Terrain

[jhooks1]

I have been working on animations for a long time, and really the only thing left to do for .12 would be to make them perform better. I have been trying to do that with hardware skinning, it improves performance but one half of the npc looks great while the other side looks off color, it is really frustrating.

I would like to work on something else, I am thinking terrain. I have no idea where to begin, I am thinking I should look at the ogre terrain tutorials and maybe Project Aedra's terrain code.

[Zini]

Sorry, but I think the terrain task is already taken by Yacoby. He sent me a PM about it before Christmas. I haven't heard from him since, but let's assume for now he has started working on it.

Was about to ask you what task you wanted next. If you want to go for rendering, water might be an option. Or if you want something entirely different there are still plenty GUI tasks.

Edit: Or you could have a go at implementing object rotation and scaling and subsequently non-load doors.

Seems the first half of this task is not on the tracker yet. Really need to update it (will do so next week).

[raevol]

I love you jhooks1. Just wanted to throw that out there.

[sirherrbatka]

Ok, we will think about "Mamarriage bureau" subforum but untill then don't spam this thread

[jhooks1]

I am choosing water, will make a separate topic when I start on it. I think I should use the same strategy (ogre tutorials, Project Aedra). I think someone was working on water for openmw a while back, so I will look at that too.

[Zini]

I will make the new thread, because I have a few comments to make about this task.

[Yacoby]

Hijacking this thread...

Are there any minimum requirements I should be targeting with regards to GPU capabilities. Mainly thinking of things like shaders.

[Zini]

Good question. I think shader model 2 is the bare minimum that we can expect on any hardware today (even older boxes). I doubt anyone is running anything less capable anymore. If you must, use shader model 3. But we should stay clear of anything newer, because it would lock out a significant part of our target audience.

[Yacoby]

Good question. I think shader model 2 is the bare minimum that we can expect on any hardware today (even older boxes). I doubt anyone is running anything less capable anymore. If you must, use shader model 3. But we should stay clear of anything newer, because it would lock out a significant part of our target audience.

Ok, cheers. Being able to use SM2 should simplify things alot

[Yacoby]

I started this a bit late (read: Friday) due to hardware problems (Not having any over Christmas and finding that I couldn't compile and do anything else due to a lack of RAM when I got back home) but I have extended the work corristo did so that the terrain is now rendered correctly and textures are displayed in a basic way (they are not blended). There are quite a few graphical issues that I will try and work out and it won't work with multiple esms yet.

If anyone wants to take a look it is in the terrain branch here: https://github.com/Yacoby/openmw/commits/terrain

NB: There is still a lot of debug code in there, so only one cell in Seyda Neen renders exterior statics (I can't render 9 cells of statics without a slideshow). I also need to correct my code style to conform to the OpenMW style (habits die hard).

Question:
How do you handle textures in the other parts of the engine? At present I am just changing the file extension of all textures to dds, which isn't ideal but I couldn't find out what other bits did.