(April 2021) Monthly WIP Screenshot Thread

i like your videos :slight_smile: good template, nice ideas, fun to watch.

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Thanks guys, I really appreciate it. I also follow everyone with great interest. Best community ever!
New updates soon :wink:

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My daughter (3) liked the grey men video a lot.
My first thought was - yeah its a real tower you defend in the tower defend game.
After watching it - like 4 times*1 - I just asked myself: What is the reason to defend an empty tower ? You need something in that you defend (a treasure, a princess, the president, whatever).

*1 Note to myself, if daughter come, dont stop working and check the jme forum while she has your pens and papers. If you do so, dont play videos of grey men (or yellow men from the animation videos…)

Keep your work on.

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The idea is to defend some cave, or gold mine of dwarfs (main character will be a dwarf), this fort or tower is a defensive construction.
But agree, need more decorations on the map, including some bushes, trees, something to fill the tower inside, etc.
Thanks for your advice :slight_smile:

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I played with some shaders I found here (Shader Library) Fish Eye, Dome and Barrel Distortion GLSL Post Processing Filters | Geeks3D. I took me a while (well actually only 30 min) to figure out how I have to adapt it to jme3. The input was slightly different, but then boom. I know it doesn’t look too good but that is the start for more shader stuff for me. I’m totally exited and have to show off the result here :smiley:

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Medium poly-count hand.

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Sorry for spamming but I found a barrel distortion shaders that looks even better than the fisheye which is too extreme I just put the twitter link here https://twitter.com/ia97lies/status/1384557214984179719?s=20 looks pretty amazing IMO.

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As my project is growing more and more into a product, I was just wondering how long I’ve been with jMonkeyEngine. But given the fact that I started 3D graphics about 16, maybe 17, years ago, I guess it was a long time. Back then, I started with Java3D but moved on to something better soon and ended up here. I like - actually love - jMonkeyEngine because it allows me to understand, adapt and extend every bit of code.
I implemented my own physics library (I am a physicist), my own deferred rendering pipeline, PBR and volumetric shaders, decals, and maybe more. I am able to render scenes at planetary scale and I have a much cooler flight simulator than M$ (I am also a pilot).

And since a couple of days, I am also a movie director and producer.

Do I earn something yet from this? Well, my children say it is the coolest game they’ve ever seen. (It is not a game, it is a simulator which I use for serious training. But it is also a game, because I put a Knight Rider car for my son. And yes, it has Turbo Boost).
Creating a project like this is fun but also sometimes exhausting. Since my start with monkeys and engines, many people dropped out and many people came in. Thank you, to everybody involved since the very beginning.

PS: Just in case you thought I was kidding about KITT.

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This is GORGEOUS!

Two questions:

  • Does PapaSpace have a website yet?
  • Are any of the assets or code available for re-use in other projects?
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First, thank you. I am always happy when somebody likes it.

  • Yes, http://www.papaspace.at/ . I need to update the website sooner or later.
  • To be honest, I am not sure about how well my code would integrate with the default JME code. I use double precision vectors for positions and a floating origin camera, a logarithmic depth buffer in all my shaders, and a quite different, deferred, rendering strategy. I also think that jme’s default PBR looks nicer and offers more features.@nehon did a pretty good job. I admit, that I would approach things differently from today’s perspective.
    The only remaining shader is the MipmapBloomFilter, which I shared long time ago.
  • Regarding assets, I can only share those for which I have the copyright. Means, the two aircrafts which you can see in the video can be shared. They are not yet finished either, but I am willing to share if somebody is interested.
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That looks pretty amazing tho :open_mouth:

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I would love to know how you are doing those amazing volumetric clouds.

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Cool, you have done a great job :slightly_smiling_face:

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Sure, I’ll try to give an overview here.

I use two 4x downsampled depth textures to determine minimum and maximum ray length for each 4x4 pixel cell. Then, I do a traditional raymarch also at reduced resolution. The ray ends at the minimum depth while calculating the clear sky color and cloud transmittance. How to make clouds is best documented by Epic Games here.

But, I had to improve performance because I need those clouds on a much larger scale. When you fly at an altitude of 12 km, you can see for hundreds of kilometers. Therefore, I use a TextureArray to precalculate some cloud density and light/shadow parameters in a 100 km radius around the camera. Since the movement of the camera is rather slow, even at Mach 2, I don’t need to update each cell of the array in every frame. I fill the information continuously and one full update cycle takes about 1-2 seconds. The TextureArray contains enough information to determine whether to decrease the step size due to cloud presence and it also tells me the volumetric shadow of the surrounding clouds.

For upsampling, I don’t use any temporal filtering because it introduces ghosting. I think that problem took me about half a year to solve. I finally used the depth texture containing the maximum depth value of each 4x4 pixel cell to complete the raymarch. When upsampling, I blend the sky color and transmittance based on the actual depth value, which must be between minimum and maximum accordingly. Some artifacts remain, for example at the edge of a mountain, but they don’t occur often.

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Java3D but moved on to something better soon and ended up here. I like - actually love - jMonkeyEngine

hehe i also had same :slight_smile:

The game looks amazing! really!

Now you can only improve gameplay or detail graphics. Gameplay is ofc most important part always, as you are also Pilot, you have all knowledge, dont forget to have game “easy” for other people, but since Children have fun, you probably already did it.

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Working on a spooky game area.

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Heheheh… I like pics like this because they are both hilarious and inscrutable. “WTF could he possibly be doing?!?”


…also… it’s a “T shirt”. lol

Edit: it occurs to me that I giggle way too hard at that… may be time for bed soon. lol

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A less ridiculous example from this prototype. Even with only the most basic functionality (no edge normals, no layering, no alternate shapes, only a handful of ‘fabrics’) this is pretty fun to play with.


Ok, one more crazy one:

All he needs is a cowboy hat and a beer in his hand and he’s ready to watch the game.

Edit: what’s promising is that even without most of the features you can still manage to create some evocative styles. Maybe this is a sailor for example:

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hi @pspeed, I’m curious about the way you change textures. Java code or some other trick? could you tell us something more?

Right now it’s pretty straight forward texture painting.

With only a handful of different materials and no special shapes or layering:
https://imgur.com/D1orYUT.png

Between that and my earlier crazy image with the “t shirt” and grid, it should be possible to kind of see what I’m doing.

The ultimate goals is to send a small 32x32 texture and let the shader reconstruct the texture. Think ‘block world’ meets ‘clothing designer’ for players to make their own outfits. This is the super basic version that only deals with skin-level clothing but already pretty neat.

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