Announcing Tesseract...

by eihrul on 04/18/2012 00:48, 137 messages, last message: 08/19/2013 16:01, 166308 views, last view: 04/26/2024 16:24

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.

   Board Index   

#112: Re: blendmaps

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

nope.

reply to this message

#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.

reply to this message

#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.

reply to this message

#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.

reply to this message

#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.

reply to this message

#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.

reply to this message

#118: Re: Can't debug with VS10

by SChalice on 11/18/2012 03:42, refers to #117

I commented out the very first line of code and it fixed the problem.

// setlogfile(NULL);


Lucky me!

reply to this message

#119: Re: Can't debug with VS10

by eihrul on 11/21/2012 14:05, refers to #118

I can't really fathom why that would have anything to do with it. On the WIN32 builds, it should be a no-op - that is, do nothing at all. Did you somehow not define the WIN32 preprocessor macro when building?

reply to this message

#120: ..

by adamturok on 11/24/2012 20:01

CUBE ENGINE 3 :D. Frichen work on this shit, get it released. Make it a whole new game all together CUBE: TESSERACT

reply to this message

#121: ..

by adamturok on 11/24/2012 20:03

I absolutely love what you did there. I am frichen amazed, I love you man, and keep up the good work ;D. Make this the new Cube Engine please. I will cry if you don't.

reply to this message

#122: Re: ..

by Razgriz on 11/25/2012 00:09, refers to #121

start crying :P

reply to this message

#123: ..

by adamturok on 11/27/2012 01:53

Could this be a mod? :D

reply to this message

#124: Cool!

by Minty on 12/04/2012 17:15

Whelp, color me interested.

Is there anywhere I can find the gameplay changes? I realize there are a number of graphical changes in Tesseract, but what about the gameplay?

Thank you!

reply to this message

#125: Re: Cool!

by Q009 on 12/04/2012 17:18, refers to #124

Tesseract is not a game. It's an engine. A new renderer for Cube 2 to be exact

reply to this message

#126: ..

by byte512 on 02/13/2013 11:47

I totally love tesseract. I'm currently using it instead of the sauerbraten client, when playing online or offline, it works nearly perfect for me (using a manually compiled version under Ubuntu). There are two things I noticed, tough:
1: Somehow on some maps the lighting system does not produce the best results (e.g.: Asgard, everything flickers like crazy) Oh, and somehow on venice, there never has been done a calclight run under sauerbraten :D
2: Water looks extremely "foggy"

Now, I know that this is a development version and that things are likely to be vastly improved over time.

Please keep up your awesome work eihrul, i relly love Tesseract, it is a huge improvement to cube 2.
regards, byte

reply to this message

#127: Re: ..

by Razgriz on 02/13/2013 12:40, refers to #126

There is a standing bug on maps larger than size 13 but i do not know what causes it. It also makes the shadows become offset from where they should be, which leads me to think it's some sort of precision issue.

eihrul could tell you more if he bothers, i don't remember the details.

reply to this message

#128: ..

by Hirato Kirata on 02/13/2013 12:53

Nope, the issue is about lights, lots and lots of lights.

In fact there's so many lights they start overwriting each other in the shadow atlas because there's no more space for them, cue heavy flickering, if not weird lighting artefacts.

reply to this message

#129: Re: ..

by Razgriz on 02/13/2013 15:32, refers to #128

well, the shadow offset issue in large maps is not related to the atlas size then.

reply to this message

#130: Sound

by spiney_. on 02/13/2013 16:26

I know everyone hates feature requests, but it would be nice if the sound engine would recieve some updates as well.
Being able to define footstep and impact sounds in the texture configuration file would be very nice.
(also sound propagation, doppler and all that crap...)

reply to this message

#131: Re: Sound

by suicizer01 on 02/13/2013 18:54, refers to #130

Make them and have a certain chance to be included.

P.S. it's not up to me to include them, but you can always try so. Maybe eihrul is impressed and would use them.

reply to this message

   Board Index