I've hopefully fixed the problem with having HDR/Bloom switched off. I had to change a few render states before running the shader. A render state instructs direct x how to render stuff to the screen. The game engine was instructing the renderer not to render anything intermittently before calling the shader routines (the Oblivion shader code then told the renderer to render stuff).

I want to find some shader constants before uploading an update. Hopefully I'll have an update by the end of the week.

wrinklyninja: I'll add a timer constant in the next update and maybe a sin(timer)/cos(timer) for wobbly effects.

Cool, thanks Scanti. :thumbsup:

That would be my request and no matter if you succeed or not I just wanted to say that I really appreciate that you'll be making an attempt

Afaik it's not needed because MGE is licensed under the GPL.


Great screenshots, I hope to see them soon in Oblivion

Shaders created for MGE don't fall under it's license.

[Neo]Woah.[/Neo]

Artsy...

Ok, didn't know that.

Heat haze sounds really awesome. Keep it up.

I only have a sec, but have you guys checked out the TIME semantic? I think that'a actually updated a bit more frequently than you'd want, but it is part of the FX framework already.

No, didn't know it existed. I'll check it out.

I can't help but notice that there are much more screenshots in here from MGE than Oblivion. Shouldn't the focus be on what can be done for Oblivion rather than comparing it to MGE? Since it's been said multiple times now that they're two different engines, doesn't it make sense to just figure out what's possible in OGE on its own?

Yeah, it does, but people like eye-candy. :shrug:

I assume some kind of a basic culling mechanism is out of the scope of possibilities for obge? Would do good for performance.

Isn't culling when you remove stuff that isn't directly visible in the scene? Like removing all the hidden stuff you can see when you twf?

That would be really cool. I hope it would be possible for Scanti to make OBGE able to access stuff that early on, it would be great for performance, you're right. We'll see.

@ IlmrynAkios: What TIME semantic? I can't find any information on it, not even at MSDN.

I'm pretty sure anything like occlusion culling is out of the question. I imagine everything is already rendered by the time we have access to it at any kind of attainable level. Without things like EXE hacking of course (and of course that is not an option). Though it'd be a welcome surprise if I'm wrong. Of course things like culling are probably not worth the effort involved anyway... Too little payoff.

I reinstalled Oblivion on my roommate's PC (still on a PowerMac.. though I may soon be getting one of the new iMacs released today!) so that I can play around with things as they come out from this project, but also because I had found that the reason that SSAO does not work when forced through nHancer (with Fallout 3 compat.) was actually a bug in nHancer! It was fixed in the latest version so I reinstalled that and the game to test things out.

SSAO is pretty noticeable in the beginning dungeon but there are several issues. For one, the "rays of light" are meshes and such have a fat, black line on the floor where the mesh intersects it. And of course since the mesh always stays rotated toward you you can follow the "scorch mark" around on the floor and it'll chase you. =p If it stayed put it wouldn't be nearly as noticeable.

Of course this is only an nVidia thing, and the effect is weak at best, but I was concerned that the poor design decisions of Bethesda when it comes to all the super-fake lighting now have another way of biting us on the butt... when it comes to SSAO. I'm not sure what nVidia employs in the driver, obviously, but I imagine SSAO doesn't have a lot of variation between solutions. nVidia's solution is actually pretty buggy, too. The starting prison cell, if I stepped near the wall, SSAO turned off entirely. The "fog" in dungeons sort of disables the effect on the whole screen too...

So maybe (hopefully) one of the goals of OBGE could be to disable all the fake light meshes and replace them with volumetric lighting? =p Ambitious, I know. But just a thought, if we're going to run into problems with mesh fakery/trickery.

(Maybe someone can look at the rays of light in the caves with the depth buffer turned on? I'll be installing it sometime tonight or tomorrow myself, though, if not...)

Pretty much. Culled objects aren't rendered in the scene.

I *think* the TIME semantic retrieves the time passed since last frame.

btw, how are you accessing depth values in your shader ?

It's to show what has been done with MGE and Morrowind and what can possibly be done with OBGE and Oblivion. They've also been used as examples a couple of times since a few people don't know what some of the terms refer to. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all.

Hey guys really good job you're doing here!
I have an idea for you

In real life when you're looking down into the water then you can see trough, but if you point up your head and looks along the water then it starts to reflect the world.

This is because the light gets reflected comparred to you (I think)

Could you implement this to Oblivion?

It's called Fresnel and it already is implemented. It's adjustable when you edit water types. There are TONS of water mods that change this (and other things such as fog) to make the water more realistic. Go to TESNexus and pick one you like.

A quick update on how I'm getting on.

I've found out that the Oblivion engine changes the world/view/projection matrices about 3-5 times per a frame. i.e. when rendering shadows, water reflections, sky, distant land or menus. Unfortunately as IlmrynAkios had discovered the matrices that are active when the shader code runs usually aren't the ones we need. This means I'm having to work out were in the code these matrix swaps are, work out what each swap is rendering and find which are the ones I need.

If I can't work it out by the end of the week I'll still upload an update with the HDR bug fix.

well here's hopeing you do work it out but you guys are doing good job never the less good Luck to you all

please prioritize occlusion culling it's really important to me.

No offense, but that comes off as rather pompous and as a demand, maybe you didn't mean it as such?

@ Whomever:

If the water stuff ends up working, will there be a way to differentiate between coastal waters and lake/river waters?

It's not possible to asign different bodies ofwater different properties, but it would be possible to change variables in the shader on the fly to give different appearances. It's just a matter of finding a way to accurately tell which should be picked.

It's actually on my to do list for Enhanced Seasons.

Yar, that's close enough So essentially it could be scripted so that the water shader would behave differently according to location? Ooooh, couldn't that mean that it could be done according to weather? [excited]