Advanced rendering

[sjek]

yep
Would want to write a bit for the end of the day so here .p

would vote for getting more advanced methods in the game first. It takes time for people to learn the new techniques like with PBR
http://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/Images/3005/? iron longsword
http://i.imgur.com/sMlqYf6.png floor
http://i.imgur.com/c3ntzEz.png bonemold bow
http://i.imgur.com/kzv3Vzd.jpg wooden keg

for the normals and UV maps it’s has been known for ages and there’s many mods that replace those with better ones. Also when searched for quicksilver the 3d max itself could be partly responsible. Taken the nifskope and whole conversion process it’s fairly good as spotting needs a trained eye and it’s not like all the models are bad.
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/ ... B-htm.html

similar normal rendering is possible via mge xe shaders, for seams etc. So tools for it can also be made in vanilla at least : )

[Blackwind]

I don''t need "eye candy" to enjoy my game, but I am running a 10 year old PC with an old 1 GB Radeon GPU. I know you are talking about the way the 3D engine renders textures, lights and shadow. I can tell you that all the models are NIF (Net Immerse Format by GameBryo) assuming you desire to edit the 3D mesh. There is an opensource project called "NifTools" found here at sourceforge. NIF mesh can be converted in Blender 3D also. However I have never attempted to edit my mesh for this game. I apologize if you are already aware of these resources.

I have messed a little bit with the 2D textures, most of which can be easy to be edited with the correct plugins to Blender or GIMP. I find the 3D view of Blender much easier to paint in than guessing in the GIMP 2D environment. My preference is to increase the detail of the existing textures over the number of faces of the existing mesh.

As for 3D rendering, I am unaware what rendering method is used by the original engine. OpenMW seems to have done a fine job and I have no complaints. Personally (assuming I had a better machine) I would not be against the "eye candy", I just know that increased ray tracing is going have a trade off.

[raevol]

Best thread in years.

Agreed.

@allcreater, would you be interested in starting small and just implementing shadows? That would put us precariously close to a 1.0 release.

[Chris]

A problem for deferred shading is the large number of semi-transparent objects that MW has, which will have to be rendered on top in a non-deferred pass. If you took a random screenshot of the bitter coast literally half the screen is covered with semitransparent fauna.

Secondly, as weird as it sounds, some areas in the game actually depend on per-vertex lighting to not look bad (for example the ghost fence, and the fire place in the chargen room). Of course, these could be changed, but requiring someone to go in and change all these lights.

Bluntly speaking, I don't think DS would work very well for the vanilla game but it certainly might with enough mods.

Another option is Clustered Forward Rendering, used by Doom4 (viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3787). Essentially, this packs all light source data for the scene into uniform buffer/data array on the GPU (very infrequently changed), while separating the viewport into 3D 'clusters' that hold lists of indices (streamed to the GPU, almost constantly updated) pointing to which lights affect that section of the viewport.

When preparing to render, you update the lists with which lights are affecting a given section of the viewport. Then when rendering a pixel, it takes the viewport coordinate and depth to get the right light list and only runs over the lights that are affecting that area. This has the benefit of being able to reduce the needed number of processed lights (e.g. a far off light illuminating some barely visible trees won't add to the processing for the nearby wall taking up half the screen). It also works with transparency since it doesn't rely on a depth pass to do the lighting, and could probably be applied to either the vertex or fragment processing stage.

Since we're talking about HDR and PBR I would also add gamma correct rendering and ambient occlusion to that list, what do you think?

I second this.

[DestinedToDie]

@allcreater, would you be interested in starting small and just implementing shadows? That would put us precariously close to a 1.0 release.

Implementing shadows sounds good to me. A lot of people list their reason for not playing on OpenMW a lack of shadows.

[allcreater]

Thank you all for very warm welcome and for respones!

Unluckely I'm not so sure in my own possibilities as some people (mostly because of motivation: it could happens that something will distract me from the project, unluckily I'm not so responsible as I want to be), so I very don't want to be overrated, but surely I'll try to do my best It's interesting, it's challenging, and it could to please so many people... What could I promise at beginning is to make some experiments with graphics with my own game branch (with DS and HDR, then, (I hope) with help of @scrawl, we will decide what we will do with that developments in a future), and of course try to implement some dedicated features in main game branch.

So, let's start with small steps, and if it will be done, will try to switch to serious developments. I think shadows for a Sun is very good feature to implement at nearest time, because it looks compatible to be added into existing game engine architecture.

In nearest days I'll try to share the results of my experiments around HDR and DS, then we could try to implement shadows, and then will planning something else.

[psi29a]

That sounds like a great plan.

I everyone is waiting with baited breath for your results!

[Okulo]

Implementing shadows sounds good to me. A lot of people list their reason for not playing on OpenMW a lack of shadows.

Yeah, if I may complain a bit, sometimes it feels like we're suffering from the chicken/egg problem.

1. There are no mods that make use of advanced rendering because there's no advanced rendering implemented.
2. Advanced rendering is not implemented because in some places (such as the aforementioned Bitter Coast) the game wouldn't look good.
3. The game wouldn't look good because there are no mods.

It's a self-sustaining circle and I think that the devs here are the only ones who can break us out of it. So I hope that allcrater (with some help of Scrawl perhaps) can pull us out of this situation.

On a related note, I remember there being some kind of fog shader. Whatever happened to that? Did it just peter out? Because that was fantastic.

[DestinedToDie]

On a related note, I remember there being some kind of fog shader. Whatever happened to that? Did it just peter out? Because that was fantastic.

Magamo tried to port it to a recent OpenMW version. However the porting broke many things and since Magamo wasn't a coder he couldn't fix them. It wasn't picked up by our developers.

[magamo]

On a related note, I remember there being some kind of fog shader. Whatever happened to that? Did it just peter out? Because that was fantastic.

Magamo tried to port it to a recent OpenMW version. However the porting broke many things and since Magamo wasn't a coder he couldn't fix them. It wasn't picked up by our developers.

Last I heard, Damiel was working on it too. A big part of the problem is that the shader really wasn't designed to be used on close ranges, and is probably something worth looking at when distant terrain is reimplemented. For me, that fog shader to cover long distances with distant terrain would be a very good stopgap until LOD objects are implemented. It'd be awesome if the original author of the shader, visvaldis were to return to work on it too. One of these days, in between work, raising a child, learning python, C++ and the basics of recombinant genetics, I'll get around to spending some real time with glsl.