Please prioritise the effects you feel like making as it's important that you actually enjoy what you're doing and that you get the sense of satisfaction (or whatever else it is you look for) that you deserve for your hard work and effort when you spend your free time doing something completely unpaid.

Vac

Edit: For clarity.

My apologies if it did that was certainly not my intent . It's just that would mean mods that try to load lots and lots of objects in one cell such as better cities (not that I use it) would be more stable and would run more smoothly. I was also thinking if it would make it possible to have "open interiors" much like open cities but for houses.

Post process shaders are just adding another layer, but tessellation, occlusion culling are more advanced stuff. Maybe deeper than the engine itself going to hardware level of things. So the scope of this project(or that kind of projects) is more like adding features. If an opportunity arises I am sure developers will use it to gain more performance. But the motivation is getting more features. For performance, upgrading your old GPU/CPU will be more rational... I recommend to use the time passed since release date to your advantage and buy new hardware.

These charts were very helpful to me.

http://emsai.net/reviews/cpu/
http://emsai.net/reviews/gpu/

I don't think OC can be implemented into OBGE. I think someone else that knows more about that then me said so in a previous reply.

Yeah I'm pretty sure occlusion culling is out for OBGE. Shaders are post-process effects, meaning the scene and the geometry in it has already been determined by the time the shader gets initialized. Now OBSE implements alterations in the game engine and there MAY be a way to do it from there, but even as much performance as might be gained from it, due to its difficulty it'd be very low on the priority list. Not to mention possibly illegal due to the EULA - I think OBSE already rides pretty close to that line.

Now changing the water shader on the fly would be AWESOME. It'd be even more awesome if it could be linked to some OBSE script commands to change it via script, ie using a trigger zone to change the water shader.

Not sure if anybody's mentioned it, but a dynamic reflections shader would be amazing. Something that would provide real reflections instead of those fake "EnvMap2" textures. Being able to make a mirror (such as a vanity) that offered real reflections of your character would be incredible. Of course using that to replace the game's existing reflection shader would be a huge rundown on performance - but it'd be so worth it.

My current hardware has NO trouble running the game on max settings so no need to upgrade. I was interested in OC because from what I've been told having many objects loaded in one cell makes the game unstable and I would one day dream to see open buildings. It's a shame it's so hard to implement.

Solid state disks may improve loading times to the level of making it possible some day. I have hope. True Open World. Maybe TES V... (I hope the game will be shader driven so we can mod the graphics instantly. And it will probably have GI, OC and Tessellation.)

What we are doing here is canolling the possibilities of current gen into the game we love(No, I meant Morrowind! ). There's really a lot of details/features we can put into...

A truly open world. That would be simply amazing...

Doubt it, bethesda loves the gamebryo engine too much.

Actually the real difficulty with "open buildings" - interiors in the exterior worldspace - is precipitation. There are a number of exterior home mods - my Pemberly Manor includes an exterior cottage. But they all suffer from the lack of collision detection in OB's particle system which means when it's raining outside, it's raining inside. As far as the number of objects loaded goes, from my experience the engine is fully capable of handling most of the additional objects from an interior worldspace, but unless you're using a really high end machine performance does begin to suffer eventually. Most individual interiors don't have enough additional objects to make that an issue. Cities, however, do - hence the performance hit from Open Cities; and the number of interiors, in aggregate, inside a city would bring even the best rig to its knees without occlusion culling.

While waiting for TES V, there's this http://www.projectoffset.com/ which appears to have many of these features implemented in it. But it's such an ambitious project it may not be out before TES V is...

