Announcing Tesseract...

by eihrul on 04/18/2012 00:48, 137 messages, last message: 08/19/2013 16:01, 166559 views, last view: 05/05/2024 00:13

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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#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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#58: Re: Real-time light updates

by suicizer01 on 06/21/2012 21:44, refers to #57

placing lights isn't the actual problem. You'll learn that if you done it some more times.

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#59: ..

by spiney_. on 06/24/2012 22:35

Improved tonemapping, yay!

Here's some screenshots of the bounced sunlight in action.


http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/8481/tess01.jpg
http://img804.imageshack.us/img804/2752/tess02.jpg
http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/3826/tess03.jpg

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#60: Re: ..

by geartrooper2 on 06/25/2012 00:31, refers to #59

very nice. gj lee.

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#61: State of the Tesseract...

by eihrul on 06/29/2012 13:03

Just a quick development summary for those who have not been following Tesseract much, but might still be interested in what has gone on with it since the initial code release... In no particular order of importance:

* Shadowmap caching feature that eliminates almost all shadowmap drawing costs in each frame, and some new light entity modifiers that mappers can use to take better advantage of this.

* Morphological anti-aliasing using the SMAA algorithm (also known in the past as Jiminez' MLAA in earlier versions). It's not as nice as MSAA, but it's cheap and works well with deferred rendering.

* Water caustics were added back in.

* Fullbrightmodels was added back in.

* Made spotlight ents work again. The resolution with them may be a bit wonky at the moment depending on the radius you set them at, but otherwise they work. Flashlight lovers rejoice.

* Did some library plumbing to make it so you can cross-compile Mingw64 builds to get 64 bit Windows binaries if you are brave.

* Sunlight now does real-time global illumination. It isn't exactly skylight, but it is nice in a similar but different way for brightening up dark spots in your map and adds a subtle color bleeding effect. And, it's dynamic/real-time still!

* I recently got my hands on an Ivy Bridge CPU, and I got things running pretty well on the HD 4000 IGP. Some things like SMAA still seem to not entirely work, but other stuff like the sunlight GI and SSAO and everything else is running pretty well.

* The HDR system has been rethought to give much saner results. After a few failed and frustrating week-long experiments that died on my hard drive without ever touching the repository, I struck upon a stupid simple idea that I should have thought of before...

The goal of HDR is not to brighten the crap out of dark things, or darken the crap out of bright things. It is simply to preserve feel of the lighting the mapper made as accurately as possible, no "if"s, "and"s, or "but"s. In hindsight, this is stupidly obvious, but almost nowhere is something like this written about or tried, since it involves reversing the tonemapping: match the output luminance on the monitor of some scene average to the average input luminance, within a given allowable range. Obvious, but strangely overlooked.

So the HDR system now does exactly that. It does not fight the mapper's lighting in any way. It just allows you to have more controlled saturation of colors and allow some viewing of things in the nigh-invisible black range, along with the tried and true "Oh, god, my eyes!" bloom effect. So if you turn HDR off, the maps still look pretty good, just now they look subtly better with HDR, a slight boost in contrast and bloomy stuff.

So, really, I can't think of terribly much more that could be added in terms of neato rendering features to the engine within what I envisioned for it, they're all pretty much covered now. I think the engine is getting pretty stable now despite all the new stuff added to it, so in a roundabout way, it is actually not much more less safe than the default codebase to base new projects off of, for sufficiently limited interpretations of "not much more less safe". I hope someone, at least, is having fun with it.

Over and out...

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#62: Re: State of the Tesseract...

by geartrooper2 on 06/29/2012 16:34, refers to #61

congrats on the revelation.

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#63: ..

by Razgriz on 06/30/2012 06:59

"I hope someone, at least, is having fun with it."

You bet your ass we are :P

And i don't know if it counts as a rendering feature, but there's quite a bit of unhappiness surrounding the fog rendering.

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