new screenshots

[timmie]

So I figured I'd post these here, as well... These are screenshots from developing the dynamic lighting system.

http://timmie.squabble.org/screenshots/zdoomgl_62.jpg
http://timmie.squabble.org/screenshots/zdoomgl_63.jpg
http://timmie.squabble.org/screenshots/zdoomgl_64.jpg
http://timmie.squabble.org/screenshots/zdoomgl_65.jpg (check out the light in the fog)

[david_a]

Yayz0rz!

Will the next release have any significant overhauls to existing features (like speeding up the renderer)?

And what ever happened to those rumours of a portal renderer? Do you have any inside scoop on whether this is something Randy's actually wanting to do for a future release, or if it's going to end up like DoomScript? (I know he did some work on both of these things, but I we all know DS is 100% dead so I fear for the poor portals...)

[timmie]

well, I'm always trying to speed up the renderer, but haven't had much luck. On the plus side, dynamic lights have very little impact on the framerate from what I can tell.

As for the portal renderer, it's just something I'm looking at for the next major rewrite of ZDoomGL (lots of interesting things planned for that, although it's still a long long ways off).

Heh, seems many people tend to forget that ZDoomGL is my first big project using OpenGL, so I made some not-so-good decisions early on in development and that translates into poor framerates now (in some places, I guess). The next version is going to be a complete rethink in how stuff is rendered, so I can take advantage of stuff like pixel shaders, screenspace effects and *******.

[david_a]

timmie said:

Heh, seems many people tend to forget that ZDoomGL is my first big project using OpenGL, so I made some not-so-good decisions early on in development and that translates into poor framerates now (in some places, I guess).

No, I haven't forgotten, which is why I asked if there were going to be any big speedups :)

[DaniJ]

Mmmmm. Very Sexy. Nice screenies there Timmie. What's the fps like with dynamic lights that large?

I'm confused by the lighting in the dark sector of screen 3 though. Maybe it is lit and I just can't see it.

The lighting in the fog looks sweet.

So what can the dynamic lights be attached to?

[chilvence]

timmie said:

so I can take advantage of stuff like pixel shaders, screenspace effects and *******.

Whatnot?

[timmie]

DaniJ said:

Mmmmm. Very Sexy. Nice screenies there Timmie. What's the fps like with dynamic lights that large?

I'm confused by the lighting in the dark sector of screen 3 though. Maybe it is lit and I just can't see it.

The lighting in the fog looks sweet.

So what can the dynamic lights be attached to?

The dark part is a polygon that has an incorrect surface normal, so it's not being lit properly (finally tracked that bug down, now I just have to fix it).

The fps doesn't really change that much, surprisingly enough. I mean, the map is really small (3 sectors, I think, plus a mirror), so I get really high fps anyway (~990fps). It dips down to about 850fps when the lights are at their largest, but the drop varies depending on how much geometry there is in the scene. More complex scenes will see a smaller drop.

Right now the lights can't be attached to anything, but I'll have a little script language to define lights for object states or frames. Those lights are the placeable light objects (thing 9800) which has 4 args: r, g, b, and intensity. You can control those lights via ACS the same as you would any other actor and you can set the light values via ACS if you want with the SetThingSpecial command.

[DaniJ]

Well, it's really looking good Timmie. Nice to hear they're controlable via ACS also.

I've just seen the lights.avi as well... cool.

Have you thought about high pass blooms? Halos?

[timmie]

I have thought about high pass blooms (I'm actually considering having a "glow" parameter for the shaders that would allow you to do Tron 2.0 style glows), but I'm not sure when I'd put that in.

Halos/lens flares will also be added (controllable via a cvar, btw) at some point fairly soon, I think.

Also, more screenshots as things come closer to being deemed "good":

http://timmie.squabble.org/screenshots/zdoomgl_67.jpg
http://timmie.squabble.org/screenshots/zdoomgl_68.jpg (masked textures lit correctly)
http://timmie.squabble.org/screenshots/fogboundary.avi (2.5MB, fog boundaries are looking fairly good now, too)

[Linguica]

What are you planning to do with pixel shaders?

I think it would be cool for a Doom port to have HDRI, so looking at a bright sky through a window in a dark room would cause it to "bleed" out a little. Plus maybe have heat ripples like in Doom 3 \m/

[timmie]

well, it'd just be for basic stuff at first (warping textures), but adding support for heat effects and HDR would be pretty cool, too. That stuff is a ways off, though.

[DaniJ]

Very impressive stuff Timmie. The dynlights look easily on a par with jDoom but ZDoomGL's light->fog interaction totally owns. Doomsday could really do with persector fog like that (not the crappy opengl fog extension).

What sort of timeline are we talking? Is the dynamic lighting the main new feature of the next version?

[timmie]

yeah, it's the main new feature. I also managed to get fog boundaries working (from the video there), but they can look funny if they're layered, since it's an additive pass. I supposed I could change it to render then front-to-back, so there's never one overlapping, though. Or something.

As for a timeline, I still have to implement the script language (I believe there might be something about it on the NewDoom forums, actually) to hook lights up to objects and also implement some predefined light types (strobes and pulsers, mainly). So not too long, I hope. I think I want to get it out before the next version of ZDoom comes out since I'm sure that'll break a bunch of stuff.

At some point, I also need to look into spotlights, since I think it'd be awesome to have dynamic spotlights in the game, but I'll release a version with pointlights first ;)

[DaniJ]

Yeah spotlights would indeed be cool, with gobo support of course :-)

That lights.avi just reminded me I need to ask Skyjake again to implement smoothing on the dynlight properties between stages...

Obviously I don't how ZdoomGL handles dynlights but I should imagine the drawing and calculation of them is pretty similar.

Are you using multitexturing?

[timmie]

no multitexturing yet, just many passes. Although I guess it would be good to be able to draw two lights at once per surface (or even how ever many texture units your card has, I guess). We'll see, anyway. I just want to get this out there for now :)

Heh, and there's no smoothing being done on the lights in that video. That's just ramping up the intensity by one each tic. I'll have the pulser lights interpolated, though, since I have a little cycler class to interpolate between two values (linearly or with a sin/cos curve) from the shaders, so it should be really easy to do.