There are several types of shader, the most commonly used are vertex and pixel shaders and you can do a lot just with those - especially in a game like LFS where you do not have animation transforms. I'm not sure in DX9 whether you even have hull and domain shaders, I think the pipe is a bit simpler than DX10 in that regard, anyway...
Most vertex shaders serve as little more than allowing the programmer to pass information to the pixel shader, such as Out.texCoord2 might be used to hold the data for the lighting normal, or some other data that the fragment (pixel) shader uses. You can send across some basic information from the vertex shader to the pixel shader and most commonly you use the 8 available texture channels to pack in all sorts of data which is not normally available such as the normal, binormal or tangent etc.
But my favourite thing (from a programming perspective) is a vertex shader which modifies the position of a vertex which is manipulated entirely within the shader, by itself this is not terribly useful until you mix it with data - like adding wind sheer to your foliage :P
The shader's main loop per se is the technique, and although loop iterators are not in themselves supported (I got around that by writing a pre-processor) I used a loop here to render each pixel multiple times in my fur shader on this model ( http://beckyrose.com/media/images/katzen.jpg ) - a technique known as a shell shader. The vertex shader transformed the position based upon the iteration counter and allowed each pixel to be rendered multiple times at different extrusions along the vertice normal and modified by a gravity factor - which creates each hair.
Now whilst this in itself is no use to LFS unless the new Westhill is going to be set in bear country, the principle could be used to replace the CPU driven animation wind effects.
The fragment shader itself ( pixel shader ) is where the real magic happens - and is where specular glints and the like are added to the final output colour. You return one of two things in the fragment shader - the first is discard; which allows you to discard a pixel - so your fences and tyre smoke might not be obscured by the windscreen, and you can return the final pixel colour.
Fundamentally there isn't much in the way of custom affects which can be added without being able to get custom data in from the application to the shader - so some forethought would be needed if you INTENDED for this to be modded, but it's probably better you just focused on getting the game working how you want it and let idiots like me focus on undoing all your work :P
I imagine the current track surface gets darker on the racing line because of either a second texture layer or an alternative mesh layered over the top. In either case, this is where fragment shaders come in to their own with techniques like splat shading, or a variation thereof, where a global texture map can plot in lo detail which texture map is used in high detail in any given area. I recently wrote a splat shader that allowed for 48 different textures to be used on a single surface, simply by being smart about how I managed each texture channel and what I used it for - and I am tempted to rewrite that to INCLUDE a shell shader for my grass, thus reducing my onscreen polycount by about one quarter...
LFS could certainly also make use of instancing, but I don't suppose you need me to introduce the benefits of that concept to you.
Anyway, yes, the raw HLSL as a text file - perhaps by entity/surface type ( eg: car.fx, tracksurface.fx, trackgrass.fx etc), would allow for some magic to happen.
EDIT: Ideally, typically, technique, vertex and fragment shaders are used in combination to achieve a single effect. eg: You can't do bump mapping with the fragment shader alone, it requires fragment and vertex shader... So ideally the .fx would contain all the elements within the shader.
EDIT2: Attached one of my simpler shaders to show a normal map being applied.
Last edited by Becky Rose, .
It's amazing how the awareness of bullying has increased since I was at school, in my day it was so prevalent that even the teachers joined in some of the taunts (particularly for gay kids or anyone perceived as gay who at my schools at least had a rougher time of it than persons of ethnicity).
The world has changed a lot, and although institutionalised bullying still happens - the social media tools that students use terrify me more - now you can be bullied 24 hours a day - and that's a scary thought! I used to get time out from bullying whenever I got home, but kids now don't have that luxury.
But we're also much more aware of it than we used to be, at least, I think that is true. More and more leaders employ McGregor X-Theory, whereas in the past Y-Theory (old fashioned authoritarian rule) was prevalent. We understand Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and kids themselves are more educated on the effects of bullying.
To a large extent this is because the world is now run by people who used to be bullied!
Stories like this will continue to emerge for decades to come, but it might one day be a thing of the past, think of this:
No child is born prejudiced. Prejudice is a learned sentiment born of ignorance and narrow mindedness. Such mentalities have little place in the modern workforce, and ultimately, such people will be unsuccessful. Ultimately these mindsets will die out.
At least I hope they will, otherwise I sincerely hope that whatever species follows us as the dominant life form on this planet does a much better job.
The world has changed a lot, and although institutionalised bullying still happens - the social media tools that students use terrify me more - now you can be bullied 24 hours a day - and that's a scary thought! I used to get time out from bullying whenever I got home, but kids now don't have that luxury.
