I don't kow, I just think it would be really good we extend the "team" so to say. If you like collect, update and describe the wishlist I'm going to let you decide about the resources you use. In real-life I do web-design and programming, I got my own dedicated machine in a center, in effect I can provide you with any technological solution ready-to-go which you (or anyone else) indicate me to manage this, as long as the software cost no money.
I anyway believe we should put something up, which is not about the inside of OBGE (said space doesn't exist anyway).
I don't want to imply I'm in any position to define the "team", I do not, I'm just there to motivate anyone to form the "team" just naturally.

I suggest a wiki (as part of it) because it's easily manageable, and allows to build up collaboration on information really quick, as well as collaborative energy between any of us. Like when Turboknight was coming up with his notebook, I thought: "hey cool, amazing, a bit sad it's a tail without pony".
I believe we need to have something "persistent" as well, which can attract other developers, for example this thread is always moving, literally and metaphorically. It's not easy to hook yourself onto it, like trying to jump on a driving train. We need a station.

Maybe even wrinklyninja would prefer some site to put the threat-head info instead of copying 40k of text in these little editors without the possibility to show pictures or embed videos.

Let's discuss and find some consense on this ...

Yeah I can definitely see the need for a persistent "home" for the project, and a wiki is well-suited for all the reasons you mentioned. It would be pretty easy to get a list of viable ideas and then make a template and put them up just to get started. Hopefully there are plenty of people with the skills to implement the ideas or it might be a lonely wiki. But I'm figuring that ideally there will be enough information gathered from people working with the shaders that entries would show up organically, I guess? I hope I'm understanding the extent of what you have in mind here, I can't really think of what else to "seed" the wiki with at the moment.

The main draw for anyone wanting to write a shader would be a system for seeing what it looks like and the performance in an actual game. But since this stuff is shifting towards DX10/11 and Crytek will apparently be releasing it's entire Cryengine 3 source code (or something like that, their announcement wasn't really clear) for free, I'm guessing people will be more interested in that, so anyone who works on this will probably end up being a fan of TES.

If you want I can provide a ton of links to research papers, that's the stuff I love (not boring old "programming" who cares about making it actually work :disguise: ) Either way, Ethatron you are awesome and should change your name to Erathratron, cause that sounds cooler.

As part of the re-integration process for OBGE Liquid Water (as currently that's kinda a fork of the obge project), I'm providing downloads for the following:

http://www.4shared.com/file/z48FQfks/SSAO_Fog_Fix_Only.html

http://www.4shared.com/file/2qXNWgSJ/INI_Based_Shader_Loader.html

While neither of those is currently compatible with OBGE Liquid Water, the next release of OBGE Liquid Water will only include the water-replacement aspect, for simplicity and for re-integration into the main OBGE project. Once that comes out, it will be compatible with the two downloads I posted above.

im more then happy to help in anyway i can, even if thats just chipping a few dollars to get the wiki/whatever a good domain name, something like OBGE.com would be nice . but unless you guys need help designing networks or network based security solutions im not going to be much help otherwise :cold: . I could also help with maintance but my time would be limited as i work on avg 50-60 hour weeks and have a few young ones.

edit: the fact that the AUD is at like 1.10 to USD is also really good for when it comes to buying stuff like domain names...lol

edit2: i also have a pretty stable net connection and a few TB's of space in RAID mirrors which could be used for off site backup of said site and any SVN style repository.

Oblivion Shader Massaging Project

:teehee:

Thanks for the offer, let's start small.
Connect yourself to palidoo, I guess you guys will come up with a list that last for a millennium. :whistling: :biggrin:

Like this:
[img]http://paradice-insight.us/stuff/oblivion/ScreenShot178.jpg[/img]

Not much different besides an incorrect medium range water shader.

One of the DoF Shaders was from crysis and adapted to oblivion, right?
So does that mean we can get other shaders from crysis and adapt to work in Oblivion?

