Dust and Footprints and Swirls (layers)

Do you guys think that footprints or caterpillar track prints could be a nice feature to be implemented in the game?

And the same question about dust behind bots/tanks

Re: Dust and Footprints

This probably wouldn't be a high priority thing and I doubt it would even be in the initial release until modders made it.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Tracks and footprints are part of the immersion and I believe neutrino is even looking into making them permanent part of the map so they don't disappear 2 inches behind the tank.

PS: I wouldn't expect them in the alpha though.

Re: Dust and Footprints

good to hear this ^^

Re: Dust and Footprints

Wow, that would be epic, to be able to see tracks as permanent decals...it would help with scouting as well, as you would be able to see the road most traveled by the enemies forces

Re: Dust and Footprints

They wont be so much decals as directly painted onto the planet texture - this is what allows them to be permanant without having a performance impact. Since explosion marks are already present, I reckon it's safe to say tracks will be in the alpha, if they are in fact going to be present in the final game.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Ahh k, interesting...I really don't know jack about the technology behind the coding (window cleaner by trade) but I do find it interesting.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Decals are actually the correct term. They get baked into the virtual texture, but those textures are generated from many layers of decals.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Ah good to know. I thought they were only referred to as such when they were discreet layers (like in Sup Com).

Re: Dust and Footprints

I'm actually quite interested in the specific implementation. I hope there'll be a blog post or something else going a bit more indepth with how the decal stuff works and how its different from traditional virtual texturing and whatnot.

Re: Dust and Footprints

"kbots travel single-file to hide their numbers."

Re: Dust and Footprints

:lol:

Re: Dust and Footprints

Laugh all you want, but it's actually not that bad of an idea! When you have a situation where tracks are fully persistent decals like that, one can even scout forces not by spotting the actual units, but by finding their tracks. It could be interesting! Very 08th MS Team!

Mike

Re: Dust and Footprints

I posted a bit about it here. For things like scorch marks or footprints we add another "sticker" (decal) to that place on the surface and re-render that section of the virtual texture.

Re: Dust and Footprints

yep ^^

Re: Dust and Footprints

From what I understand it's very similar to how id Tech 5/Rage handled environment textures. I'm sure there's plenty of info around the internets about how they implemented it.

Edit: Whoops, I missed page 2. Still, id Tech 5 does it similarly and here is a PDF with lots of pictures about how they do it: http://s09.idav.ucdavis.edu/talks/05-JP ... lenges.pdf

Re: Dust and Footprints

The major difference between id Tech 5 and what we're doing is we generate the virtual texture in real time.

id Tech 5 has tools for creating the virtual texture that work in a similar method, but they bake that content in to images that get stored on disk. When running the game it has to continually fetch image from off disk (stored in .jpeg form), convert it to DXT5, and add it to the virtual texture.

We found we can generate the texture faster than we can read it from disk (even with SSDs), so we just always regenerate it.

Re: Dust and Footprints

So your textures are basically procedural or what? It seems a bit wasteful to regenerate it on the fly but I guess anything beats reading several gigs of textures from disk.

So how big is a decalset for a biome then? Is it small enough to just keep in memory or do you still need to swap that?

Re: Dust and Footprints

The actual textures used by the decals are made traditionally (photoshop, 3dsmax, mudbox, etc.). However instead of just having a tiling texture we have a small hand full of images that get layered on top of eachother (hench the sticker analogy).

Here's a sample of 4 such decals, the bottom two are base textures, the top two are for extra details on top of that. This image is scaled down considerably from what the real in game resolution is. We also lay down the traditional repeating texture to act as a base.


Then we add a decal on top of that. Repeat several more times, with random rotations, randomly choosing between base decals. Then we add a few detail decals on top of that.


An explosion is simply another decal on top of that.



The the location, rotation, size, and image name for each decal is saved off so we can reconstruct it again later and it'll be exactly the same every time. The resolution of the images we use right now is fairly high, but we can change the resolution we keep on the video card to reduce the memory usage.

Re: Dust and Footprints

Aaaah. So I guess you er... keep the decals in memory and then blit them into the virtual texture according to your database of where and how much? Is that done every frame or only when you load in a new bit of the virtual texture?

So I guess there's still a limit to how many decals you can have in one place before running into perf problems? Hundreds? Thousands overlapping perhaps? More?