37637598 on 28/8/2009 at 03:31
That was a great response, you said pretty much my problem with the Doom3 engine. Every video, screenshot, demo I've seen or played of Doom 3 makes it look like a scary game where you play as an action figure fighting scary action figures because everything seems to have a coating of wax or suran-wrap over it. Everything! Even the blood and guts of the enemies you slaughter. Shadows are a pretty big part of what makes an engine useable for me. If an engine doesn't have a great default shadow system, and they won't let me customize it or create an outside plugin, it's useless to me. I'm not strict because I need perfect looking shadows, I just don't like when things that have such impact on framerate such as realtime lighting to, be out of my control. Soft shadows are something I would like but that effect is only really necessary where a light is far away from the object whose shadow is being cast, or on certain surfaces and in some other conditions. I guess in general it makes shadows look more realistic though.
The games we make are always tests because we're always trying to see what we can do. For instance, one project was simply a rain engine. When rain particles would fall from the sky and hit an object that had the texture effect on it, an active texture layer would be applied over the surface of the object making it look like rain was running down the surface and slower rain particles would fall from the bottom and the edges of the surface. This was something we were able to complete but rendering something like that in a shit engine really limited our ability to ever use such an effect in a scene with any other effects going at the same time. When we run the bare compiled effect rendered in a seperate graphics monitering program, it would run just fine, with all other effects going as well. I think we had pixel shading, bump mapping, texture projection, bloom, all high resolution textures with distance filters, mini mapping, mini texture sample filters, material effects such as gloss, metal, matte, etc. We were running somewhere around 80,000 polys, which is a very low number for frame rate to be crapping out. And all of the above filters are very common to be running at the same time.
It would be much easier to stay motivated knowing our engine was doing a pro job. Baked shadows are something I use anyway, simply because they save a lot of CPU for objects that need moving shadows. I've even baked moving shadows to planes before on objects that have a linear swinging motion, such as a swinging power line being blown by the wind, or a door. Then you just tell the engine to play the frame of the animation that cooresponds to the position of the door, or phone line. That is much less to process than finding the edges of the object constantly to calculate where to project a shadow, how many points to project, etc.
You're kindly giving me a second motive to look further into the Doom3 engine.
Eabin on 1/9/2009 at 19:40
Quote Posted by 37637598
I just sent the creators of Unigine an e-mail asking about their physics engine, and whether Unigine will accept external OpenGL and DirectX functions and plugins. It is a bit pricey, considering I'm still only doing this as a hobby, but less expensive than UNREAL and looks to be about as good, if indeed it can work with 3rd party engines such as Havok Physics, Havok Cloth, and various others. Any chance you've seen anything for professional projects come out of this engine?
i would guess this is why the price is rather low: because there is simply no finished game using this engine yet (that i know of). just tech demos.
afaik they are currently working on (improving) their own physics implementation, so i'm not sure how well prepared the engine is for 3rd party plugins. but the (
http://www.unigine.com/devlog/) devlog gives a good impression of what the engine is capable of.
one more thing would be the editing tools. they look fairly usable, but you would have to find some opinions from non-unigine guys. there are a few screenshots and stuff on the first pages of the devlog.
37637598 on 2/9/2009 at 00:40
Oh my god this engine looks cool! (
http://www.unigine.com/devlog/page4/)
check out the stereo effect at the bottom of the page! I had the idea to make a game with this effect ages ago! I wonder how it looks with the glasses... Anyone who has stereo Red/Blue glasses must tell me! I just might gave to buy a box of cracker jacks now to get a pair.
PS I got an e-mail back today from someone with support, and they said it DOES NOT support external rendering software. Hopefully their built in stuff is as good as it looks. This could very well be my choice, I just need to see how it handles realtime masses of moving and scripted objects and visual effects. The lighting looks good too.