But we're also much more aware of it than we used to be, at least, I think that is true. More and more leaders employ McGregor X-Theory, whereas in the past Y-Theory (old fashioned authoritarian rule) was prevalent. We understand Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and kids themselves are more educated on the effects of bullying.
To a large extent this is because the world is now run by people who used to be bullied!
Stories like this will continue to emerge for decades to come, but it might one day be a thing of the past, think of this:
No child is born prejudiced. Prejudice is a learned sentiment born of ignorance and narrow mindedness. Such mentalities have little place in the modern workforce, and ultimately, such people will be unsuccessful. Ultimately these mindsets will die out.
At least I hope they will, otherwise I sincerely hope that whatever species follows us as the dominant life form on this planet does a much better job.
From what I have read over the years Cargame is actually very consistent in asserting a pragmatical view of the development progress, I would not describe him as bashing. Occasionally pessimistic perhaps - but those of us who remember Scawen's pre-mountain biking days have all been pessimistic at times.
So with that settled, back on to the topic at hand:
The move to Dx9 presents an opportunity to move LFS away from fixed function rendering - so my question goes to Scawen: Do you intend to pursue a shader driven approach to the rendering or will you be sticking with the fixed pipe approach? And if moving to shaders, would you mind please to consider exposing the raw HLSL so I can edit the hell out of it and add a tonne of bling to upset the purists?
I'm wondering if Scawen will expose the HLSL so I can have some fun with it :P
Don't panic the game will not be a Facebook game, I'm just going to be doing the alpha testing amongst the facebook group because it is easier than coding up a web site to handle all the messaging and stuff. Alpha testing is still a ways off though, I hope later this year.
Yeah, this genre of game is like the Everest of computer games - but that's why I wanted to make it. After this I'll definitely be less ambitious for a bit! It's been a couple of years since I started the first prototypes and figures out what direction to head in - and now I'm about a year into the production version of the game.
I did have a schedule at one point but I moved house at the same time as hitting a technical hurdle so I fell behind it by a few months - but I'm still slowly plodding forwards.
I cheated and used gravity, so the fur moves but does so using a fixed constant - which is far faster than storing a snapshot of the bone data and calculating each layer of the shell dynamically.
Shell shaders in real time are all about speed, otherwise other content onscreen may need to be compromised.
The reality is you barely see any movement anyway because the fur is short - but it's there.
Shell shaders in real time are all about speed, otherwise other content onscreen may need to be compromised.
The reality is you barely see any movement anyway because the fur is short - but it's there.
Spot on
The same technique I used for the grass but very differently configured.It was a bit fiddly because for one I'd never done it before! But also my 3d engine did not support lopping technique passes or passing in an index counter, so I wrote both the fur and the grass as a series of separate text files and then made a PHP "pre-compile-parser" to assemble the final code.
I really am pleased with the final result, and now am sorting out more monsters which can have fur because most of what I have are scaled reptiles - I need more fur dammits!
OSRIC Legendary Heroes (PC Game) Developement Update
A year on and I am still working on my game, only now it is looking much better! So I thought I would show some beauty shots off to see what you think:
I am especially proud of the fur shader, it was really complex to make but it just looks amazing.
This little critter swims underground and then says hi when he's next to you
And if critters coming out of the ground wasn't enough, they come from the sky too.
I had to make sure this plant was physically large enough to digest a Human. There's a reason this must be so!
In fantasy worlds, snakes aren't big. Snakes are HUGE.
And some snakes have 3 heads, a body, 4 legs and a tail :P
When you absolutely definitely have to die, run into this guy. He'll get the job done.
hubba bubba >>drool<<, right?
The game will be available in around about a year [no fixed date yet] on PC format only. Shader Model 3 & dedicated graphics memory required.
For regular news updates and access to alpha testing when it happens please join the OSRIC Legendary Heroes Facebook Group.
I am especially proud of the fur shader, it was really complex to make but it just looks amazing.
This little critter swims underground and then says hi when he's next to you
And if critters coming out of the ground wasn't enough, they come from the sky too.
I had to make sure this plant was physically large enough to digest a Human. There's a reason this must be so!
In fantasy worlds, snakes aren't big. Snakes are HUGE.
And some snakes have 3 heads, a body, 4 legs and a tail :P
When you absolutely definitely have to die, run into this guy. He'll get the job done.
hubba bubba >>drool<<, right?
The game will be available in around about a year [no fixed date yet] on PC format only. Shader Model 3 & dedicated graphics memory required.
For regular news updates and access to alpha testing when it happens please join the OSRIC Legendary Heroes Facebook Group.
