TSE.. What are you most excited for?

#21 Marco, peter

could you run me through how you implemented parallax mapping in TSE

#22 This excites me :)

Flexibility - Data specified in Materials is used to procedurally create the shaders necessary to render the different materials. This is a very powerful system because it does not rely on programmers to create the shaders. It is an art/designer driven process. Because there are many different Material parameters, there are thousands of possible shader creation combinations. In addition, the shaders are generated specifically for the hardware that the engine is running on. Shaders automatically scale in power and render quality based on the platform. It will even multipass render a Material automatically if necessary. This adds up to massive time savings for developers; artists can get results without directly involving a programmer, and programmers don't need to write dozens of mundane shaders.



So that is great for getting on with prototyping at first... then use:

CustomMaterials - Procedural generation of shaders is a real time saver, but it can't create every kind of shader imaginable. For special effects or custom "looks", the CustomMaterials are available. They allow shader programmers to easily drop in their own .hlsl or shader assembly files right into the TSE framework. There are even fallback hooks for each level of shader hardware, so there is full control over how it looks on all platforms.


TSE coming features are already wodnering around my brain which in turn is cooking some new game ideas... (not necessarely just visuals here... more than that)

New terrain technology also sounds VERY promissing and I can't wait to learn/see more about it to get even more excited....

What does not excite me is the fact I don't see info about any built-in advance on physics models... Maybe it is not on GG plans... in which case it would be good to be able to easily integrate some of the existing Physic-Packages out there...

Actually the more I read about TSE the more I think I should not wait and just get the EA license:)

#23 I am excited about finally switching to a format for terrain that streams in data from arbitrarily large heightmaps and arbitrarily large texture maps.

That is pretty, uh, pretty . . . I have to go a lay down . . .

#24 Yep, Game engine multithreading is getting more important... the dual cores are out and the quad cores are coming...

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1826663,00.asp

#25 TSE is the shiznat...

#26 For TSE I would like to see more than 1 UV channel so you can do more up to date multitexturing. That way we can do more interesting DTS materials with shaders. Like masking textures using a second UV for dirt, grime masked blends over large surfaces of tiled geometry. That kind of thing.

#27 You mean something like this? udn.epicgames.com/Two/VertexBlendingTutorial

#28 Thats painting vertices to show whats underneath and requres a lot of polygons to get detail.

With texture masks you have 2 layers of textures, like rusty metal on top, and shiny metal below. THen you use a third greyscale texture as a mask on a seperate UV channel. Lighter pixels show more of the shiny metal through the rusty metal.

Don't know if your familiar with photoshop layers, and masking, if so its exactly like that.

#29 I dont know what is really in the engine, besides guessing from the snapshots. I am going to be getting the engine really soon, and I would hope that they have a nice dynamic lighting system, and sharp graphics! :)