(February 2016) Monthly WIP screenshot thread

I set the background texture to mirroredrepeat so UV coordinates > 1 or < 0 just wrap. The normals for the mesh are all the same and do not change. The shader is using a normal map yes, but it’s not used to modify the face normals, it’s used to offset the background image:

vec4 norm = texture2D(m_Normal, texCoord2 * vec2(m_repeat_x, m_repeat_y));

vec2 offset = vec2((1.0 / m_screenX) * m_RefractionStrength, (1.0 / m_screenY) * m_RefractionStrength);
offset *= vec2(norm.r, norm.g) * vec2(2.0, 2.0) - vec2(1.0, 1.0);
vec2 wtc = vec2((worldTexCoord.x / m_screenX), (worldTexCoord.y / m_screenY)) - offset;

vec3 back = texture2D(m_background, wtc).rgb;

Made with GIMP and Blender. Used GIMP to create a black and white tileable cloud, then used that as a displace map on sub-divided plane in Blender and saved out the Normal pass after rendering.

P.S. When rendering with Blender Internal the normal pass is in a different format. For anyone wanting to make normal maps that way, you need take the normal pass channel and seperate into individual RGBA components, multiply both the red and green channels by 0.5 then add 0.5. The blue channel is inverted so it needs to be multiplied by -0.5 then add 0.5 then recombine, plug it into the composite node and save.

1 Like

Here’s a short clip that demonstrates the effect and the flickering. When the Music Player window comes up you can see the flickering in the lower right of the Music Player window.

Very strange… :chimpanzee_nogood:
It changes over time - the only other thing that I can think of, is the tpf (time between frames), so maybe it’s something that is influenced by changing tpf values during frames (but why would you include time?). :chimpanzee_confused:
Also it happens exactly where the border (quad#7) and the inside (quad#4) meet each other. So maybe it has to do with that somehow… :chimpanzee_confused:

Hm, yes, should work (I think) but not sure here. Did you try “repeat” (without mirrored?). But I would have chosen “mirrored repeat” too, to be honest. :chimpanzee_sad:

Well, maybe someone of the graphics folks here have any ideas??

Yeah, I’m not using tpf for anything here, I’m not too hung up on it since the low setting looks good enough. It’d be nice if a solution were uncovered, but either way c’est la vie.

@Tryder I am so stealing your effects and putting them into my game … if that’s ok? :smile:

1 Like

And here it is:

If you got anything to comment, you should put it here, so we don’t clutter this thread too much:

11 Likes

@zissis Absolutely go right ahead, lookin’ forward to seeing what you can do with it :smile:

@Ogli Thought you’d want to know since you were graciously trying to help me out with the flickering issue, I fixed it! I went through the source code a little bit and decided to use multi-target rendering on my FrameBuffer. In the first pass I write the distorted image to gl_FragData[1] and leave gl_FragData[0] unaltered, then in my second pass I overlay the window texture and perform color balance on the texture in the #1 slot and write the result onto both gl_FragData[0] and gl_FragData[1].

Just for fun here’s a cap during a quick play-through last night:


P.S. That was taken before I fixed the flickering so I used the low setting in which UI windows do not display behind one another.

7 Likes

I feel so left out these days as one thing after another keeps conspiring to keep me from making pretty graphic things. Lots of times it’s because I’m working on open source game stuff that just isn’t very visual. This weekend it’s because my “day job” laptop hard drive got corrupted and I can’t trouble shoot it at all myself because of the stupid corporate build. (Full drive encryption but I don’t have the license or any of the utilities to do a data extraction… boo.)

I decided that I don’t like that anymore. I also decided that it’s been a long time since I bought a new machine (about 5 years). Also, the ‘lost a bunch of data’ depression needed some good retail therapy. Put that all together, and Saturday early AM I ordered parts from Amazon to be delivered the same day (I love that!). Same-day delivery nicely limited my choices enough that I didn’t dither back and forth for a week about choices. (The only thing Amazon couldn’t get me fast was a case so I had to go to a real brick-and-mortar store for that.)

So, no screen shots from me but here’s my pre-unboxing pile:

AMD 8 core, 32 GB RAM, 2 3 TB drives (I wanted RAID0 but Win7 didn’t like that)… GTX 960 4 GB. Decent machine, I think. Right now I’m doing the obligatory “download a bunch of nVidia demos” while I build a dev environment up.

…finally have all of my github projects checked out at least.

