After some time, an update!
There were multiple major changes in the project. First - I’ve migrated to LuaJIT from the reference Lua implementation; that means I can make use of its FFI and the speed advantage it gives me (you can write scripted code that is roughly as fast as native, means it’s sufficient even for heavy computations like AI and physics). Along with the LuaJIT update, I began rewriting the script library so that it’s faster, more concise and powerful, without usage of any deprecated Lua 5.2 features (and more stuff is scripted, for example the whole UI is now). The engine is currently going through stabilization phase, it’s very unstable in parts by now but that’s getting fixed.
Another major change, more visual one; the engine got a new renderer, called Tesseract, written by Lee Salzman (the guy who is maintaining Cube 2). This basically brings the tech to 2012, adding multiple kick ass things:
- deferred shading - a modern shading technique used in various newer games (Battlefield 3, Metro 2033, Mafia 2, Dota 2…)
- entirely dynamic lighting - there are no longer any precomputed lightmaps, everything is entirely dynamic
- connected with lighting, shadowmapping - the engine supports cubemaps / tetrahedral shadowmaps for point lights, cascaded shadowmaps for ortographic projection sunlight and perspective projection spotlight shadowmaps (useful for things like realistic dynamic flashlights that cast shadows)
- HDR rendering with Humus’ photographic tonemapping and bloom (LDR is available too)
- Screen space ambient occlusion, reflections and refractions
- Subpixel morphological antialiasing
- Model and bump / parallax map self shadowing
Of course, this brought the hardware requirements up, but it’s not that bad; at minimum, you need a graphics card supporting OpenGL 2.1 (equals DirectX 9) and Shader Model 3 - something like, geforce 7600 at minimum should do. Ideally though, OpenGL 3 (= DX 10) and SM4 capable graphics card is recommended (GF8600GT/9500GT/…)
The map format stays compatible, so existing maps can be imported, the lights sometimes fuck up however and need to be updated. The renderer is currently in the state of flux thus can contain glitches and new features might get added.
Overall, OctaForge should get stabilized during summer. If you want some new screenies, here you go (it’s a port of Cube 2: Sauerbraten map called Justice, I use it for testing, it doesn’t fully represent the details possible with the engine but whatever, I don’t have any “real” map atm, also note the low FPS - that’s due to bad lighting - it uses many subtle lightsources for lightmap precompution instead of just the required amount)
Just a scene from the map:
Here you can notice the smooth shadow filtering:
Edit mode view (note the many many many lightsources):
Model shadows:
Awesome water effect:
Moar water:
Another water scene with view on the model:
Shows how the model shadows itself:
Some underwater fog and refraction:
Shadows vs specularity:
High sunlight shadow resolution:
Another example of hires sunlight:
All those screenies are with antialiasing enabled and anisotropic filtering disabled (forgot to turn it on :p)
A raw day-night cycle video done with Tesseract (pretty early build, that is not running in OctaForge - Tesseract is a project on its own)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23auA5nFML8
Some of my older videos:
Model selfshadowing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8eu9zuIwvA
Some dynamic lights from fans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk4agiB4TQ8
Oh, and before I forget.
There’s a new game in development on the engine. Anyone remembers Chaotic Dreams? The awesome series of mods on Quake 2, Unreal Tournament, UT2003 and UT2004? If you don’t know, you can read about it here: https://chaoticdreams.org/about-us/
There’s a sequel to it developed on OctaForge. Currently it’s in the preparation stage. The old team leader stays, I’m doing the programming, there are a few new people, and a few old people. We’re aiming to get at least part of the old team together again.
If you don’t know these mods and tl;dr, Chaos is series of multiplayer FPS games; they mix scifi, medieval and fantasy, adding all sorts of weapons (sword, crossbow, rail gun, gravity vortex - shoots a mini black hole sucking everything in, …), true 3D movement (airfist gun, grappling hook, antigravity belt … you can all use that, but make sure to not make it turn against you :p) as well as other kickass features like living proximity mines (they’re like standard proximity mines, but they’re alive, yellow balls with smiley faces which will chase you around the map and blow up when they catch you, of course only if you get too close) and turrets with remote cameras.
You guys are always welcome in Chaos/OF forums/IRC of course
