Announcing Tesseract...

by eihrul on 04/18/2012 00:48, 137 messages, last message: 08/19/2013 16:01, 177988 views, last view: 10/13/2024 02:06

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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#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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#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!

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#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?

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#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

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#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.

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#122: Re: ..

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

start crying :P

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#123: ..

by adamturok on 11/27/2012 01:53

Could this be a mod? :D

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#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!

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#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

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#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

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#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.

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#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.

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#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.

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#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...)

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#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.

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#132: Re: Sound

by spiney_. on 02/14/2013 00:01, refers to #131

Having samples isn't the issue I think. There's plenty of decent FOSS ones any project can just pick up.

Sure... why add them? I don't see Sauer adding them ever since it's against the philosophy. However if Tesseract has it's own game in the works (?) it could benefit. I think it's an amazing engine in many regards, but in terms of sound I always felt it lagged behind all the idTech stuff and whatnot. All the updates on the renderer are very impressive, and the unified lighting and shadowing is the best out there. I just wish some of the other aspects would get some love.

Ofcourse it's eihrul's call. It's all his time and work and I feel like a tard for asking without having something constructive to add.

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#133: Tesseract has moved!

by eihrul on 06/24/2013 10:47

Lately we are starting to work towards making Tesseract a stand-alone game/media project independent from Sauerbraten. As such, I made the decision to move back to an SVN repository to better deal with the larger load of forthcoming media assets. This SVN repository is now hosted by TuxFamily (http://tuxfamily.org), which seems to be a nice group of folks offering FOSS projects full-service hosting that was better than most other services I could find, including SourceForge.

The details of the repository can be found at the new Tesseract landing page at: http://tesseract.gg

The landing page is somewhat barebones at the moment, but should give the requisite details for using the SVN repo. You no longer need any Sauerbraten install or packages to use it, and indeed, the latest codebase is now in some ways incompatible with Sauerbraten content aside from the ability to still import map geometry.

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#134: autobuilds

by spiney_. on 07/05/2013 16:03

Will the mapping hell autobuilds use the new repo in the future?

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#135: Re: autobuilds

by suicizer01 on 07/17/2013 00:09, refers to #134

isn't that up to mappinghell itself?

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#136: ..

by Julius on 07/19/2013 22:54

I hope you are keeping in mind to have the base set of assets licensed freely?

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