Announcing Tesseract...

by eihrul on 04/18/2012 00:48, 137 messages, last message: 08/19/2013 16:01, 138270 views, last view: 12/09/2021 06:27

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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#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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#137: question about lod and popping

by spiney_. on 08/19/2013 16:01

suicizer: yeah I was under the impression Eihrul had something to do with it, but I might be mistaking. Anyway, it's easy enough to build with codeblocks, even for noobs like me.

Stupid feature requests:

I was wondering if it's possible future versions will have some kind of fade between the different levels of the RH grid? The popping is a little bit distracting. Kind of a shame since it looks so nice in bright sunlight. I'm sure if it was an easy problem it would be there already, and these large scale volume things seem tricky, but yeah, it's just a bit of a shame.

On the topic of bright sunlight, it would be useful to have some kind of setting for the cascaded shadows to have hardened edges without having to blow up the res/splits or lower the farplane too much. I've seen this in various other games, so I'm assuming it's possible...

Finally, I really like the screenspace reflections, but it's a bit weird having it disappear on parts where it's pointing outside the buffer. Is it possible to use the nearest cubemap for reflections on those parts? Might look worse in some edge cases maybe... think putting a cubemap near water and reflective stuff is reasonable enough for mappers to do though.

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