One game has some form of dynamic GI implemented for instance. The SSDO mentioned early is a fairly convincing approximation, but would fail with the camera angles we usually have, as well as being very expensive. Most of the existing dynamic GI techniques take advantage of the fact the world we live in is flat and boxy, and usually the bounced lighting is very diffuse and only vaguely directional. If you have a room that's lit by a single small window a single light in the center of the room can very convincingly approximate GI by manually placing a single point light in the middle of the room. This is how we faked GI with the original Quake and Unreal engines, and how Pixar did it until Monsters University! Many of the current dynamic GI techniques are doing something similar but with several points either in a fixed grid (which is what Crytek does) or manually placed with some smart interpolation between points (which is what Battlefield 3 & 4 does).

None of these work well for PA. We're not a flat world so a grid won't efficiently map to the surface, and we're dynamically generating the world so we can't manually place points. There are some other techniques that might be viable, but they present their own problems.

Where does nVidia's HBAO+ fit into the scheme of things?

Awesome changes overall - we are now really getting close to the kickstarter trailer.
Have you guys thought about implementing atmospheric effects like haze (depth fog)? We see that alot in the
kickstarter trailer and it adds a lot to the 'planetary' feel.

To add to ace's comment, ground units and structures appearing blurred at orbital altitude or a toggle for planets that switches a cloud layer on and off for the purpose of contrast for orbital have been suggested in other threads. For reference on the second point the game endless space has nice looking cloud layers.

Back on topic, can you remove the ground shadow of orbital; it doesn't feel right for them to have such a hard shadow.

Technical layman here: will there be water trails behind ships? Just something I've been wondering.

@Quitch
HBAO+ is an NVidia only technique that requires compute shader. We don't currently support compute shaders, and we're not officially partnered with NVidia so we don't have access to that technique. I also believe it's DX11 only, so as an OpenGL 3.2 game it's also impossible to implement.
HBAO+ can probably run just fine on OpenGL 4 and AMD, but the implementation details aren't public.

@ace63
We currently do have a depth fog in game. The kickstarter video didn't! The kickstarter video faked atmospheric fog with a circle of color manually positioned over the edge of the planet. The depth fog we have in the game just doesn't have enough density to show up as much more than a halo around the planet against space. But if we increase the density it doesn't have the nice falloff in the halo it has now. Yes, it's an area we want to put more time into.

example of planet with existing fog density increased

@nightbasilisk
The separation of ground and orbital units is certainly something we've talked about. A depth of field effect as well as shadows have been brought up. Depth of field is possible, but it wouldn't work quite like what you're expecting as orbital wouldn't stay sharp while the ground is blurred in that case, but rather the orbital near your view would stay sharp. More likely we'll use depth of field to blur out other planets behind your focus planet.
Shadows are a different subject. Because of the way we do shadows it's an all or nothing. We could remove orbital units from casting shadows, but they would then not have any self shadowing either. We tried implementing a soft shadow technique while experimenting with trying to remove shadow acne, and that would have been capable of blurring the orbital (and air!) shadows, but it cause too many other problems to be usable.

@tilen
Maybe? I can't give a real answer on this. I actually added these several months ago (along with tread marks from vehicles, and contrails on planes) and it was postponed due to performance implications as well as generally being too overt visually.

I see. That's unfortunate.

Thanks for tacking the time to answer our questions bgolus.

Is it possible to weigh the amount of fog based on the height above the planet? Since the higher layers of the atmosphere should probably thinner than the lower ones, that way the edge of the atmosphere could fade out correctly, while having more impactful fog. That, combined with some (fake) atmospheric scattering effects could look pretty nice

Great to know it exists but I hope they can be put into the game in some shape or form as little things like that can really add to the feel of a game. Back to the optimising with you two then...need more to allow for the switching on of these types of nice effects

Still looks pretty. It reminds me of what happens when you're too close to the planet in free camera mode.

yes yes yes!

yes please!

worth getting keys stuck to the forehead, aye?

Can I get a hear! Hear!

I hope you manage to get those ship, vehicle and aircaft (con)trails back. Something I look forward to. Thanks for the answer!

Thanks for your responses Ben, very interesting. I also hope the trails behind units will at least come as an optional thing for those with PC's that can hack it

It really helps to add some depth and contrast, compared to the before pictures where everywhere more or less blurs together. Small stuff like this adds a alot to the visual experience.