I don't know what substitutes for maths - but even without being armed with relevant facts I can work out that:
Taking Humans - a VERY slow to reproduce species:
500 million years = 500,000,000 years
500,000,000 / 16 (although reproduction started earlier before television replaced religion as the moral compass) = 31,250,000 generations
Taking the lowest supplies mutation rate given in this topic so far:
1.6 mutations per generation = 500,000,000 mutations
or to put it another way, 1 mutation a year. Now factor in the simpler organisms that we evolved from, and suddenly that's a lot of mutation. Then look up some actual facts to base these numbers on - heck I'm just doing maths - and you can go from a cat to a rhino to a unicorn and back again.
500 million years is a frigging long time. In fact - it's enough for the map of the Earth to become what it is today, from the Pangean super continent it was then - AND BACK AGAIN if it chose too:
and that process was just caused by tectonic movement - no mutation involved! When you consider that just a single mutation can - if it's on the right gene - do this:
and this
That sounds perfectly logical.
Until you consider that you are referring to the first ocurrance of single cell organisms, it wasn't mud, and we've found evidence of such simple single cell organisms on meteorites originating - we theorise - from Mars 6bn years ago (Hense the current search for signs of life there).
That puts a damper on "in Gods image" eh
Arguing against evolution cannot be done with logic or fact. To chose not to believe a cast iron repeatable fact that we can observe in the genetic evidence of each and every one of us (the one and 45000 genes that are not inherited) can only be done by voluntarily embracing a choice not to accept intelligent reasoned argument that is backed by evidence. Aka: choosing to be stupid, as a lifestyle choice.
I got bored of the current content years ago. And don't be giving that every combo party line crap - the sad part is the future plans for LFS do not yet appear to go anywhere near giving us the quantity of tracks that old timers would find reinvigorating.
Rockingham would not get me going out to buy a new wheel. A set of 15 tracks and the long absent concept of a 5 door 2 litre saloon and a group C might.
If you find my presence to be negative, then take heart in that I do only stop by occasionally to check on progress. On the whole I've been very supportive of Scawen when posting, but I'm not above the odd wise crack or occasional condescension in a [any] general direction - this is the internet after all.
I'm not sure how pointing out a few parallels of LFS development and a medical condition is shocking, they don't use electro shock therapy for bipolar anymore! But if you take offence at a reference to the condition - then you might take some relief in knowing I've lived through cyclothymia myself.
In regards to the many years of delay and shrunken user base - its my view that LFS self destructed. But I don't regard the situation as unsalvagable.
Loads done and an approachable dev, then several years of bemoaning his customers and dreaming he would finish without even starting: sounds like bipolar to me.
Authoritarianism gives more power to governments. It's not much to do with left/right. Fascists have gone too far too.
I've never seen a system behave differently to as I described, when I see it I'll believe it.
@Dan: The system is not allocating more system reserved RAM when there is more than 2gb, it is the same amount - the problem is your motherboard can only address 4gb total, this includes GPU and onboard GPU, contrary to the rebuttal above. If you added 16gb, you would have about 14gb of reserved RAM (except of course it wouldn't work anyway).
I think your problem is that the motherboard has a 32bit addressing on it's I/O controller. Quite why they've made it that way makes no sense, but then HP never worried too much about conforming to anyone elses standards so it's no surprise.
What I can't figure out is why there is 512mb of your RAM being allocated to something - the rest is all explainable. It's something to do with your motherboard, and I don't think you'll be able to change that without changing the motherboard/cpu/ram (and possibly gpu/psu) combination.
About the only thing I would use on your system is the x64 Windows 7 :P.
Good luck with the job hunt. I lived in a village in the arse end of nowhere without a car for years. I used to cycle to the nearest town to get a train and then cycle the other end - the fittest I was in a decade! So it can be done
- but I don't think I can handle village life anymore.If you can find a way to get here, I'm going to throw a house warming soon
.Thanks Jak, I didn't realise that.
From the cache size, I would say this is the 521 - at least I'm not blowing my brains out figuring out how he got Windows running
I still can't figure out the 2.75gb thing though.
Oh just to clear up the issue on the 512mb of graphics card RAM on your graphics card. This memory is part of the same memory map - the limitation is in the processor & motherboard - it can only physically address 4gb total and that includes the graphics card even if it is a separate non-integrated graphics card because the processor needs to talk to it to load textures and 3d meshes and whatnot into that memory space. That takes away 512mb, and your onboard takes away 128mb. Totaling 640mb, leaving you with 3.375gb addressable RAM space.
Correcting myself.
I just checked the specs, the motherboard should address 4gb.
The graphics card, which I understand from another users forum thread I found only and not an official source, does appear to allocate RAM regardless - but...
According to Intel the GMA 900 allocates a maximum of 128mb RAM ( http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma900/ ).