I kind of meant something that you actually have fully functioning, but progress is progress, I suppose. Am I misunderstanding what you're doing? I heard that you had already replaced the vanilla shaders such as nighteye and the like, which would allow it to be displayed over Liquid Water. That was more of what I was hoping to see rather than something that isn't currently working correctly. Does that make sense? :mellow:

Perhaps. He's re-made *all* the vanilla shaders. If the only one that *is* having problems is the medium range water shader then I'd say that was most impressive indeed.

Ethatron, I am impressed that you've done all that and got the game looking so close to the original. It's a great starting point and I'm looking forward to seeing what can be done with the new shaders.

Vac

Edit: Oops, had *isn't* instead of *is*. :angel:

It's good to think of shaders not just as effects light nighteye but as the fundamental "layers" that produce the [simulation of light in the] entire scene. At least that's how I vaguely understand things. But Ethatron's accomplishment is getting under the hood and being able to use his own components in place of the vanilla ones.

The nighteye fix for Liquid Water (among many other major fixes) will be a consequence of Ethatron's work, but it's not the goal or anything.

@Matthew_Kaine: Palidoo is right. To imagine what he's changed . . . assume all the leaves in that picture are bright blue and blinking on and off at random, lets say. That's not in Oblivion, but a shader for it is trivial, and could now be used. These are different from nighteye as they apply to whatever object(s) you like, not the whole screen, and they know more information. So stuff like this can happen: http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/elementLinks/fig16-07.jpgThey also will never conflict with existing OBGE shaders, since basically 2 passes happen - one for the objects and then one for nighteye/ssao/water etc. Also, tomerk can now make the water part of the built in oblivion water, removing all cross shader bugs and conflicts.

Oh, and it might be faster.

^{(P.S. Is it faster?)}

You have it off:
He's re-made *all* the vanilla shaders. The only one that *is* having problems is the medium range water shader and the underwater surface shader

Oops, fixed.

Nothing to see here! Please move along!

Ah, ok, I think I understand now. Shaders just tend to be more obvious in my mind when they do something to the whole screen. You're right, it is very impressive that the medium range water is the only shader he's having issues with, and I wasn't trying to say that it wasn't. I just was hoping to see more of the success side of the project than what still needs to be done. Thanks for clearing up the project for me, though, everyone.

I just can't wait for new HDR shaders! *crosses fingers*

The shaders for normals is working, the ground shader is working, the shader(s) for reflections are working, the near-water shader is working, I'm not too sure what other shaders (not an expert) are getting used, but they're all working A-OK in the shot. Isn't that a good demonstration of success? Personally I still think it's a very impressive result being demonstrated. Throw in an NPC (skin shader) with hair (alpha channel) wearing something with a glowmap and he'd really be showing off. :goodjob:

Vac

I dunno about you guys, but ima thinking the lighting on everything looks pretty damn purdy

I second this. Lighting like http://i466.photobucket.com/albums/rr30/Wolf_wisper/ScreenShot6.jpg is just awful, plain awful, in my honest opinion.

But it is "fully" functioning ... you have to distinguish between visual design and technical function. I did not change the output of the shaders, but I re-created their function in a form which is accessible for anyone who wants to change the visual design. Before it was 0s and 1s, magic, black box; now it's open for learning, understanding and changing towards a much bigger possible audience, including actual designers who can program shaders (like tomerk); who's immersion in designing isn't hampered by technical distractions. I can also adapt basic functionality, expose additional views of informations which exist in the framework, once an implementor requires it.



Your desire is totally natural, but some three threads ago I decided not to participate in an augmentation of a restrictive approach (all in screen-space). It was the moment to exactly come to the point we are right now; having the freedom of choice in the technical sense. You as a "consumer" still are at the mercy of the visual artists, if nobody makes the nighteye you'd wanted, you won't get it. But you have now the possibility to push the MIDAS guy, or LAME guy to do your shader, and the issue won't be technical anymore. I'm pretty sure we can also manage to get 100 different nighteye-shaders for 100 different night-eye spells into Oblivion, because as I said we have the possibility to permutate the existing shader to infinity.
That was the goal of this step. And this in reality was the easy step. We have to understand the shaders now, document it's context (use of variables and textures etc.). Then we can change them. That's nothing I can do by myself, I can add to it, I can encourage it; but it's going to be a community effort.



