good news… it’s like xmas x10… really excited about how Apricot is turning out… I think they should make a game for every movie project they do from now on… eh… how amazing would the GE get then…??
that’s what I was expecting over all the features, cause blender GE needs a huge improving in the performance, without it has non-sense any other feature.
Some simple optimizations to skip diffuse/specular/emit if they
are set to zero
If Brecht means, for example, the GLSL for emission won’t be computed if there’s no emit going on, this is very nice. No diffuse/specular computation is good for objects that would be shadeless (like GUI elements)
My GPU pulls my GPU Fantasy land BGE GLSL tech demo disguised as a game with spot shadows along at 60 FPS on the latest Windows build.
I also heard of someone commenting on a huge performance increase on the Apricot blog when playing the demo with the newest build.
yay. also, do they have any plans of making the bge use your hardware? wouldnt that increase performance?
If they can say, devote a whole core each to logic, textures, physics, and AI and let the GPU do the graphics, that would be sweet (check the Intel tech demo ‘Ice Storm Fighters’ for a show of what 4 cores can do to games)
Game engine shadow optimization, don’t use shaders fordrawing into shadow buffer.
The main feature I want in the GE is shadows but I don’t have a GFX card that supports GLSL (Geforce FX 5200). I was hoping from the above comment it meant that shadows were going to be done a different way but they are still slow and dependent on hardware. I know sofware shadows can be done quickly because I have played with the JMonkeyEngine for Java and I can enable a render pass that shows nice shadows with no noticable loss in performance.
Am I missing something or are shadows a no go without GLSL hardware support? Also, can someone recommend a fairly cheap video card that will support the new GLSL features available in Blender.
Cheers for the help!
The main feature I want in the GE is shadows but I don’t have a GFX card that supports GLSL (Geforce FX 5200).
Same here.
Am I missing something or are shadows a no go without GLSL hardware support?
No, there are aways more than one way to generate a shadow. Currently, Blender uses GLSL to render texture mapped shadows. However, other shadows like Volume Shadows, Stencil Shadows and Ray-Tracing Shadows do not need GLSL (There are more shadows, but I can’t remember them off the top of my head).
Further, I have no intention of implementing a different shadowing method, since everyone seems to be moving to shadow buffers anyway. GLSL support is available on any Nvidia/ATI graphics card that came out in the last 5 years with the right drivers. In an editing application like Blender it makes a lot of sense to provide flexibility in making materials which GLSL provides, while a fixed function pipeline is very restrictive in the types of materials you can make. I think it’s better to bet on the future given the limited resources.
Does anyone know where i can report issues? I’ve found a few so far:
-Textures continuously disappear, get error code C9999 exception during compilation
can sometimes be fixed by closing / reopening blender ( am i the only one getting this?)
-Shadow face option (not the new kind, the uv setting) crashes blender.
-copying lights / adding more than 3 lights causes issue #1
-copying lights / adding more than 3 lights causes issue #1
I’ve had this issue too in the newer builds. I have more than 3 light sources. The result is that lighting “appears” to be gone all together.
brecht, I appreciate you being upfront about your intentions. You’ve done a lot already and you only have time to do so much, so what you’re saying makes perfect sense. I do hope that someone will add shadows that are not shader based, though, as shader-based shadows which require the latest drivers cater to a narrow spectrum of computer users (gamers and technophiles). The current efforts make sense in the context of a game engine which is being marketed to game designers (be it for rapid prototyping or finished products), but the BGE also has a much wider application in the context of casual game design (games like Bejewelled, which are often played by the not-so-technically-inclined) and artistic visualizations (architectural walkthroughs, scientific presentations, realtime 3-dimensional display of aggregated data, etc.). People using the BGE for these type of applications will likely favor wide spectrum feature support and compatibility over modern gaming techniques, since they will be mostly concerned about their product actually working on the end user’s computer with the least effort possible.
Anyway, I simply wanted to give a very practical explanation as to why BGE users might want non-shader shadows. I don’t mean to downplay at all the amazing-ness of what’s been happening these past few weeks. We’re all very appreciative of the changes that have been made, and I know we’re all looking forward to more great things ahead!
really? mine reverts back to blender materials.
I don’t have this problem in blender itself, but when I run a game in the blenderplayer. Then the lights die all together.
…
Anyway, I simply wanted to give a very practical explanation as to why BGE users might want non-shader shadows. I don’t mean to downplay at all the amazing-ness of what’s been happening these past few weeks. We’re all very appreciative of the changes that have been made, and I know we’re all looking forward to more great things ahead!
Exactly. Also, I wasn’t implying that you yourself brecht should implant different shadows. You’ve already done a great deal of work on the GE. I think we all appreciate the great work you and the other devs have done. =)