HP claim the motherboard will support 4gb, but that it should be DDR2 533/400 non-ECC, un-buffered memory ( http://www.findlaptopdriver.co ... lett-packard-09e8h-specs/ ).
And regards 64bit, um ( http://ark.intel.com/products/ ... Hz-512K-Cache-800-MHz-FSB ) - how is x64 Windows even working? hah....
EDIT2: fixed CPU link to cpu with correct fsb speed from screenshot, still same question!
I just checked the specs, the motherboard should address 4gb.
The graphics card, which I understand from another users forum thread I found only and not an official source, does appear to allocate RAM regardless - but...
According to Intel the GMA 900 allocates a maximum of 128mb RAM ( http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma900/ ).
HP claim the motherboard will support 4gb, but that it should be DDR2 533/400 non-ECC, un-buffered memory ( http://www.findlaptopdriver.co ... lett-packard-09e8h-specs/ ).
And regards 64bit, um ( http://ark.intel.com/products/ ... Hz-512K-Cache-800-MHz-FSB ) - how is x64 Windows even working? hah....
EDIT2: fixed CPU link to cpu with correct fsb speed from screenshot, still same question!
Last edited by Becky Rose, .
I'm actually surprised it runs x64 Windows, I thought that processor was only 32bit. Maybe I'm wrong, I'm not really into hardware these days.
In any case your motherboard likely is the limitation here, it seems that a chunk of RAM is allocated to the on board graphics regardless of whether it is disabled in the BIOS.
You may have reached the zenith of what that PC is going to do.
I assume you're all BMW'd up again by now, so maybe a new PC is next?
I only do that when people are wrong. Why would you fear being wrong unless you KNOW you talk shit?
No I am not telling you what is Christian and what isn't.
I am pointing out that:
- The Christian bible prescribes different punitive actions for different sins.
There are also many things which are not regarded as sins but also carry chronically severe punishments, such as a wife's husband dying before she bears him a son.
If you believe in the bible and voluntarily choose to worship the evil pedophile voyeur God, then you might want to consider separating the dogma from the actual text.
Better yet, understand the concepts in their original - ancient - language, you'll be surprised how meanings have changed in the translation to English and the 1950's re-translation (which added homosexuality as a sin by translating using modern translations for words like Malakoi which had earning their meaning BECAUSE of the church).
You might also want to look at the history of how the bible was written, the when and who. For instance, there is an awful lot of that pesky annoying evidence stuff that says categorically that the entire religion was a contrivance of the Roman senate who failed to secure affirmative military victory against the rebellious Israelites (who in a fit of irony with today's world: took issue with paying taxes) and who instead sought to subjugate the Israelites by serving them with a modified form of Judaism.
But don't dwell too much on the facts that bother you or interfere with your faith if you find that uncomfortable because you cannot be a true Christian if you let facts get in the way of your faith. Just do at the least understand the difference between what your bible actually says on various subjects instead of what the established dogma interprets - and then interpret the bits that you like and ignore all that awkward slavery and misogynistic stuff.
I believe you are referring to the colour grey improperly.
More disturbingly, you seem to feel that all sins are the same.
Well Catholics can now eat meet on Fridays; can now be cremated; and fasting before communion is now only an hour instead of from midnight; oh and of course slavery is a-okay provided you enslave a foreigner.
But your argument is false. Some sins are not part of the dogma: For instance it is a sin to eat a misshapen grape according to the bible, but it is not part of the dogma. Few Christians are even aware of this sin - and yet it is a sin in the Old Testament and the Tora. (Not sure on New Testament).
How do you reconcile such descrepancies and still claim that your God's failure to intervene in Child abuse is A-OKAY, in fact, he should be thanked for it.
I don't think it's wise to mix the gender argument in. Besides, the people of the Nagovisi, Khasi, and Machinguenga would probably take issue with that statement. And any other matriarchy I might have missed. Although I gather some idiot converted many Nagovisi to Christianity - so I'm not saying you're wrong at all
Women can't think, and therefor I am not one? Right...... *shakes head*
The sane and rational answer is that because the question cannot be answered you should therefor not conclude that you know the answer.
But the REAL question is: What do you get if you multiply six by nine?
To wit the answer is 42, not 54. Meaning that either the universe is base 13 and we've been adding up incorrectly all these years, or the universe is fundamentally broken.
More seriously though: The reason religions have creation myths is part of their justification. By claiming to know the answer to a question which cannot be answered they use this to position themselves as the masters of your soul. If this was something that had been answered then they would use a different question, perhaps we'd all be arguing the air speed of an unladen sparrow? I mean we know how quick a European Sparrow flies, but nobody ever worked out the air speed of an unladen African Sparrow...
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG