I just had to login to tell you you're awesome, peachy.
:bowdown:

I second the point about peachy being awesome and stuff.

Wow, talk about an update, and one that predicts a game that is now about 9 years old will be on par with one not even released yet! This is maddness! No! THIS...IS...MORROWIND...MODDINGGGGGG!!!
haha

Ok, after you get the bulk of work done on this, can you go lend a hand to the OpenMW project? Seems like you could really get them moving along. Great work though, without you people that can code this stuff, MW probably wouldnt be nearly as far along as it is today.

sweet!

I'd happily test some features if there's any that are in need of an artist more then a programmer.

Oh and also very good question. Have you been able to hook into the landscape? either changing shader or swap textures?

Yeah, that would be cool - I was asking a long time ago if it's possible to add a shader to the ground surfaces that simulates the sun reflection (I don't know how to describe it exactly - as seen in WoW or Battlefield 2).

Also, is it possible to use such APIs like http://free-zg.t-com.hr/cssm/?

Keep it up on the good work Peachy!

Having something work the first test, which both the variable system and filesystem have now done, is kinda an accomplishment.

Although, the sheer amount of testing I put this poor thing through, even before it runs in game, is definitely paying off. Visual Studio (the tool I'm writing Voodoo in) offers 5 levels of pickiness when it goes looking for possible problems (W1 through W4, and Wall). There's also a flag to treat warnings that might not be an issue as errors and scream and shout and refuse to continue.

Now, /Wall is so picky it complains about Microsoft's code and official C++ stuff, so it's not too much use. However, all components of Voodoo are compiled under W4, which has quite a few false positives but very few false negatives. In addition, all the Voodoo code is annotated for static anolysis and I run it through every rule Microsoft has published (and am searching for more). Again with warnings-as-errors turned on.

If there's one iffy bit anywhere in it, the whole things fails.

It took a while to get set up, but is making my life a ton easier, and should do the same for everyone else.



Well, that miiiiight be a touch of wishful thinking, but then again, wishful thinking followed by everybody working together to do it is why we're all here and have gotten this far, so a bit more can only take us further.


I may help out there if I can, time is a bit short at the moment and the vast majority of what I have is dedicated to Voodoo. Once Gem is done, I have about 2 dozen other games to support, so I may be a while.


I'm actually starting to put together a list of things I can't do artistically. I'm not sure when, but I'll start sending out a few PMs to folks. Right now I'm looking at some simple models and (re)textures to test things like crystal effects, volume clouds, velvet, that sort of stuff.

As for landscape textures, they work pretty much like other textures, so from what I've seen so far (haven't examined them totally, just a glance) materials should work the same. Once materials are fully up and working, I'll be testing them in land. Need to figure out how best to handle blending, though (and see if shaders can make more than 2 textures blend smoothly).


Like normal mapping the ground, or doing shiny snow and such? The shaders for those are pretty simple (I actually have them written up already), so as long as the stuff I mentioned after Mireneye's post work out, whatever ground effects you want can be slapped on.


Hm. Well, generally speaking with the plugin setup, yes, you can use external stuff. It may take a bit of tweaking, but that's the idea.

Specifically for that library, I have no idea, need to go over it. Some of their concepts certainly look interesting, though. Nice find, let's see if it works.




Something I'd like to mention, possibly necessary or not, is that whenever I say things like "yeah, that sort of thing generally works" or "whatever you want", it is absolutely not apathy on my part. I've been taking great pains to develop Voodoo as a framework, not a specific tool to do what I want. It supports shaders that anyone can make, materials that anyone can set up, and plugins that anyone can write. I do not want this limited by what I can think of or do. Because of that, I can't say yes or no to everything that might be possible, because the goal is for as much to be possible as is... possible. Certainly far more than is reasonably possible.

Now, not everything in Voodoo is done, so some things may not work and I don't know for sure what will and won't yet, but I do know that quite a few things do and have reason to believe much more will. More than I can imagine, I hope. So the crazier your ideas get, the less likely I can say "absolutely" and the more likely I am to say "let's try it."

Just in case anyone was worried. :biggrin:

In other news, if tonight's testing goes well, I'll have a few useful shaders up and running and can show some screens of those.

Bumpeti How's the current progress?