MS4 is up

#41 Mike - I didn't see any performance improvement from your changes, although I did switch the vertex buffer over to a static on the off chance that it helped on a card I didn't test on. What other improvements did you include?

#42 Hmm... I downloaded the latest head 2 days ago, and my changes weren't there.

You didn't see any performance enhancements? I would think that a static buffer would be faster than redoing it every time... strange.

On the off-note, what is the reason (I was told that there was one) that one cannot have a transparent material glow? I see no ill-effects from it (after I reenabled the capability).

#43 ...

Quote:
Yes, it can cause sorting issues with the glow, ie, glow will draw over any translucent renders which will look odd in many cases.

#44 What is the latest revision called in cvs, so i can type it in instead of HEAD.

#45

Quote:
A bunch of fixes and updates went up to CVS today, here's the list:

- dynamic lighting performance options now in
- lighting support for projectiles, explosions, items, and weapon fire
- performance pref to disable the glow buffer
- fixed drop-in interior crash
- dynamic shadow clipping fix
- map2dif lighting fixes
- render target shadow assert fix
- fixed light mount crash
- fixed editor crash related to WaterBlocks
- fixed texture reduction crash
- fixed exit crash on demo
- added player footprints

One of those a week and people may stay happy.

#46 Another update went to CVS today:

- Added prefs to limit shader features
- Fixed map2dif runtime configuration
- Fog fix for translucent materials
-added support for piggybacking low quality dynamic lights onto existing dynamic light rendering passes, cutting down the overall shader complexity.
-fixed dynamic lighting render order bug, where render managers could render the lights before the base pass
-dynamic light rendering based on zone vis
- World editor selection fix
- Fixed misc issues with Show Tool
- Removed "start new mission" launch from main menu when pressing F11.
- Fixed orbit camera crash / net asynch.
- Removed zbuffer clear from DRL pre-clear (already cleared in GuiCanvas).
- Fixed minor flying vehicle bug relating to particle nozzles.


Atlas fixes:

- Added destructor to atlasClipMapBatcher.
- Fixed UV import from CHU.
- Simplified clipmap rendernote binning logic.
- Sped up unique cache texture uploads and corrected color swap.
- Made batcher a member of AtlasInstance2, instead of a temporary.
- Now imports properly from L3DT again.
- Fix for incorrect bounding box generation in some cases.
- Fix for flat terrains.

#47 @All,

I've written up a section in TDN regarding the latest dynamic lighting optimizations and how to take advantage of them:

Dynamic Lighting Performance

#48 John. You rock. This is something I've been wanting to read.

Thanks brah.

#49 Very nice stuff!

Just two questions: Have you guys considered to let lights emit trough zones when the zone is visible? Having dynamic lights moving between zones look really funky and is hard on the eyes.

Has the mounting of lights been addressed (they dont update properly)?

Thanks again for all the updates.

#50 Good stuff.

#51 Stefan, Better interior dynamic lighting is definitely a priority, I'm still trying to balance speed and flexibility. The code originally functioned like TGE interior dynamic lighting (finding all affected interior surfaces), however it was extremely slow when compared with rendering the entire zone right from the geometry buffer. Rendering the entire zone, however, creates excessive overdraw (why it's limited to a single zone). TGE 1.5 caches dynamic lighting info for non-moving lights, this would work, but things like weapon/projectile lights will still be very slow (TGE is less affected by rendering individual surfaces, because its rendering pipeline is very simple).

I'll need to work with you on the mounting issue. I'm doing testing here and it seems to work correctly. I'm using lights mounted to Fluffy as a test, when a client connects both Fluffies have their respective lights mounted. If you have a simple example dir you can send over modded with the necessary changes and info on how to create the problem that would help a lot.

#52 On the mounting: I'll merge with HEAD and post in the old thread when I get up tomorrow.

Thanks for the information, it is interesting!

#53 Please, someone... What is the latest revision called in cvs, so i can type it in instead of HEAD. I just downloaded the HEAD and built it and now both release and debug freeze my computer.

#54 Anton, I think some people have had problems when they downloaded MS4 into an existing (older) TSE directory. I would try renaming/moving/deleting your old directory or using whatever method you see fit to download MS4 to a new location.

#55 I'm doing a build of the latest HEAD.
What problems are you having?
Anything show up in the build?
Did you rebuild everything?
Did you run the different examples?

#56 I just ran the demo demo and the terrain-water demo without problems. Debug version.
Did not merge anything. Clean build.

#57 Basic day and night cycles

#58 Awesome! Are you gonna release it as a resource?

#59 Meh. Nothing too special. That's all just scripted. Basically it adjusts the DRL multiplier every second. Surprisingly enough it's not too bad on performance.