Checkout the Oblivion Shadow Project maybe they have good inspiring info:
http://ccgi.garrettn.plus.com/

We're hoping to achieve more than just shadows. Im actually content on not having shadows. I would really love to see a proper DoF, Godrays, and a SSAO shader first.

Depth of field is actually what I've just decided to try first, seeing as I've got all the building blocks to hand for that already. I'm hoping I can do it right!

I, on the other hand, would also love to see static shadows.

Sounds great. But for static shadows, would a shader really be used for that?!?

I'm not sure, but as long as you can get the vector positions of the statics, then it is possible. Whether or not there is a better way, I don't know. I'm still a noob when it comes to shaders.

OK, I really don't get this. I understand that you can access the depth buffer from a shader, but what in it can you access? In Scanti's testshader, he's got a 2d texture from it, which he then does stuff to make it look nice, and display that, but how do you access information on objects (like their depth) in the buffer? Are there parts to the buffer like you've got the .r/.g/.b/.a parts to a 2d texture?

Shader noob wanting help! Please? I have cookies...

Dude, watching that video brings a tear to my eye.... I think Bethesda's too closely tied to their GameBryo engine to consider it, but CryEngine is a FAR superior engine. I figured that out when I loaded up Crysis and had better graphics quality AND better performance than with Oblivion.

So does anyone have any news on an implementation of dynamic shadows from statics? To me, that's far more important for realism than godrays. And godrays without shadows is more immersion killing than immersion creating. And it seems to me the shader implementation should be relatively similar for both of them.

I'd be happy to try it, but I don't have the know-how on how to get information on stuff from the depth buffer, I've only ever worked in 2D. Unless someone is willing to teach me?

EDIT: Read up a little, and I now know that the buffer stores the depth of each pixel's nearest object. What I want to know is: what do the four indices of the vector that Scanti's testshader computes? Are they colors and one depth, and if so, which is which? Looking at the code, I'm guessing that the last three are color related, as Scanti sets them to 0 to get black on near objects, so I'm also guessing from that that the other one must be related to depth, as that one is the only one left to vary, and that must lead to the color variation. Am I right?

EDIT 2: OK, so playing around with it, it seems that for the float4(x,y,z,a), x is the colour of the farthest pixels, and a is the colour of the nearest pixels. I have no idea what the other two are though. Oh, and I was thinking that DoF would need a camera vector, but just realised that it can be done by finding the depth of the centre pixel of the screen, which is where the crosshair should be, and therefore what you're looking at. Now to find out how to do that...

Dynamic shadows is being worked on in the oblivion shadow project but im not sure if a shader can do it. From what I read on the MGE threads, they failed with shaders and shadows. The buggy, but only way, is to follow RPG-blackdragons way by making the statics creatures from activator scripts. Its a very buggy process and when the game has way too many creature loaded, performance goes out the roof.

Progress!

I've gotten a blur effect increasing into the distance from the camera working. Now it's a matter of fixing it around the depth of the centre pixel, and having the blur go both ways, and then it should be working as expected. I'd post some screenies, but I'm working in depth-buffer land ATM, so it's all just black and white, and the effect isn't very noticeable.

Hopefully I should have this done by the end of the weekend, seeing how much time I get.

EDIT: @ Scanti: Is the constant rcpres a vector with two indices? I'm a bit confused by the readme.

Nice work wrinklyninja! Looking forward to screenies

Sounds great wrinklyninja :goodjob:
Can`t wait to see those screenshots :twirl:

Doh! I just saw the above link. That's what I get for reading all but the last page of posts.... Sorry for the redundancy.

:edit:
There's not much there, though....

No need to say sorry, happens to the best of us

OK, here's screenies, since we all love eye-candy:

http://i617.photobucket.com/albums/tt255/WrinklyNinja1/Oblivion2009-10-1622-31-56-25.jpg
http://i617.photobucket.com/albums/tt255/WrinklyNinja1/Oblivion2009-10-1622-32-04-49.jpg

I should state that the blur is being applied from the camera into the distance, so it isn't actually how DoF works, which is from the distance of what the player is looking at and away from that. It also probably uses the wrong blur effect, the one I've got is ripped straight from ScreenEffects, it's commented as being poisson disc blur. I'll probably end up changing it if I don't think it looks right.

Other than that, enjoy!

It's a float array so:

float rcpres[2];

rcpres[0] = 1/width
rcpres[1] = 1/height

Edit: Nice dof effect. :thumbsup:

@ Scanti: Thanks for the speedy reply, and your OBSE plugin!

DoF looks good, kinda hard to notice but such progress so fast.

DOWNLOAD NAO KTHX.
(I wish to dike around with this)

OK, stuck again. Damn this learning curve.

I can't think of how to get the info of only the centre pixel. Is there a way this can be done, perhaps by constraining the sampler to a set of coordinates encompassing that pixel?

Once again, e-cookies are on offer.

tex2d(yourDepthSampler, 0.5, 0.5)

GIMMEH GIMMEH GIMMEH

Great news. I am moving to dorm right now. I think I will be able to play with it tomorrow. :intergalactic:

@ IlmrynAkios: That did the trick. I should have thought of that myself though, in hindsight it's fairly obvious. :facepalm: I'll get onto applything the blur onto that right away. And then I'll upload it somewhere for you to muck around with. I can only dream of what you'll do.

*unintelligible gibbering*

BTW, Scanti-- have you messed with auto-MIPmap generation at all? Infinity Ward made a really awesome http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch28.html for CoD4 we can likely pilfer.

I thought about it. The problem is that a MIPmap texture must have it's dimensions as a power of two. i.e. 128 x 128, 256 x 256 etc. That means I have to find some way of resampling the frame buffer without messing up it's aspect ratio and distorting it.

Well, for what it's worth, put me down for wanting godrays, water caustics, and better HDR. I honestly am not a fan of DoF effects and turn them off in any game that allows me to.