Oh how painfully true this is. It is of course my greatest wish that they hadn't started actual game development yet and are considering CryEngine 3 for its awesome forests (http://mycryengine.com/images/gallery/Integrated%20Vegetation%20and%20Terrain%20Cover%20Generation%20System.jpg, http://mycryengine.com/images/gallery/Dynamic%20Volumetric%20Light%20Beams%20and%20Light%20Shaft%20Effects.jpg, http://mycryengine.com/images/gallery/Natural%20World%20Effects.jpg, http://img6.abload.de/img/mycryengine_com_backgry6qh.jpg) ... But I digress. :/

Edit for clarification: The stuff below is involving Nvidia's SSAO implementation and has nothing to do with OBGE shaders. This can be toggled through the application nHancer with the Fallout 3 AO settings. (Look in my last post for more details)... I'm not working on any shaders myself, at least not right at the moment.

I mentioned in one of my last posts that I got the Nvidia SSAO working (finally) in Oblivion. It of course is Nvidia-card ONLY, and I feel the effect isn't as strong as it could be. During the beta drivers where this was implemented you used to be able to choose Off/Low/Medium/High, but now it's just Off/On, and on seems "Low".

Anyway, here is a comparison shot: http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g304/jw0ollard/Oblivion/ScreenShot0.png / http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g304/jw0ollard/Oblivion/ScreenShot1.png

It's clearly most obvious in the bookcases, as it should be. (Lots of tight spaces)

If the implementation is pretty standard as far as SSAO goes, there are several graphical issues that may need to be faced whenever someone creates an OBGE SSAO shader... Namely the dark spot on floors where the "light shafts" intersect, as I talked about in my last post, and I recently discovered when swimming underwater that SSAO must not know about the "fog effect" shader and does not adjust its contrast accordingly.

The fix for the latter would be very simple, I think. Eventually there will be a better underwater shader (chromatic dispersion, caustics, fog, wavy-ness), which could then just be applied after SSAO, no?

I had a few other SSAO comparison shots, but I haven't yet bothered to resize and crop them... Maybe I will sometime. Since the Nvidia implementation is so weak, though, it's not very remarkable. I'm also doing this on a completely vanilla reinstall, so my Oblivion shots aren't that great to look at anyway. =p

This looks promising. For screenshots, it would be best to over-exaggerate the effect so it's easier to notice the difference, but, when I flipped back and forth between the two, I would definitely call it an improvement. I'll be looking forward to seeing more progress on this.

Again, just so there's no confusion (I explained it further in-depth in my post before last), this is something you can just toggle in the Nvidia settings.

Though I expect not many people read my post before last because no one ever replied to it.

I'll edit my original post a bit, even though I thought I was clear enough.

Just an FYI, but with addons (see previous OVEP threads), Gamebryo is more than capable of doing all the bells and whistles and full Occlusion Culling--it's just a matter of whether Bethesda will bother, and to what extent they feel like optimizing.

True, but it's either bethesda or gamebryo that's making their games 10x more unstable then other games released at the same time, 2x less resource efficient, and 3-4x less attractive then other games released around the same time. Imagine if Oblivion was made with cryengine, or hell, even unreal engine.

There is nothing wrong with the Gamebryo game engine. That engine can do all the tricks out of the book. If they ever make TES5 it will be amassing.

The problem was (and still is) at the time of developing the game TES4 - Oblivion the console market. The game has to run on consoles but consoles where to dam weak to run Oblivion in its full glory. They made the game look bad due to that fact.

It is a fact that you can’t give the PC-market better visual effect then the console-market.

Umm, Oblivion looked awesome for the time it came out.... it took a lot of horsepower to run as well... but not a ridiculous amount. When it came out I ran it on an ATI 9800 Pro with 128mb vram and a single core processor and I was able to run it with medium settings.... I think you are remembering incorrectly. 3-4x less attractive? Come on now...

You run the game probably on Default Max settings, most of us run the game on Uber Max INI setting.

3-4x less attractive? No, not really. But it wasn't put together in the greatest way. The lack of shadows was unforgivable even then, I feel, and they should have re-enabled it with a patch once PCs could start handling Max settings. Along with that, the icky lighting system. I just don't understand why they fake lighting, at all.

They fixed some things in Fallout 3, at least, but I hope they do NOT use the custom Gamebryo engine from those two games for TESV. They should start fresh with Gamebryo 2.6. I believe their modified version is something like 2.3 or 2.4 in version.