Thanks. I agree, that's why I pushed palidoo towards following the path of documenting the possibles routes the art direction can go. One mind's imaginaition is surely limited in comparison to the combined imagination of a whole bunch of people. Especially when you're caught in the technical context, you evaluate everything in technical posibilities. I'm sure we'll get really stunning proposals.



Well, the Grinder^TM (my toolset to get from binary to HLSL) does post optimization, and not really much shaders were compiled for 3.0, and the DX9c SDK has the DX10 HLSL optimizer. So it should, maybe it's not measurable, but technically it should.



:biggrin: Well we could start a huge evaluation now, trying to provoke the usage of all shaders, and looking which are wrong. Though I think we should wait for some more shader developer to join. Dunno why RPG-Blackdragon didn't say hy here ...

I'm afraid you've misunderstood my intentions. The reason I was confused wasn't because I wanted you to show me something visual; I just didn't understand the work that you're doing. I was under the impression that you were doing both technical and visual design with recreating the shaders for the game, but now you're making it sound like all you did was make the coding more accessible. Which is it? I wasn't asking to see anything flashy, I just thought a visual example of what you're doing for the community would be useful for those like me that feel clueless.

I really don't appreciate being called a "consumer at the mercy of visual artists," by the way; that makes it sound like the members of this community give nothing back to to those that are creating the new material. The modding community here is free for a reason; people are constantly giving back. This is a family more than a market, and I would never even consider calling any of this business. You yourself say that this is going to have to eventually become a community project. If that's the case, why try to imply that you're the only one in control?

he made it so it could be accessed, ie before it couldn't, its not a matter of making something more accessible, it wasn't before. what was being done before was in effect post processes, that's why Ethatron needed to provide a hook for the reflections etc for liquid water. So everything we did was done after the oblivion renderer had completed the frame. Now thax to Ethatron we can change the way the oblivion renderer works, the possibilities are endless.

Basically Ethatron built a system that allows anyone to make any kind of icecream you can think of and your complaining that he didn't make you ice cream. well now anyone can make any kind of ice cream.

i also dont think he implied control at all, he is simply building the framework for ARTISTS to then leverage. its kind of like having a go a John Carmack or tim Sweeney, some one has to own the frame work up to a point, but that frame work allows everyone to do anything they want, Ethatron is basically saying he will add additional hooks as artists need them so they can complete there work/ideas. you value the work of tomerk and tomerk values the work of Ethatron.

Haha, thanks for the interesting anologies. As I said, I was confused, which is why I was simply asking for an easy-to-understand explanation. He made it sound like I was asking for something which he couldn't give, and that made me think I still had no idea what he was talking about. I think you've made me get it, though, so thank you. However, I still feel like what he said was implying that the mod-user doesn't contribute anything to the community, which I'll always flat-out disagree with.

It was mentioned previously that your hooks allow in-game editing of the shaders. I didn't really think about this too much until I read this. I assume this kind of thing would need to be tied into use of, say JRoush's Magic Extender, or just use scripted spells to enable per-spell customisation of such shaders?Dumb question, but there's a slight delay at present as the OBGEv2 HLSL shaders compile post game-load. What kind of delay are you seeing with so many HLSL shaders? I presume the mechanism is much the same (post game-load compilation). Oh, and apologies for this slightly negative question. :whistling: Agreed, it's not really necessary. I'm quite willing to accept your word for it that it's all working right, I was trying to point out all the shaders I could think of in that shot that demonstrated the "success" that people didn't seem to be noticing, and then mentioned a few more shaders that I suspected would get unnoticed even if they were included in the shot.

Still greatly impressed. When the depth buffer was exposed for OBGE2, that was very good, this now is fantastic.