Horde3D

Very nice! Having a small library of shaders would be a great thing since many user are not hardcore graphics programmers. But of course that's up to you to decide how many of your shaders you want to make publically available.

As you suggested, Ive added a new shader in the wiki! The fresnel reflection/refraction effect:
http://www.horde3d.org/wiki/index.php5? ... _-_Fresnel



It can be used as a glass shader.

Cool, thanks a lot for the article! Your screenshot is a nice eye catcher.

@Mikmacer wow that looks great. I see it only acts on the cubemap and is just translucent to the scene. I wouldn't have thought of that, it's a pretty good looking cheat

@kal "Unfortunaly, the shader is not affected by lighting at this moment" I like it, the sceenshot looks like a cross-between a ball of plasma and a furry animal, great for a cute magical/sci-fi creature.

A little update from our game project. We are aiming a first "real" in-game footage this winter, since this, we are working a lot on this project. I am aiming something visually impressive for an indie game project, and I'm working a lot on it!

Ive hosted some screenshots of the main character development:

Concept art:


3D(Still not finished, more than 1 month of work in part time) :


This is my first test in horde3D with the head, and a work in progress. Ive created a special shader for the skin and the hair. It is far from being finished, some hairs are missing, the hair color is not the final one, and the specular texture on the skin is really bad :

Very impressive! can't wait to see more. Out of interest what sort of polygon count have you budgeted for your characters?

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Let's bring 'em out! Any old iron! Any old iron!
A door opens and a homewife brings out a rather sophisticated-looking ground-to-air missile system, and dumps it on the cart.
Thank you.

Thanks!

The polycount is about 20 000 - 25 000. Since the game is made in a way that you will not need to show a lot of polys, in th environment, we are pushing it a little bit higher than usually.

We still haven't tested it with animation, since the main artist of our project is specialised in animation, he wants to use a lot of bones too, so I don't know about the performence right now. Maybe we will need to do some adjustements.

You may consider that for hardware accelerated skinning the bone count for one character is currently limited to 75 joints. You may consider using morph targets for things like facial animations.

Gotta love the Buffy vibe you have going there, nice work!

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

We already knew this limitation, and we will surely use the maximum of joints possible, or near. We will surely use morph target for some animations too, but surely not facial animation since we are not planning to have voice acting now.

We are aiming for something like 2 to 3 hours to get trough the entire game. The goal is to aim on quality and not on quantity And we are almost all students, or have a full time job, so our time is limited for the project.

Im not sure for Horde, but on contract last year one of the problems we were suffering from was memory usage due to a high volume of bones on the character and the number of animations - however it was a much older engine.

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Let's bring 'em out! Any old iron! Any old iron!
A door opens and a homewife brings out a rather sophisticated-looking ground-to-air missile system, and dumps it on the cart.
Thank you.

Impressive work! I'm really looking forward to see what your project will turn into...


That's definitely the right choice. Concentrate on a few core features and make them as good as possible. That's much more worth than a huge game which is for that reason not so much fun or not as technically impressive.

Apparently some characters on God of War 2 PS3 have over 180 bones in the skeleton. I wonder how they handle that many bones, since the PS3 does not have a huge amount of memory compared to PCs coming out today.

Given a 4x4 floating-point matrix per bone, and 180 bones, that is ~100kb per keyframe. You can use a slightly more compact representation, and even so, 1MB per 100 keyframes doesn't seem ridiculous.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

The GoW2 team has some great talent - they managed to implement HDR on the PS2!

ID software released a paper called Current and Next Generation Parallelism in Games where they talk about PS3 optimisation. They seem to use the CPU (the cell SPUs specifically) to run a lot of their vertex shaders instead of running them on the GPU. The PS3 has a very different memory architecture than a PC, which allows them to use the CPU as a stream co-processor like this.
There's also some other cool info in there, such as how to compress a normal-vector (3 floats) into 24bits