And whoever mentioned instability, I think it's highly computer-dependent. My computer of several years ago crashed all the time with no mods. My roommate's new PC which I used recently (I'm on a Mac currently) never crashed until I started piling on mods. But it is pretty unforgivable that the engine is so finicky. Crashes on one computer, but not on another, and so on so forth.



Wrong. Dead wrong. PC games always have better graphics than their console counterparts, at least as of late. Even back when Oblivion was released. With no signs of PS4, Xbox 360 2, or Wii 2 for another 3 years (at least) the gap between PC games and console games is only going to grow larger as the PC market gets faster and faster video cards.

PS3 GPU = crappy 7800GTX
XBOX 360 GPU = crappy ATI HD2000/3000 hybrid (R600 chip)

At the time Oblivion came out, I had a 6600GT. Shortly after, I upgraded to a 7900GT. Therefore I already had a better GPU than BOTH consoles, and could run the game at much higher resolution (1680x1050).

Anyway, if they're already in the process of making TESV instead of it just being on paper, I hope they're not using the Oblivion/FO3 engine. They could at least use the latest Gamebryo version. Or move it to something even better like CryEngine 3. ESPECIALLY if they're going to put TESV out on Xbox/PS3... I refuse to let those consoles limit the quality at which I can play the game on PC. If they'd go with something like CE3, they could let the engine scale the quality down for them, and still give us a really nice looking PC game. I don't know how they'd manage making a modern DX10/DX11 TESV with nice graphics without having a lot of trouble in porting it to the consoles on their antiquated, hacked-up Gamebryo engine from 2004.

How would one go about doing this?

Posting this for general perusal:

float2 PixelKernel[13] ={	{ -6, 0 },	{ -5, 0 },	{ -4, 0 },	{ -3, 0 },	{ -2, 0 },	{ -1, 0 },	{  0, 0 },	{  1, 0 },	{  2, 0 },	{  3, 0 },	{  4, 0 },	{  5, 0 },	{  6, 0 },};static const float BlurWeights[13] = {	0.002216,	0.008764,	0.026995,	0.064759,	0.120985,	0.176033,	0.199471,	0.176033,	0.120985,	0.064759,	0.026995,	0.008764,	0.002216,};

The first code is a snippet from my DoF shader - it calculates a Gaussian blur. The second is a couple of arrays from the horizontal bloom shader in MGE. I'm trying to swap out the arrays in my code for these arrays (should be fairly obvious which I mean), but I'm having difficulty with it. Even after changing the variable names and references to make sure they all add up, and changing the max value of i, trying to see the shader ingame causes it to crash. It doesn't do this if I just reverse the changes. Changing the variable type of the BlurWeights[] array doesn't help either.

Any input?

EDIT: Oh, and you can ignore the retarded comments.

The effect compiler should post an error message for any compile error. Take a look at depthTest.log to see if you've got one.

I think he meant they won't bother/want better graphics. They want to sell those games on consoles sooo bad.


Emergent has been working. http://emergent.net/Partners/Software-Partners/. Like Umbra's occlusion culling, Lightsprint's GI and Natural Motion's euphoria(GTA4). (It appears those sigs worked!)

Tell me why we have these powerful GPUs? Well, if things goes this way(FIFA 10 PC disaster), soon ATI and Nvidia can kiss our ***es. (I bought my new video card for Morrowind!) On the other hand we have this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDFszGI3FwQ

But that dynamic displacement feature, we have that since 2004, but they sell it like new. Even Crysis in all its glory is DX9-PS 3.0 and 2 years old. Still good news for PC gaming though.

@wrinklyninja,
blur shader codes, I always borrow them. I really haven't figured them out. But my guess is the lack of 'rcpres' or the uneven number(13).

@ ShadeMe: Thanks, didn't realise that. I fixed the problem. Though the effect looked worse, so I chucked it. :shrug:

200! Time for a new one.