11 Likes

Hot damn, you doin’ physics simulations on that beast or what?

P.S. We all like your non-visual open source game stuff :slight_smile:

Nah, my day job these days is boring enterprisy stuff… massive ugly maven builds, giant jboss deployments, etc… the power will be put to good use and it’s nice to have for game development, too. The dead laptop was only a 2 core + hyperthreads intel thing I guess. Between that and the corporate garbage they loaded on it, I always felt like I wanted more power.

Thanks… just not much to post in a screen shots thread. :slight_smile:

1 Like


Pre-rendered background game. 1 of 4 projects ^^. Finally noise free renders

6 Likes

@pspeed why 32Gb RAM but “only” a GTX960? Wouldn’t it be better with 8Gb RAM and GTX970?

Hm OS and Java scales pretty good via ram. Also using a ramdisk with 8gb for the ide and workspace sounds possible :slight_smile: Gotta feed the cpu stuff fast enough

(In other notes, my current project needs around 8GB ram for 1 client and one idle server, with a fully loaded server that quickly reaches 16gb)

More RAM helps EVERYTHING. Especially with 8 cores and the thread implications (more cores implies I will want to run more threads).

A GTX 960 was $200. A GTX 970 was $350. Not worth it at all to me. 32 gig of ram was $160… (versus maybe $40 for 8 gig.)

1 Like

I picked up 8GB of memory for my laptop last month only to find out that even though my laptop specs say it supports 8GB and the RAM met all the technical specifications it didn’t work. If I put one of the 4GB modules in the lower slot with one of the stock modules in the upper slot it would work, but not with both 4GB modules.

So I guess I’m just supposed to guess which RAM is compatible with my system or I suppose I could buy the same brand that’s already in it for like $300, DDR2 memory is expensive these days.

It’s not clear from your description, but I always do DDR memory in pairs… and that seems to be the only way it’s generally sold. It may be superstition but something tickles my memory that matched pairs are either necessary or highly preferred or something.

Memory are working together in an equivalent way a RAID does. They share the work. This mecahnism works only if the motherboard can run them at the precise same rithme which is not necessary the case, even with idem specd pieces.

Kingston has a pretty cool memory search page, which can help avoid the purchase of exepenssive manufacturer tested memory. Just goglise “kington memory search”

1 Like

Beautiful stuff this month again!

Sadly, I worked on my small minecraft(1.7.10) frigate (the SS Potato) so I have nothing to show (again :D)… lil compact spaceship that moves in the 6 direction, has a cannon that shoots from 60 to 200 squares, 2 to 4 shells and can set a delay before shells explosions. Also has 2 bombardment slots, lights control and a personal beamer, all that controlled by a computer. The shipAPI methods make sure everything is secure (made an error once before that, and all my ship but one block exploded :D). And the computer can be set to listen via a modem and therefore be controlled by another computer via a remote control api (I use a tablet ^^).

Scripts can be written to control the ship for missions, such as an attack script such as:

  • stop the lights
  • move 20 up
  • then move front 200
  • then fire long range 4 shells max delay before explosion
  • loop 10:
    move 5 left
    fire cannon 3 times
  • move 150 front
  • loop 10
    bomb using the two slots 5 times
    move 5 right
  • move back 150
  • move down 20
  • lights on

Has a self destruct mechanism too.

Quite a nice control of the ship via lua console too, either from the ship computer or a tablet (or another computer).

Todo:

  • work on FTL (ship teleport)… need to test an idea see if it would work but think it should.
  • small refactoring so controlling multiple ships would be better
  • have some security so that anybody can’t control the ship by sniffing and broadcasting (it already doesn’t use the basic wcbe wireless because it could be used to self-destruct the ship… while now, no such problem exists).

Now I need to find someone ready to challenge my lil spaceship :D. And I need to find a cheap microphone to make a tutorial about such ship making.

PS: I’ll edit my post to remove all the SS Potato part if you peeps think it shouldn’t be here.

So, it’s a minecraft mod? A mod that uses Lua and let’s you control a spaceship? Cool! :chimpanzee_smile:

I still hope that when my game finally hits the online shop, some minecraft players will still be there to jump on in and test their Java skills against jME instead of minecraft. But somehow I have the bad feeling that this market window has already been closing during the last few years. Maybe my game will be “the next minecraft-like hype” but I somehow have doubts that this is gonna happen. :chimpanzee_closedlaugh:

How are you going to find bottlenecks in your code with such a machine?? :laughing: