Announcing Tesseract...

by eihrul on 04/18/2012 00:48, 137 messages, last message: 08/19/2013 16:01, 166289 views, last view: 04/25/2024 15:32

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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#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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#41: Re: if anyone compiles it...

by quintux_v on 05/19/2012 23:35, refers to #39

I think I compiled the github source code, but I keep getting a "frame buffer support required" error when I run both the batch file and the .exe, can I safely assume that means my computer's too bad to run Tesseract?

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#42: Re: if anyone compiles it...

by Razgriz on 05/20/2012 00:13, refers to #41

probably.

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#43: Re: if anyone compiles it...

by eihrul on 05/20/2012 01:10, refers to #41

It means your GPU is too old to run it, yes.

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#44: Re: if anyone compiles it...

by quintux_v on 05/21/2012 06:13, refers to #43

Damn, that's too bad. I'm kind of not surprised, seeing as I don't have any support for Blender's Cycles renderer on my computer. I'll just have to wait. Thanks for the confirmation

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#45: Re: if anyone compiles it...

by suicizer01 on 05/21/2012 18:33, refers to #44

Or you just have to spend a little more money to buy a decent pc.

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#46: ambient occlusion

by rbit on 05/21/2012 19:11

doing vertex based ambient occlusion for static geometry might look better than the SSAO alone, octree gives a useful hierarchy

http://snipurl.com/23m0531

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#47: Re: ambient occlusion

by Razgriz on 05/21/2012 21:58, refers to #46

very interesting.. the idea of screen-space leaving the party sounds good to me regardless, but 12.7 speaks about indirect lighting, and i like where that is going..

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#48: Re: if anyone compiles it...

by quintux_v on 05/23/2012 06:56, refers to #45

True, but I'd have to wait to get that money anyways. Well, less wait, more work and save up money.

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#49: Re: if anyone compiles it...

by Q009 on 05/23/2012 14:17, refers to #48

Sure, Crysis could work on Atari as well. Just some optimization... ;P

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#50: running the batch file

by it9999 on 06/04/2012 15:15

I downloaded the zip, unzipped it, compiled it with Code::Blocks and ran it and i got a message saying "could not load core textures" what should i do?

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#51: Re: running the batch file

by tempest on 06/04/2012 17:08, refers to #50

Read the readme. "Install" section.

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#52: Re: running the batch file

by Razgriz on 06/06/2012 22:13, refers to #50

Tesseract requires a working SVN copy, and you need to hook it up to it for it to work.

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#53: No .exe file

by Jackle on 06/19/2012 07:35, refers to #52

There is no .exe file in the bin folder, it can not start, what do I do?

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#54: Re: No .exe file

by Razgriz on 06/19/2012 09:39, refers to #53

You have to compile yourself for your own system. You can use codeblocks with mingw for windows and if you have another system wait for the suggestions of others.

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#55: Re: No .exe file

by eihrul on 06/19/2012 11:53, refers to #54

Or you can just get daily builds from here: http://mappinghell.net/tesseract/

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#56: Global Illumination

by spiney_. on 06/19/2012 20:12

I've been playing around with the sunlight global illumination with a big smile on my face :D There's no skylight equivalent to do hemisphere lighting, and I guess that might be tricky. A constant ambient works decent enough, altought I wish it wouldn't lit up the insides of buildings as much. But can\'t have everything, and this is pretty damn fantastic already :D

One thing I think could be improved some more is the tonemapping, it tends to blow out into pure white easily in areas with high contrast, especially the sky and sun. Nonlinear response curve might help?

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#57: Real-time light updates

by Laraso on 06/21/2012 05:01

Is there any chance that some of these features might make their way into Sauerbraten?

I watched that YouTube video and my jaw dropped once I saw the real-time lighting updates.

It takes forever to place and edit lights on a map in Sauerbraten, and that feature would make it incomparably easier.

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