Announcing Tesseract...

by eihrul on 04/18/2012 00:48, 137 messages, last message: 08/19/2013 16:01, 166288 views, last view: 04/25/2024 14:56

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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#64: Re: ..

by eihrul on 06/30/2012 07:22, refers to #63

In what way?

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#65: ..

by kripkenstein on 06/30/2012 07:41

I don't seem to get any water rendered, is that expected?

Otherwise OMG this is so amazing, I love just moving lights around and seeing how things look. It's awesome.

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#66: Re: ..

by eihrul on 06/30/2012 08:04, refers to #65

It's safe to say broken things are never expected. I don't even think it's appropriate to ask that. :)

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#67: Re: ..

by Zamwa on 06/30/2012 08:34, refers to #63

I'm happy with it lol!?

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#68: Re: ..

by xoltan on 06/30/2012 08:50, refers to #63

As far as fog goes, I'm not sure if Razgriz's problem is the same as mine. With wider aspect ratios and fields of view, the left and right edges of the screen aren't clearly less foggy than the center of the screen. I'd guess that it has to do with something being planar instead of cylindrical.

Not the best examples, but ones I have handy:

http://www.xoltan.org/files/terrain01.jpg

http://www.xoltan.org/files/terrain2.jpg

Not Tesseract, but it behaves the same.

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#69: Re: ..

by Q009 on 06/30/2012 11:45, refers to #68

Holy shit, nice terrain work

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#70: Re: ..

by Razgriz on 06/30/2012 14:24, refers to #68

Yes, that's the part i don't like about the fog really, it's planar and not spherical, which seems weird in a variety of cases.

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#71: Re: ..

by Razgriz on 06/30/2012 14:42, refers to #70

well, my point is, with all the fancy things tesseract offers, it feels wrong not to work on the fog too :P

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#72: Re: ..

by Zamwa on 06/30/2012 16:35, refers to #68

I really don't notice it to be a problem unless I set /fog under 300! What I'd like to control is the transition thickness of fading! Like a command /fogfade would be sweet!

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#73: Re: ..

by Q009 on 06/30/2012 16:49, refers to #72

Here, have this potato, sir.

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#74: Re: ..

by eihrul on 06/30/2012 19:25, refers to #70

Spherical fog, maybe. Exponential fog, maybe. I played with them, but they were problematic in their own ways. One day, fog may improve, one day.

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#75: motion blur

by spiney_. on 06/30/2012 19:56

I really like the way it is now :)

The one thing I would like to see improved at some point though is the camera motion blur. At the moment the motion blur is really more of a ghosting effect. Something like Valve added in the Orange Box would be nice, HDR or not...

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#76: Re: ..

by Razgriz on 06/30/2012 23:38, refers to #74

now i'm curious to know what those problems were about :D

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#77: Re: ..

by Zamwa on 06/30/2012 23:51, refers to #76

Same here...

lets just be glad though it's getting tuneups for now! ;"P

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

by ProtoThad on 07/01/2012 09:30, refers to #61

OK, I\'ve decided... I\'m just going to have to gitpull and start playing around with this. I\'ve been happily hacking around on the generic sauerbraten code so far, but this new lighting stuff looks too sweet. I\'m curious to benchmark it and see how it runs on my rig. :)

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#79: Re: ..

by suicizer01 on 07/01/2012 14:33, refers to #74

Just a question eihrul. For what I've understand, fog is actually a (fullscreen) shader. Is that true?

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#80: Re: ..

by eihrul on 07/01/2012 15:29, refers to #79

No.

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#81: Re: ..

by suicizer01 on 07/01/2012 22:23, refers to #80

So what's the purpose of shaders like fogged, foggednotexture and fogworld?

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#82: Re: ..

by eihrul on 07/02/2012 07:52, refers to #81

They are for drawing objects with fog, it's not a post-pass.

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#83: ..

by VioletBlack on 07/25/2012 08:34

I've got to admit I was crushed when I realized I don't have any hardware capable of running this thing. It looks so beautiful. </3

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