New Water/Atlas Effects

#81 Anyone have this code?
It would be much better then starting from the TSE base water effects.

#82 No, but you could use raycasts to find depth and have the color vary. I believe that's how Legions' code works.

#83 Yep, several ways to do it I was hoping to save some time with a nice community solution.

#84 Yeah, sorry for all the delays. Theres that whole military thing, sucks up a lot of time. ;)

I should get a computer in a few weeks hopefully, where I'll be able to finish up the effect. While I served watch in bootcamp I wrote out the code as well as I could think on how to finish it, so it shouldn't take long. I'm going to finish it before I release anything cause I know it'd be complaints otherwise.

#85 Nice to hear that :)

#86 Eager to see some code, thanks for the update Jacob.

#87 Don't like bumping, but this mostly is for assurance. I'm on leave right now for Christmas, a little break from the Navy A-school. Loving that place so far btw. But yeah, my comp parts are back there. I'm heading back a day early so I can put it together. I should have it running soon enough, internet not long after. I haven't forgotten at all about this water, I'll fix it up in notime! While I was standing boring ass midnight watches in bootcamp I wrote out plans for various effects to make using my recruit-issue pen and a paper towel. (good thing I didn't get caught doing that....)

But also while I was there, I came up with a possible idea for shore effects too, which I'll have to try. But before that comes yet another idea I had which I won't speak of just yet... its a secret! I told Matt Vitelli all about it, but I'd rather him not speak about it yet either.. But lets just say its a new approach to using shaders for an idea that is not only a first as far as games go, but should make quite a stir indeed... If done correctly, it will totally remake first person shooters and how they function.

#88 Don't forget about the rpg developers =)

#89 Yea if it's in an add on pak form i'll buy :) If it's that super secret must be darn good. You talking something like the Nvidia SDK waves example etc? Where they use SM 3.0 for vertex texture fetch or something like environmental bump mapping?

Edit: little inspirational for next year!

#90 You'll see! :) Like I said, it's a new approach to using shaders.. So it's somewhat unconventional to use shaders in the way I have in mind. Its a totally new feature I thought of, no game has ever done this to my knoweldge.

#91 Jacob really has a quality idea here and I'm eager to see where it goes. In reply to your question Vashner, I'm working on a VTF version of water. The only major problem with VTF is that only Nvidia cards support it.

#92 The X1600+ should support it. ATI added SM 3.0.. I think a couple others like 1300 might have it too.

ATI had made a decision to drop SM 3.0 from it's whole X800 line of GPU's because at the time only Farscape was out with support.

#93 The new ati cards with amd gpu's will be amazing, intel and nvidia will need to team up if they want any chance of the market share after this next gen of hardware comes out.

#94 It's not a question of supporting shader model 3.0, it's that I believe Nvidia has another extension or two for it that the ATI drivers don't support. I could be wrong though, I've just read in many places that ATI cards don't support it. There's always parallax occlusion mapping, though. That could be a nice alternative for ATI cards.

#95 @Matt V - I don't know... look at this whitepaper, I don't see any special non SM 3.0 instructions..
If it won't run then ATI didn't follow the instruction model.
download.nvidia.com/developer/Papers/2004/Vertex_Textures/Vertex_Textures.pdf
From what I have read they have followed the model so it should run on the brand new line. Something about the X1300 SM 3.0 missing stuff but not the 1600+.

Here's a snippit from the whitepaper listed above

Quote:DirectX 9
You first need to check the capability bits ("caps bits") of DirectX to see if your
GPU supports Shader Model 3.0. Based on that, you may have to fall back to
software vertex processing if there isn't support for the features you need.
An application can query the supported formats for vertex textures by calling
IDirect3D9::CheckDeviceFormat with the
D3DUSAGE_QUERY_VERTEXTEXTURE flag. Software vertex processing supports all
texture formats.

#96 Did little more googling..

Oh man ATI.. Guess they left it out? I thought this line of GPU's from ATI would have 100% full SM 3.0 abilities :(

www.digit-life.com/articles2/video/r520-part6.html

Quote:iXBT.com: Why is there no vertex texture fetch, what reasons might affect this decision, can it hamper the full SM3 compliance certification? Will this move displease developers?

I will not deny that vertex texture fetch is a useful thing. In spite of this, the lack of vertex texture fetch in the X1000 series was a deliberate architectural decision. Sterling texture units, providing fast fetching and supporting filtering in various formats, would have taken up a lot of die surface, especially considering that the X1800 chip has 8 vertex pipelines. On the other hand, in my opinion, inferior texture units limit efficiency of this interesting function significantly. It means that the usage of vertex texture fetch in real games would have been rather weak, and the corresponding piece of the die would have just been idle in the majority of games. For chip manufacturers it means wasting money. I haven't seen a Direct3D game supporting vertex texture fetch so far. The only OpenGL game supporting this feature is IL-2. By the way, we are pleased to note that it's the Russian developer 1C who promotes advanced graphics technologies

#97 SM 3.0 & ATI:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=SM+3.0+site%3Aati.com

#98 Yea I am sure it could be sent to software to do but that would be too slow for a game. I think Jacob is looking at something else anyway. But I would not write off vertex fetch for the future it's in DX10 / SM 4.0 HW as far as I know and is good for boat wakes, high waves etc. Just think of what it could to do something like uh atlas by bending terrain around or structures.

#99 Meh. ATI's answer to VTF is parallax occlusion mapping, which is somewhat similar to relief mapping. While VTF is fairly slow, parallax occlusion mapping can be just as slow, if not slower in some cases. Even with this said, Parallax Occlusion Mapping wields some great results.

#100 VTF is not slow considering a normal IT hardware cycle (Means you run it on a 7900 or 8800 GPU and see if it's slow.. it won't be). ATI made a decision so it's not supported. That's all fine but POM is not VTF.

Reguardless I am sure anyone that can make some water with either would be well received. ATI needs to stop making these kind of market decisions over standards. SM 3.0 is supposed to be SM 3.0 then here come the "I can get more IC's per wafer without" people.

A conflict between a suit that wants to make a buck and the interests of gamer and developers. Obviously ATI had the ability to build the GPU with full SM 3.0.