Announcing Tesseract...

by eihrul on 04/18/2012 00:48, 137 messages, last message: 08/19/2013 16:01, 166165 views, last view: 04/20/2024 02:23

What is Tesseract? Tesseract is a sort of Frankenstein's monster that escaped the lab when I ripped out the static lightmapped heart of Sauerbraten, squished it under-foot with extreme prejudice, and stitched it back together with deferred shading and shadowmapping.

Run-down of the cool new features:
deferred shading
HDR rendering with tonemapping and bloom
omnidirectional point-light shadowmaps
sunlight cascaded shadowmap
screen-space ambient occlusion
screen-space water reflections (no more reflection plane limits)
refractive alpha cubes
refractive glass material

A dorky video of some of this stuff in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkFT1ra2w-A

The actual code is at a github repository for the moment:
https://github.com/lsalzman/tesseract

See the README for some more details about running it.

The code is still under Zlib license.

The work on this code was done in collaboration with Benjamin Segovia over the last month or so.

The codebase is still in a state of high flux, so I would expect a lot of changes coming in the future.

The goal of all of this is not really to replace Sauerbraten and development on Sauerbraten itself will continue into the future. This is just a fork, a what-if experiment to see what it might look like if it dropped all concerns about compatibility and good performance on old hardware and just tried to modernize.

In fact, while it can load Sauerbraten maps, the lighting model of Tesseract is roughly incompatible, as not only do Sauerbraten maps use way too many lights, but Tesseract renders the lights a bit differently.

Tesseract is not at this moment endeavoring to be a stand-alone game, but just another parallel codebase people interested in the engine can choose from to work from if they want to mod it into a game of their own.

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#98: Re: A new direction...

by Zamwa on 08/02/2012 05:42, refers to #84

I'm glad to know this will evolve from the ground up! What's the plan for the first preliminary game-modes or is this going to remain open for debating?

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#99: Re: meh

by suicizer01 on 08/02/2012 20:45, refers to #92

If I had the courage to stop wasting time on some ctf-map which I'm creating, I maybe would find some time to model them with MM3D...
Maybe another time....

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#100: ..

by geartrooper2 on 08/02/2012 23:21

I would just like to add that I am in favor of using sayings such as OTOH and OTOOH, but truly, where do we go from there? And is even OTOOH plausible? A spiritual OH, perhaps? Does eihrul have features we are unaware of? Does this explain his coding ability?

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#101: Re: ..

by Zamwa on 08/03/2012 03:06, refers to #100

That is a lotta questioning going on there GearTrooper and always good to ask I say!

Eihrul: I know... Sry My question is stupid! :")

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#102: Re: ..

by geartrooper2 on 08/03/2012 20:01, refers to #101

Righto!

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#103: textures

by spiney_. on 08/05/2012 10:21

If Tesseract will be a stand-alone game could consider using the high resolution versions of the Phillip K texture packs. The ones in Sauerbraten are half-resolution.

http://philipk.net/

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#104: Re: textures

by geartrooper2 on 08/06/2012 16:36, refers to #103

The tutorials on that site are pretty good.

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#105: ..

by robin1337 on 09/10/2012 16:32

Hey eihrul.

Very nice work!!! I downloaded it yesterday and I really enjoy the shadows. :) Can you upload the map with these moving lights? That would be great.

Keep up the great work!

Bye

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#106: ..

by spiney_. on 09/19/2012 00:06

Incase you should ever run out of ideas for optimizing the shadows ;P

http://www.dimension3.sk/2012/09/siggraph-2012-talk-shadows-in-games-practical-considerations/

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#107: Re: ..

by eihrul on 09/19/2012 04:12, refers to #106

The lighting/shadowing engine is already pretty much state of the art. It's pushing 60+ Hz at reasonable resolution on a 2005 GPU doing fully dynamic lighting and shadowing on everything in the scene - what he mentions as being pie in the sky.

It is basically running like greased lightning already given what it is doing. It seems to even run well on Ivy Bridge Windows drivers, and gets ridiculous framerates on actual new gaming GPUs (650M, at least, giving me closer to 100-200 range). I dunno that there is much of anything I can do to make it faster at this point.

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#108: Re: Real-time light updates

by Darkwiz666 on 10/11/2012 17:17, refers to #58

Hey Q006, you still working on Octaforge, right? Hasn't been an updated release in ages yo!

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#109: ..

by Minty on 10/17/2012 23:46

Definitely interested to see where Tesseract goes. Good luck!

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#110: blendmaps

by spiney_. on 10/29/2012 14:20

I was wondering if Tesseract will be able to allow painting blendmaps on vertical surfaces? I\'m painting cavities, dirt and fake AO and the current way is quite limiting.

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#111: blendmaps

by spiney_. on 10/29/2012 14:20

I was wondering if Tesseract will be able to allow painting blendmaps on vertical surfaces? I\'m painting cavities, dirt and fake AO and the current way is quite limiting.

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#112: Re: blendmaps

by Razgriz on 10/29/2012 23:06, refers to #111

nope.

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#113: Day/Night cycles

by Hirato Kirata on 11/04/2012 06:20

Hi guys, just thought I'd leave this video here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcsaADbCiGo


One thing to note is that I extended the code to allow dynamic light properties, as you can see at a few points in which torches/lamps get switched on and off.

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#114: Re: Day/Night cycles

by suicizer01 on 11/04/2012 14:00, refers to #113

Looks pretty cool. I hope Tesseract would have it also.

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#115: Re: Day/Night cycles

by Hirato Kirata on 11/04/2012 15:51, refers to #114

Tess can definitely do the sunlight thing.
The dynamic light properties? Not so much.
I assigned attribute 6 to correspond to an associated light_# tag, which is then executed and cached and returns a string of up to 4 numbers, respectively radius, red, green, and blue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__eSvW5SU_A

If eihrul wanted to add this to tess, he'd first need to extend the entity system to allow at least 6 attributes, or he'd have to go about it an entirely different way.

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#116: Re: Day/Night cycles

by suicizer01 on 11/04/2012 20:06, refers to #115

Well, too bad Sandbox isn't as popular as any other official mods among the community. It really looks like it has a lot of cool features to offer.

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#117: Can't debug with VS10

by SChalice on 11/17/2012 18:19

I compiled the latest version (and earlier) with no problems and the code runs very well stand alone. When I try to run under the debugger, I hang on:

glGenBuffers_(1, &vbo);

There is some incompatibility between the debugger's graphics andTtesseract's implementation of OpenGL. I am unable to determine what.

I debug Sauerbraten with no problems.

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