DeleD Community Edition

[Mille]

I've been browsing this forum and seeing a lot of VERY nice shoots from various game projects, but I’m wondering – what kind of engine do you guys use for rendering you world, is it mostly Irrlicht ? – or do some of you use your own code to parse and draw dmf scenes ?

Here are a few shoots from an editor I’m working on in my sparetime, I’ve named it Sumo Builder - and it has a friend, the Sumo engine which just draws what you make in the builder, full screen or window mode .. its not at all complete, but it’s a start!




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[Twixn]

Personally, i like making my own engines, i've made quite a few
and honestly its about time i showed off my latest one again.

Your editor looks cool Is it a full editor like DeleD, or does it
load DeleD levels and adds stuff to it?

-Twixn-
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Failure is not an option!....It comes bundled with the software.

[Mille]

Hey Twixn, you should show os some of your stuff - I've checked your web, its COOL for sure!!

Anyways, the purpose with the editor was to make a huge scene and be able to add dynamic lights to it and code the material shaders. At the moment I can just add DeleD models (as many as needed), and then move, rotate them and save the hole setup to a file. Also I can add omni, spot, and ambi lights with a cube-map shadow (GPU) implementation.

But Twixn, what should I do about static lightmaps ?. I can not use the lightmaps from DeleD since I have multi models (each as a seperate .dmf mesh).

[Twixn]

First off; Thanks , my site is abit dated so i should update it with info on my
current projects.

For the lightmaps, in theory you could load each dmf's lightmaps and simply apply
them to their respective models. However this will cause problems if one model
'should' cast a shadow on another.

Considering how DeleD's lightmapper cant work on multiple dmf's at a time, im pretty
sure you wont be able to. But do you need to? You have a pretty cool lighting system
already, and using lightmaps will probably force you to disable both the shadows
and lighting of your system (as lightmapping stores surface lighting, not just shadows).

Anyway again, excellent work

-Twixn-
_________________
Failure is not an option!....It comes bundled with the software.

[Mille]

Guess you are right about the lightmapping in DeleD – I just saw some of you game shoots from your web and I’m pretty sure you have lightmaps in you engine – so you just use the lightmap generator in DeleD ?

For the indoor maps I do not really need lightmaps (you are right about that), but some of the outdoor environment, where this light source (sun) is fixed at all times making soft shadows, I would like to use static light maps. I could try making my own lightmapping generator, which makes a single lightmap (.dds file) of each model, using the whole geometry.

The problem is, I’ve never done such stuff before – maybe DeleD would like to share the lightmapping code, guess not

[Twixn]

Yeah, i use lightmaps. But they are more for older cards these days
as i have a better dynamic lighting system set up too.

I guess you are right, for the sun lightmaps are good. Using DeleD's
lightmapper is out, unless you model the whole outdoor scene in one
dmf.

You may aswell give lightmapping a try, or softened shadow mapping,
but lightmapping will be better for speed.

You could try some cheap and nasty hacks if you like? Like only calculating
the lightmap for the ground. You can probably do that using shaders and FBOs
(assuming you use OpenGL), so no fancy math.

-Twixn-
_________________
Failure is not an option!....It comes bundled with the software.

[Mille]

Allright, just curiosity, how is your dynamic lightning system when it
comes to soft shadows, are they also dynamic ?

I do my current shadowing using a cubemap (distance) implementation on the GPU, it has a block-look edges, kind of bad

[Twixn]

At the moment, my soft shadowng is dynamic, but not as fast or as
'pretty' as i'd like. All i do is take multiple samples of the neighbouring
pixels when calculating the shadows and blend them together.

I plan on doing a different method where i draw just the
shadowing (from the camera) onto an offscreen buffer, blur it and then
draw it to the screen.

Keep in mind this method was developed for shadow mapping,
but works very well for stencil shadowing too. If you want to see a demo
of it in action for stencil shadowing i could link to it for you.

-Twixn-

Heh, btw: Sorry for hijacking your thread
_________________
Failure is not an option!....It comes bundled with the software.

[jwatte]

Btw: If you want a day/night cycle, then light mapping is pretty hard to do well. You're probably better off doing plain lighting.

An alternative is to encode the surface response to time-of-day using a spherical harmonic, but that gets kind-of heavy on the math and number crunching :-) It looks pretty good, though (you can get atmospheric scattering, light-dependent ambient occlusion, and all kinds of nice things baked in this way).

[Mille]

Twixn: I would really like to see you shadow demo, I'm in the process of trying shadow-stuff anyways, so its a help to see what other people do.


jwatte: nice input, I've looked at the PRT demo (Shperical Harmonic) in the DirectX Doc, but I must say its a bit to complitated for me at the moment. It reguires som math-reading etc. to understand fully, and my 3D projects are still sparetime suff ... but who knows, maybe one day I have a PRT implementation

[Twixn]

Well, its not actually my demo.

Anyway, here is a link to the demo, if you want to see the effect in action:
http://www.andreasjonsson.se/core3d/downloads/Core3D-0.3.1-SuperSoftShadows-Bin.zip

And here is a little tutorial the guy has made too:
http://www.codesampler.com/usersrc/usersrc_7.htm#oglu_soft_shadow_volume

Keep in mind these are not my demos, however i know the author and he made these
to be shown so why not?

-Twixn-
_________________
Failure is not an option!....It comes bundled with the software.

[Mille]

nice links, thanks

For now, I'll stick to a very simple static softshadow
implementation: put the camera in the light position,
render a cubemap with a shader saying that blocker
meshed will write 0, and none blockers will write 1,
blur the cubemap using Adope, and you can get PRT
looking stuff, result so far:

[Sindwiller]

Nice stuff, but you know, light radiation is also something that makes PRT look good

Also, stop using those low res textures in addition with low res normalmaps. It looks horrible!

Just my 2 cents!

Wfr, Sindwiller
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"Ave Jeroen et Paul-Jan!" populus clamant.