Next-Gen Graphics

Hi, im building a GTA style game and i know i'll never even come close to GTAV type of graphics but i was wondering if there are any tips and tricks anyone knows to boost the visuals. I'm using C-script and commercial edition so no shader support which makes my game very limited. i want to get a similar type of clouds in the picture in the left and maybe some fake shadows and fake bloom/blur effects. Any tips are welcome no matter how small. In my game (pictured on the right) i have stencil shadows but i had to take it out because my fps went from 40fps to 0.5fps probably because it's not accelerated shadows. Thanks in advance

Commercial HAS shader support

Sorry i meant i have 'Extra edition'

Shader is up the A8 Version A7 I dont know if it has Shader or not. The Shots look good .

in extra you can make nice skies, you can combine sky cubes domes cylinders models. you can download 2 sky cubes from my homepage, or make your own ones in Terragen 1, both for free (you can find there a tutorial how to do it, and some scripts that handles auto camera settings and rendering, to do it faster).

Well I'd strongly recommend an upgrade, as Shaders are standard today.
On the other hand (as I have seen the gameplay video on Youtube): Use as highly detailed textures as possible, turn on anti-aliasing, use higher-poly models with - again - better textures. Improve some (or most) of the movement code (syncing animation and movement, no "strafing" cars, etc., etc.) Add effects (e.g. a proper explosion for the hand grenade)
This would polish things up a lot, I think.

Edit: I forgot: Probably better get rid of all the real brands in the game and make up your own (as they did in the real GTA series). I think Subway and Audi (among others) are not amused when their (trademarked) logos and designs are used in an indie video game portraying violence.

Another edit: Shaders won't make your game suddenly look great. Professional games do look good because of passion for detail and that stuff I mentioned above.

imo shaders are important and they can boost the visuals a lot.
but of course, shaders are not a magic switch you can flip that makes everything look awesome.
some careful tweaking and good resources (textures, meshes) are needed.

Actually, all you would see without shaders on current hardware is the clear color. It's not about any cool effects (although a lot is possible), but about determining the vertex positions in clip space for the rasterizer and determining the fragment color for output.

The "fixed function pipeline" used by gamestudio when not assigning shaders is outdated for more than five years (at least 6, but I think it's even longer) and emulated with shaders in your graphics driver, as the ffp required special hardware for its tasks.

Hi, I came across this http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showthreaded&Number=151794 which seems like it does exactly what I need but it's not working for me using A7 extra. Can anyone get this to work? i'll even pay you!

Also can anyone show me an example how I can create my own shadows using a decal sprite, I can't find anything about that anywhere

Extra edition not support decals, like not suport shaders.
Sorry but i afraid upgrade to commercial is only solution.

Ahh okay thanks, I can't upgrade, my project isn't compatible with A8 I've tried already. A lot of things including physics won't work and I can't start again I spent years getting my game to where it is now.

In my opinion, it will be better for you to spend time on making your project compatible with A8 (few month?) and at the same time employ someone to create a shader pipeline for you. That will be better, than sitting with nothing there, but breaking your head, trying to get shaders to work with outdated engine version.

Greets

I 100% agre with 3run, this is your best option, but also i totaly understand your problems. Try contact support did you can upgrade to A7 commercial. I am sure that they will help you if you explain your problem. If not, try open topic, maybe someone want sell A7 com licence.
Then you will solve problems with shadows. About shaders... there is no great solutions for c-script.
But at leasts you can try mix your c-script and lite-c, and use shaders like bloom, dof,... I think this with mixing c-script and lite-c, work only in versions A7.5.

BTW: Don't scared try translate whole code into lite-c, this can be done faster than you think. Just try, if you stuck somewhere community will help you.

Nope, this is not possible, no matter what version you got.


Agree, translating CAN be rather easy and fast, but some code parts can be harder to translate. My Tip (i didnt read the whole thread): If you have no problems - continue with c-script, but if it holds you back too much, then I would say: Do it!

Chris i not recomanded this option, but this is 100% possible, and work without any problems. You have example code in one of Aum magazines, i think in Aum100. My friend Pavle use this method in his project also, beacuse he use old c-script templates. Try search in Showchase games "Skulls", "Blades of Power" or "Secret Sword" and you will see.

Hi,

I think that an A8 licence work with the same A7 edition.

It's possible. AUM 100 -> Exquisite contributions -> Featured contributions -> Sorcerers by Pavle Nikolic. Check the source code, it's a mix of C-Script and Shade-C which was written using Lite-C.

I couldn't figure how he did that though.

Including lite-C scripts in a wdl script is officially not supported and you will not find to much informations about this. But now with example code from Pavle it should not be a big problem. Important thing - combining doesn't work in game studio versions higher then A7.50

Oh..Thanks. I tried mixing Lite-C and C-Script with the A8 Free edition, but it didn't work, now I know why... hehe.

Also, congrats for the prize!

Btw C-script is not supported in A8 Free edition only in Trial or some above. Thanks

Great to see this old topic revived!
I can also just agree with the previous comments. Upgrade to A8 and then try to migrate your code, the community will help. From the gameplay-video, some of the movement and physics code needs some fixing anyway, so why not combine this?

Thanks for all the replies guys, I did manage to get my game to run in A8 after months of converting code but I had to abandon it because it would run fine if I ran it from WED but once I published it and ran the .exe it would crash to desktop without warning so it was a dead end. I will contact support to see if an A8 key is compatible with A7 if not I will try to convert it to work with A8 again.

I still have A8 on my computer I can do a YouTube video to show how A8 crashes if you like?

Better send the log file (-diag)

Right, I have a 30 day trial version of 3D GameStudio so I have access to shaders. If all goes well I was told by support I can buy an A8 com licence to unlock my A7!! I have already tested the pp_bloomblur.fx and it works! My question now is what's the best Bloom blur shader around? I have been looking but keep getting dead links. I need one that is compatible with c-script and looks better. Also I was reading that I can apply fake shadows through a post processing shader (shadow mapping) which would be much faster than stencil, is this true?

Thanks

if you need a lot of dynamic shadows, shadowmapping is faster. if you use mainly static shadows and a few stencil shadows cast by simple low poly objects, stencil shadows can be faster. but you can combine static shadows with shadowmapping as well to improve performance. moreover, imo you can get better quality by shadowmapping. just check my latest contribution