Announcing Tesseract...

by eihrul on 04/18/2012 00:48, 137 messages, last message: 08/19/2013 16:01, 138260 views, last view: 12/09/2021 06:27

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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#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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#98: Re: A new direction...

by Zamwa on 08/02/2012 05:42, refers to #84

I'm glad to know this will evolve from the ground up! What's the plan for the first preliminary game-modes or is this going to remain open for debating?

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#99: Re: meh

by suicizer01 on 08/02/2012 20:45, refers to #92

If I had the courage to stop wasting time on some ctf-map which I'm creating, I maybe would find some time to model them with MM3D...
Maybe another time....

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#100: ..

by geartrooper2 on 08/02/2012 23:21

I would just like to add that I am in favor of using sayings such as OTOH and OTOOH, but truly, where do we go from there? And is even OTOOH plausible? A spiritual OH, perhaps? Does eihrul have features we are unaware of? Does this explain his coding ability?

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#101: Re: ..

by Zamwa on 08/03/2012 03:06, refers to #100

That is a lotta questioning going on there GearTrooper and always good to ask I say!

Eihrul: I know... Sry My question is stupid! :")

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#102: Re: ..

by geartrooper2 on 08/03/2012 20:01, refers to #101

Righto!

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#103: textures

by spiney_. on 08/05/2012 10:21

If Tesseract will be a stand-alone game could consider using the high resolution versions of the Phillip K texture packs. The ones in Sauerbraten are half-resolution.

http://philipk.net/

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#104: Re: textures

by geartrooper2 on 08/06/2012 16:36, refers to #103

The tutorials on that site are pretty good.

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#105: ..

by robin1337 on 09/10/2012 16:32

Hey eihrul.

Very nice work!!! I downloaded it yesterday and I really enjoy the shadows. :) Can you upload the map with these moving lights? That would be great.

Keep up the great work!

Bye

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