63 replies to this topic

[myconid]

Pureon, on 14 June 2012 - 07:32 PM, said:

Interesting. Am I right in thinking something like that would take a long time to implement in order to test performance impact?

The correct answer is 25 minutes.

Edited by myconid, 15 June 2012 - 10:56 AM.

[Pureon]

myconid, on 15 June 2012 - 10:55 AM, said:

The correct answer is 25 minutes.

lol, now you're just showing off! Amazing.

[zoot]

myconid, on 15 June 2012 - 10:55 AM, said:

The correct answer is 25 minutes.

Very nice! Might it be advantageous to introduce a slight bit of randomness? Perhaps in the phase?

Edited by zoot, 15 June 2012 - 01:57 PM.

[Potter]

myconid, on 15 June 2012 - 10:55 AM, said:

The correct answer is 25 minutes.

WOW! Looks amazing what a simple effect can do for the game ambience...

[Shield Bearer]

Hahahahaha! Man, you are too cool! Did you say you could do this for cloth too? Amazing stuff! Keep it up bro

[Wijitmaker]

Did you guys know that there was an actor made years ago for testing? Check this out if you have time:

binaries/data/mods/public/art/actors/flora/trees/pine_animated.xml (hopefully it still works)

See what kind of performance issues you might have if you load a map up with these actors as a comparison (probably poorer?). This test tree was also made to animate a fall on "death" (they should actually fall when first attacked).

I like myconid's method a lot better though, no animating required and I'm guessing better performance

[Pureon]

Wijitmaker, on 15 June 2012 - 03:40 PM, said:

Did you guys know that there was an actor made years ago for testing? Check this out if you have time:

Yep I saw that when I first started working on animations for 0 A.D.

[twin]

Good animation. Do you think to move the smoke in the same direction to the wind? I think that it will more realistic.

[Shield Bearer]

How feasible do you think adding falling trunks would be? And making the tree wobble when being chopped?

[myconid]

Pureon, on 15 June 2012 - 11:00 AM, said:

lol, now you're just showing off! Amazing.

Just having a bit of fun.

zoot, on 15 June 2012 - 01:11 PM, said:

Very nice! Might it be advantageous to introduce a slight bit of randomness? Perhaps in the phase?

After the video I thought to use the object coordinates as an offset of the phase to make "waves" of wind passing through the terrain. Didn't quite work out the way I wanted, but it did make it look random! Right now I'm using three cosines per vertex... maybe kind of inefficient, so I'll need to find a way to approximate it...

Wijitmaker, on 15 June 2012 - 03:40 PM, said:

Did you guys know that there was an actor made years ago for testing?

Yeah, I came across it while changing the tree actors.

twin, on 15 June 2012 - 04:39 PM, said:

Good animation. Do you think to move the smoke in the same direction to the wind? I think that it will more realistic.

It's possible. The particle emitter could share the wind information with the tree shader, though the two are different effects.

Shield Bearer, on 15 June 2012 - 05:22 PM, said:

How feasible do you think adding falling trunks would be? And making the tree wobble when being chopped?

That's a job for the animators, I think. Adding a physics engine would take a lot longer than 25 minutes!

[FeXoR]

Great thing in general, even better for 25 min

myconid, on 15 June 2012 - 05:30 PM, said:

That's a job for the animators, I think. Adding a physics engine would take a lot longer than 25 minutes!

Hehe ^^

[zoot]

Could more of the skeletal animations be moved to the GPU? Apparently it has been a concern in the past that they are too CPU-intensive.

[myconid]

zoot, on 15 June 2012 - 06:40 PM, said:

Could more of the skeletal animations be moved to the GPU? Apparently it has been a concern in the past that they are too CPU-intensive.

Check the config for the "GPU skinning" option. Apparently it's disabled because it's slower, though I haven't tested it.

[zoot]

I see

[k776]

Very nice work.

I notice the shadows flicker as the trees move though. Are shadows done on the CPU or GPU?

If they're on the CPU, it'd be nice to move them to GPU rendered. Should be faster right?

[zoot]

k776, on 15 June 2012 - 08:29 PM, said:

Very nice work.

I notice the shadows flicker as the trees move though. Are shadows done on the CPU or GPU?

If they're on the CPU, it'd be nice to move them to GPU rendered. Should be faster right?

I've noticed that flickering on other shadows too. I assume its a bug. See the shadows at 0:12 in this video:

Edited by zoot, 15 June 2012 - 08:49 PM.

[myconid]

k776, on 15 June 2012 - 08:29 PM, said:

Very nice work.

I notice the shadows flicker as the trees move though. Are shadows done on the CPU or GPU?

If they're on the CPU, it'd be nice to move them to GPU rendered. Should be faster right?

Shadows are already done on the GPU. The flickering/pixellation is a limitation of what current shadowmapping technology can do (you'll notice similar artifacts in AAA games as well).

There are some alternative techniques to mitigate the problem, such as cascaded shadowmaps, though in my view their results aren't good enough for their memory/performance cost.

There may also be some techniques to prevent the flickering under some circumstances, such as during rotations. I don't know much about them offhand, but they should be worth looking into.

[zoot]

What about shadow volumes? My choice source of objective information, Wikipedia, says this technique is slow when the shadows are large, but that doesn't really seem to be the case here.

[myconid]

zoot, on 15 June 2012 - 09:14 PM, said:

What about shadow volumes? My choice source of objective information, Wikipedia, says this technique is slow when the shadows are large, but that doesn't really seem to be the case here.

I think shadow volumes could become the industry's favourite in the upcoming generations of GPUs (geometry shaders! ), though for the moment shadowmaps are a safer bet for us. Besides, it'll be much easier to get decent results out of what we've already got than if we start from scratch.

It's true that the shadowmap implementation we have needs some debugging, especially the GLSL version (it's on my list, but the list keeps getting longer!). If we can stop the flickering during camera rotations, we're good for 0ad part one. For part two, if there'll be moving lights, seasons and stuff like that, there'll need to be a way to fade smoothly between light states to reduce the flickering... so that can wait.

[historic_bruno]

Let's get some of these patches cleaned up, tested, and integrated with the engine I suppose #1493 and #1497 are a good place to start even though they have no visible effects. I think we can get them in A11 if the changes are validated.

myconid, on 15 June 2012 - 07:22 PM, said:

Check the config for the "GPU skinning" option. Apparently it's disabled because it's slower, though I haven't tested it.

Indeed, there was a discussion about that here.