Announcing Tesseract...

by eihrul on 04/18/2012 00:48, 137 messages, last message: 08/19/2013 16:01, 166186 views, last view: 04/20/2024 10:46

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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#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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#84: A new direction...

by eihrul on 08/01/2012 12:52

So, I dunno how people will react to this, but I have come to one conclusion with regards to Tesseract gameplay:

So long as Tesseract is not really stand-alone and just parasitic off of Sauerbraten content, it is essentially useless. For Tesseract to truly live, the Sauerbraten parts of it must sadly die.

So what I think I am going to do is make a sort of stripped-down "Sauer lite", that mostly just focuses on a sort of rocket-gib gameplay, and nothing else, with a main goal of keeping the download size close to 100MB or not much bigger.

Anything extraneous to this like pickups (weapons, armour, etc.), SP, old game modes like capture and hold, old maps, etc. I am just going to cut from the codebase. It will also let me muck around with some various other gameplay aspects in general without disturbing Sauer gameplay at all.

So depending on how you look at it, it will either end up being just a smaller demo game for people to base off of, or a more insta-focused Sauerbraten TC with less but higher quality content. With no more dependence on Sauerbraten, the engine and other aspects can more freely evolve without disrupting Sauerbraten itself.

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#85: meh

by viruz on 08/01/2012 15:56

sorry to hear that.

Before i make my point, let me just say that i currently have no pc that is able to run tesseract.

Now, my point:

Sauerbraten is finished. It has the features it needs, and even more maps and modes that.

We could change gamemodes and add even more maps, but the game wouldn't benefit from it. Also, Sauerbraten suffers from its long development time. the ogro and the snout in the same game? also complex and urban_c vs the new shader-heavy maps. its like combining quake1 and halo3. while gameplay has some similarities, the gfx and sfx are spreaded across several generations of video game history.

I would never suggest to get rid of the ogro and complex in Sauerbraten, first, i like those and second, it would release a shitstorm.

But Tesseract has the chance to set things right and make "cube3" a state of the art free or open source game, possessing the integrity cube2 lacks, with equally great looking maps, sounds and textures, maybe even entirely rethought gamemodes.

Sauerbraten won't make make hundreds of new players by extending the history.html, in fact it feels like it is. but if done right, tesseract could revive this game.

So, my suggestion is:

1:
Feature freeze for sauerbraten. every 18-36 month a new release containing new maps, maybe new playermodels if someone feels like creating some, or backporting from tesseract. also minor patches.

2: Make tesseract the point of interest. Reduce the hardware requirements and graphic quality as far as reasonable possible. Take only content of quality from sauerbraten and replace ancient sounds and textures. Maybe rethink aspects of the gameplay. Also this would be a chance to unify the project under one software licence. sauerbraten can't be delivered via game magazines because of cc-nc in some contents.

3: ?????

4: Profit?

Its your choice eihrul, but if strongly advertised by the community, tesseract has chances to become far more popular than sauerbraten.

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#86: Re: meh

by eihrul on 08/01/2012 18:35, refers to #85

I am not sure you understood what I am saying:

Sauerbraten will continue developing along as it always has.

Tesseract will diverge to be something else gameplay wise with entirely separate content.

Neither is going away.

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#87: Re: meh

by suicizer01 on 08/01/2012 19:51, refers to #86

Well, it would be nice if Tesseract had some more realism in it, especially on the aspect of sounds and view (like some empty sleeve which will be thrown away after firing a weapon like the rifle and like some proper hit-the-ground sound after jumping (it doesn't always work right now) and step sounds, for example).

Would be damn great if you just killed instantgib and continue with modes as FFA instead. That would create some getaway for people that still want to play something else as insta, as there wouldn't be much else.

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#88: Re: meh

by eihrul on 08/01/2012 19:53, refers to #87

The game you are looking for is COD. Have at it.

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#89: Re: meh

by suicizer01 on 08/01/2012 19:53, refers to #87

To support my second statement; that would keep Sauerbraten being a mainly instantgib game, while Tesseract has a deeper kind of play (because of the FreeForAll).

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#90: Re: meh

by suicizer01 on 08/01/2012 19:56, refers to #88

No, CoD is realistic in flow and gameplay also compared to Sauerbraten (or Tesseract). I was only talking about the graphics.
CoD still knows instagib; the main difference is that you have a knife instead of a rifle.

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#91: Re: meh

by suicizer01 on 08/01/2012 19:58, refers to #90

To support my previous statement; I'm not pointing to create a AssaultCube 2. Maybe that helps getting what I mean.

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#92: Re: meh

by eihrul on 08/01/2012 20:35, refers to #91

OTOH, I'd much rather make an AC2 than keep Sauer's FFA; or otherwise stated, I do not like FFA in Sauer enough personally to reproduce it beyond Sauer. OTOOH, I'm not gonna throw in a bunch of Quake 2 MD2 models for players and weapons, so that would be a consideration if someone is willing to remodel, that could be an alternative, but the main idea is to capitalize on the actual parts of Sauer that I, personally, like, unless, like I said, someone wants to remodel all the players/weapons from AC, I could do that. :P

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#93: ..

by spiney_. on 08/01/2012 21:01

What about CLONE? Will it use Tess or Sauer as base?

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#94: Re: ..

by eihrul on 08/01/2012 21:11, refers to #93

Seems you're in the wrong thread, sir.

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#95: Re: meh

by ProtoThad on 08/01/2012 22:17, refers to #92

Personally, I like the idea of Tesseract being trimmed down. It will make it a cleaner starting point to base stand-alone games on or make a smaller playground for people just wanting to learn from the code-base. I\'ve been having fun wading around in the Sauerbraten code... but there is a lot there I am really not interested in.

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#96: Re: ..

by spiney_. on 08/01/2012 22:52, refers to #94

There's a thread?

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#97: ..

by kripkenstein on 08/02/2012 05:40

Sounds like stripping things down will let you experiment with new stuff in tesseract, that sounds good to me! Full speed ahead :)

I do love regen capture (some of the maps really encourage strategy in that mode) which I guess would be cut from tesseract, but I'll just play that in sauer.

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