I'm out of date on full-screen shaders...

Hey all,

I'm trying to get back onto the full screen shader wagon.

(A new way of handling full screen shaders may have passed me by since I looked last -- I've tried a few searches (ex.), but I came up empty.)

Here are my parameters:

- We're using a screen-aligned quad
- Last time we did that (in Wonderful), ALT-TAB crashed the game
- Technique that'll work at multiple resolutions
- We're using C-Script

Any advice?

Thank you!

It might be time to switch to lite-c... i too refused to do that for a long time but it's really worth the script conversion.
And converting c-script scripts to lite-c is really really easy. mostly you have to change some stuff to capital letters and thats pretty much it... I don't how big your script collection actually is but i think you can pull it of in one week.
It's really worth it

You're right; it's far past time. But my team's versed in it, and all our legacy code is there.

I don't know if this works in C-Script, but with Lite-C you don't need screen-aligned quads. You can actually post-process a screen very easily (look up PROCESS_TARGET), and the shader is given useful parameters such as the size of a pixel.

You can also very easily link stages together this way. Look up "stage" in the manual. You'll like what you see. The shader workshop also has a couple of really good examples of its usefulness.

BTW, in Aaaaaetc (I was playing it yesterday, and thoroughly enjoying it!), I still get a small floating quad during some of the videos that floats a distance in front of the screen with black edges -- it looks very much like it is meant to be a screen-aligned quad, but is too far forward.

Jibb

PS: If you really can't move on from C-Script, and if you haven't done so already you could set up your pp-shader to texture the screen-aligned quad in view-space, instead of using its texture co-ordinates. That way, the quad doesn't have to be perfectly aligned with the screen, as long as it covers it completely.

Hello,
If you want to keep C-Script code and still use Lite-C stages you can easily combine those two. I'm using both in my game for the very same reason.

Only set-back is that I wasn't able to use game_load because PPE is simply not active after that instruction. On the other hand level_load works just fine so I have replaced game_save with simple save system that uses file_var_write and everything works just fine.

I would consider it if you wanna keep C-Script and still have nice looking PPE in Lite-C.

Aha! Thank you both.

> BTW, in Aaaaaetc (I was playing it yesterday, and thoroughly enjoying it!), I still get a small floating quad during some of the videos that floats a distance in front of the screen with black edges -- it looks very much like it is meant to be a screen-aligned quad, but is too far forward.

Yeah; we actually changed camera.arc, and accidentally left a view entity in there. Alas.

> If you want to keep C-Script code and still use Lite-C stages you can easily combine those two. I'm using both in my game for the very same reason.

That sounds like it's just what I need! It this just a matter of creating a Lite-C script, and include<>ing it my C-Script file? I've done a few searches for such with the handy-dandy A7oogle utility, but wasn't able to turn anything up on combining the two.

Thanks!

its all much easier in a7 but im not sure how it works in cscript. if your looking for lite-c programmers, me and julz are both looking for work most of the time and now that I'm back into doing freelance I have time to do it.

Yes that's about all you have to do

My main C-Script has...

include <PPE_Start.c>;

...and in PPE_Start.c I have...

#define PRAGMA_PATH "shade-c" //if you use Shade-C
#include <acknex.h>
#include <default.c>
#include "mtlView.c"
#include "sc_core.c"; //if you use Shade-C

...because I also use Shade-C HDR.

Now you can use and chain stages...

camera.stage = viewBleach;
viewBleach.stage = viewDesat;
viewDesat.stage = viewColor; //viewBleach,Desat&Color are my own views- i can't remember the original GS PPE view names

...or/also Shade-C...

sc_setup();

...that's all.

Btw:
If you want antialiasing you will have to use ChrisB fullscreen antialiasing plugin...
http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=263055#Post263055
...because d3d_antialias will now be totally useless

Btw Btw:
I forgot very, very important thing
In PPE_Start.c you need a startup function because your function main is in C-Script and Lite-C can't see actions assigned in WED or C-Script.
So you need...

void ppe_startup()

...and everything works out.

Indeed we are! I'm unavailable for the next few weeks as I move to Canada (I'm just about to pack up this computer now), but in future I'd be very keen to work on a Dejobaan Game!

Jibb

LC/JM> me and julz are both looking for work most of the time

Thanks for the heads-up; we're set for now, but I'll let you know if/when we're looking. Only one out of the 3 programmers we have knows how to use C-Script. Oy.

GOleg> Yes that's about all you have to do

Thank you! It's doing some really weird things (exiting on ESC?), but I think it actually means things are starting to work! Woo!

try remove the line
#include <default.c>
That file defines standard keys, like quitting on esc and f10, changing screen res and quicksave and quickload, which might overwrite what you have set in c-script.

No problem I'm glad I was able to help out

As for esc I'm not sure- I have default.c included in my script and everything works fine. To be honest everything works fine also if I exclude it so... both are o.k. in my case. My GS version is commercial 7.50. Maybe that has something to do with it.

Btw- you can't share your vars between C-Script and Lite-C but you can use engine vars to communicate between them.
I use turb_speed for kick-effect: when enemies hit player I set turb_speed to 2 in C-Script and that triggers shake ppe in Lite-C. After 0.5 sec shake turns turb_speed back to 1.

> try remove the line
> you can use engine vars to communicate between them

Aha! Great to know. Thanks to you both.

Well it took me ~1 hour to get into lite-c and to be able to convert all my c-script code to lite-c, it really only is a matter of capital letters and the precompilers. And it would enable you to use all the additional lite-c functions available.