Announcing Tesseract...

by eihrul on 04/18/2012 00:48, 137 messages, last message: 08/19/2013 16:01, 166158 views, last view: 04/19/2024 20:32

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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#21: Sauerbraten 3

by naggie on 04/20/2012 15:55

Great news!

This is similar in magnitude to the differences between Cube 1 and Cube 2.

How about calling it Sauerbraten 2 or cube 3?

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#22: Re: Sauerbraten 3

by Q009 on 04/20/2012 16:08, refers to #21

No. It's not similar. It's just graphics overhaul

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#23: Re: Sauerbraten 3

by _Spiney on 04/20/2012 16:25

While I wouldn't call it of a similar magnitude, it's pretty invasive. Unified lighting and shadowing allows all kind of stuff that would be very non-trivial to do with Sauerbraten.

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#24: Re: Sauerbraten 3

by eihrul on 04/20/2012 17:12, refers to #21

The choice was either Cube 2.5 or Tesseract, so I went with Tesseract. :)

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#25: Re: Sauerbraten 3

by suicizer01 on 04/20/2012 18:24, refers to #24

+1 for that.

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#26: lighting extension

by suicizer01 on 04/20/2012 18:32

I don't know if this already is possible in Tesseract, but it would be damn great.

The idea is to have some more realstic lighting when using a shader like "pulseglowworld".
I talk about then:
- Controlling the intensity of the light real-time, so it could match the "pulsespeed" shaderparam (even it doesn't have to)
- Controlling the colour of the light real-time, so it would match the "pulsecolor" and "glowcolor" shaderparams.

Bad thought or what?

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#27: ..

by Windecker on 04/20/2012 19:20

Not that this thread is for suggestions, but here are three thoughts for this amazing amazingness:

1 - A simple flickering/flashing/pulsating light controlled like a particle. ( like the old Unreal games had everywhere. ) Great for torches or those florescent lights with a bad ballast. ;)

2 - A bar light entity.. this might be difficult to do; I don't know. It would emit light from a line rather than a point.

3 - Finally, the ability for a texture to emit it's own light via a glow map with the right parameters.

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#28: Thank you

by sharavsambuu on 04/20/2012 20:12

Wow thank you very much eihrul!!!

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#29: Re: ..

by eihrul on 04/20/2012 20:47, refers to #27

The problem is generally the shadows. Area lights + shadowmaps don't really mix. You can fake it by making the light a bar, and the shadows emit from a point, but I don't know how great that would look.

I guess the other problem for animating the lights is that it is kinda clunky to do it in the ent. You'd probably have to to do the animation in a cfg because of all the parameters necessary which would be a bit lame, dunno.

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#30: ..

by _Spiney on 04/20/2012 22:42

While we're throwing around random ideas... I know this is only a very early release, so apologies!

HDR stability -- when an explosion covers a substantial part of the screen, everything rapidly darkens. Also the sky tends to blow out easily. Maybe I just don't know how to work the parameters very well.

Water reflections -- things in front of the water sometimes contribute to the reflection (hudgun, trees, playermodels, etc). Since it's done in screenspace I don't know if this is fixable, but it would be nice.

Also, it would be great if we could have these reflections on arbitrary geometry. Envmapped floors aren't recieving shadows now, but it could be great if we had those water style reflections on them.

SSAO -- this is a pet peeve of mine in a lot of games, but ssao unrealistically darkens the corners of rooms. Personally I think it should only darken concave areas where there's a sharper than 90° angle. But since it's bound to screenspace I don't know if this is fixable.

About the arealights, it's certainly a tricky problem, but I had this idea about how instead of keeping lights as points, you define them as spheres. Then you can then use wrap-around lighting which lerps the wrapping-lenght based on distance between the sphere-light and occluder. The shadow could become more blurry when nearby the sphere -- approximating the penumbra.
With pointlights you will always have a sharp falloff, but when you treat it as a sphere you can use that as a parameter to soften the falloff ramp.

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#31: Re: lighting extension

by _Spiney on 04/20/2012 22:46, refers to #26

You know, you could make it image based. So having a 1D image which plays back lighting color from left to right at a fixed speed.

A problem with this could be if Eihrul decides to allow brightness > 255 that the image needs higher precision than the typical 8bit RGB.

I'll shut up now :P

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#32: Good gawd...

by Darkwiz666 on 04/21/2012 00:55

I've been asking people about when there would possibly be some form of dynamic lighting...

...and now this! Awesome! Hope it makes it into Sauer in the long run. :3

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#33: ..

by Windecker on 04/21/2012 03:12

Radiosity!!!!


...Would be awesome but I fully understand the difficulty in implementation and therefor will not force my hopes and dreams upon anybody here.

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#34: oh my gosh oh my gosh

by MisanthropX- on 04/27/2012 20:25

When can I start building maps for you eihrul? :>

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#35: Simples

by Evropi on 05/04/2012 23:40

1. Build a utility that converts old Cube 2 maps to Tesseract ones
2. ???
3. Profit.

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#36: Re: Simples

by Q009 on 05/04/2012 23:48, refers to #35

Cube 2 maps are playable in Tesseract. Some of them are laggy but that can be fixed

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#37: Re: Simples

by Razgriz on 05/05/2012 00:05, refers to #35

Proof that he hasn't even read the original post, let alone try tesseract out :P

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#38: Re: Simples

by Darkwiz666 on 05/10/2012 22:47, refers to #37

What's even more funny is that on this page...his post is first. The only other thing on the page for him would have been the first post and he should have damn well read it.

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#39: if anyone compiles it...

by Pieter on 05/11/2012 01:56

if anyone compiles newer version of this from time to time feel free to share the bins for us lazy software-illiterates. :P

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#40: I...

by Leopardson2022 on 05/11/2012 02:51

MOTHER

...

MOTHER OF GOD

EIHRULE

YOU RULE

aHKSGBIPJAjihojfogbobgnoisn

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