Main Discussion

[David]

Originally Posted by Jasiek

You should make it transparent with fuzzy egdes fo tif LBA more.

don't undestand that..

Yes I first thought doing it that way but since there are many quads drawn here it has to be static geometry (vertex buffer or display list) , like the whole scene actually.
memory space is : 20x 256x256x4 = 5.24Mo
or 20x 128x128x4 = 1.31Mo with low quality.

Could you upload grass sprite with alpha channel like png ?

[David]

well here is a demo with LOT of grass
http://www.mediafire.com/?n0x3nkt3qe5
I got 500 fps with an ASUS EAH3850 Series (work) and 5 fps with GeForce5200. (home). That's insane !! FPS is computed with the app FRAPS you can get on my project page
in this demo, the CPU doesn't do anything at all. Only the graphic card do the job.
Try it and tell me your FPS !!

edit : I forgot to add a random size factor, and maybe I'll add also a random darkness factor.
Wind intensity and behaviour coud be more controlled playing with active texture.
I'm really stuck with that geforce, I'll keep developing on 320x240

[Darkflame]

works great here.
Especialy looks good with the camera low.

Cant wait to see it with a alpha-channeled sprite though. Will probably add a lot more work for the gpu, but will remove that black pixaly effect and should look vastely better.

[David]

it actually IS alpha channeled ! Otherwhise you couldn't see through the grass. Try to open texture material_grassXXXX.tga
But I only perform an alpha test here, I can adjsut it better and also add alpha blending. I think last option is what you are talking about.
Take a look at opengl redbook for more details.
http://www710.univ-lyon1.fr/~jciehl/...L_PG/ch07.html

[Darkflame]

I meant a full alpha channel, that is, variable transparency. (RGBA)
What it looks like at the moment is you have a particular colour mapped to transparent, or at least, are only having the alpha channel as a yes/no extremes.

We shoudnt be seeing any of that black on the edges of the grass when zoomed in idly.

[leoboe]

My FPS remains constantly between 30 and 60 (nothing more and nothing less)
CPU is 2-5%

I've got a GeForce 8800 GTS 340
(with forced Antialiasing x16 Antisotrophic)

[David]

Darkflame :
I'm doing an alpha test for transparency. If alpha < X, then nothing is displayed at all. If alpha >= X, texel is shown without any blending operation. The problem is the value of X, I raised it and now there are no black borders.

Leoboe :
Thanks for the info. That 2-5 % is normal, because there is nothing computed in that demo, it's all static geometry (yes, even the grass is static !!).
When I will add character animation, I will have to add mesh deformation (skinning) computing and also path finding, I think it will raise to 100%.

[Darkflame]

ah, righto

[Homeless]

Call me lazy if you will, but deciphering this thread is beyond me currently. Tell me, what is this all about? A summarization would be appreciated.

[Darkflame]

A new engine for LBA.

[Homeless]

In which way does this differ from TwinEngine and Prequengine? What's the goal?

[Medur]

The goal is to have fancy graphics, I believe.

[Darkflame]

Thats a nice side effect :P

Homeless - Have you seen the videos?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjsj-oZdYAM
(very old one now)

[LBAWinOwns]

Originally Posted by Darkflame

A new engine for LBA.

What?

Are you certain this isn't only a grid-rendering engine project like the first release of LBArchitect. Only this aren't trying to mimic LBA's graphics. It instead tries to show 3D-graphics, using the fact that LBA actually is 3D.

[Bot13]

Do I understand correctly that it reads the location of objects in LBA scenes? So that when we're through with all the fancy graphics we can convert all LBA scenes with a flip of a switch?

[Darkflame]

Yes...ish.
You cant do it at a flick of a switch exactly without a very polygon intensive scene, as there would be much redundancy.
But it can already export a 3D mesh from any isometric scene from LBA, which can then be edited/touched up/optimised in 3d software.

[Bot13]

But as LBA doesn't use a 3D engine, we can't use that one. So all implemented programming (interaction, health, story, events) in that old engine would have to be redone.

[Darkflame]

david38 plans to use LUA scripting for that stuff, I believe
(mentioned back a on page 4)

[David]

LSA is two things

- a set of useful tools
- a game engine completely connected to Blender and Lua scripts

Perspective Map viewer reads map from LBA and shows it in a fancy way, in perspective / fake 3D. It exports map to OBJ, only for designing new maps like the one made Jasiek The video darkflame refers to is a great demo made by RobG I got inspired to make that tool.
The game engine doesn't read any data from original game. It uses it's own readable text file maps and 3D models generated from Blender by python scripts, and will read lua game scripts for dialogs, scenarios, bot behaviour etc...
Hope that makes things clearer

[Darkflame]

Whoops, sorry, link to the wrong vid :P (I had that on my favorates)

Anyway, this is all fantastic work so far.

[leoboe]

But there's one point I still don't understand.

In every project we do there's either modeled 3d-objects or original isometric tiles.
Why don't we link both so we build every single isometric brick in 3d and after that use a program to replace the original bricks in the scene with the new 3d-objects. this would let us rebuild whole areas with much less worksteps.

Also that way we could even convert our own created maps from LBArchitect to 3d.

So why isn't that possible?

[ChaosFish]

Originally Posted by leoboe

But there's one point I still don't understand.

In every project we do there's either modeled 3d-objects or original isometric tiles.
Why don't we link both so we build every single isometric brick in 3d and after that use a program to replace the original bricks in the scene with the new 3d-objects. this would let us rebuild whole areas with much less worksteps.

Also that way we could even convert our own created maps from LBArchitect to 3d.

So why isn't that possible?

Sounds like a good idea. If for every isometric brick in LBA there'll be a corresponding 3D counterpart it should be possible, I guess.

(but what the hell do I know!)

[David]

Once you have a 3D object library, it's a piece of cake to rebuild a map or make a new one with blender. You can even get the exact position of each object in original maps by importing OBJ files generated by Perspective Map Viewer.
LBA architect is a modding tool, made to create maps and use them inside original game. I'm making a different game engine, starting from scratch. It pretends to be easily readable, and open. I think I should'nt have add this grass and water effect, it's making things more complicated. Maybe I'll remove it. I prefer to develop gameplay rather than visual effects.
It's true that game engine has some common concepts with orginal but it's not the goal. For example my engine works with flat maps !

[Darkflame]

The gameplay/scripting abilitys should indeed be worked on more then graphical effects.

But, on the other hand, this sort of project should really be guided by your interest in it.
If you get bored doing the effects, work on the gameplay, or visa-versa.

I know on most of my projects if I get bored doing a specific part, I go work on another "corner" of the project and come back to that bit later :P

[David]

Totally agree !!
So for gameplay, next step is adding twinsen model in that map