Im stil working on my 3rd Person Horror Action Adventure Game (A7)
<Shade-C Beta> Terrain and Water are stil wip.
Most vegetation also stil missing.
Player Code written by Rondidon, modified by Superku and me.




http://www.indiedb.com/games/downside-evil

Looks good. I`d like to see the player code in action. Maybe you could make a little video?
What`s that weird thing in the water? Looks like a television interference . You could work on the lighting of the scene. Moonlight is bright light and casts vague shadows.

Oh and I could help you out with some tips about vegetation. I would heavily recomment to use something like Blender to create a big vegetation mesh. Placing the objects individually in Wed is a bad method referring to performance and stability of the engine. I had a similar problem with my shooter project a while ago, too. Change the level design method as long as you`re able to. Prevent yourself from trouble and get a better workflow! I could give you links to some good tutorials and maybe few vegeation models (for free, of course). Check out Terminal26, Loopix and Dexosft. They have good grass and tree sprites and models.

@Rondi: Ill think about a video once ive completed the file-package for you.
About the water: Well, Shade-C (beta) water is stil wip. The Part in the middle of the water is GS watermirror shader.

About vegetation: that is why i stil wait to fill the level with grass. I wanna find a solution that has almost no effect on the performance.
The Methode you suggested about using one big file for grass is one idea, but i would prefer to have a colormap where the grass models generate themself if the player is near. The Serious vegetation code is almost perfect for that, problem there is that even the invisible grassmodels are stil sucking on the performance.

Wrote a real motion blur some time ago but it did not look good (esp. edge bleeding made it look bad) and the effect was pretty expensive. Now I've got a fake motion blur that looks much better than the previous "real" one and simple ambient occlusion, both only need depth information and are self-made, haven't had a look at the usual SSAO technique(s), yet.



EDIT: Ambient occlusion comparison: http://www.superku.de/ao_compare.jpg
(motion blur is still active and costs performance, but speed is 0, so no blur visible)
Btw. it's of course no real ambient occlusion, it's a "depth booster".

@alibaba: Thx!

WANT IT!!

@Chris_Oat: Vegatation is always bad for the performance.
In my shooter project I created different "vegetation zones" per level. Then I wrote a little code snippet that switched the meshes invisible that were most distanced from the camera view. But that`s not very elegant and inefficient.
For my new project I created one big mesh that is always visible. It has around 25k faces. Not the best method, too, but it works fast for smaller ares. Import is that you design your level in a way that the vegetation sprites don`t strike to be needy of polygons. For example use simple (one-sided) faces for the background vegatation (grass and sprite trees) and models of a higher quality for the gameplay area. Always look for the best compromise. Don`t use a model that is about 1000 faces instead of 400 faces and looks just a bit better. Don`t use a 512x512 texture if you go well with a 128x128 image.
Even if it`s more work: Designing your own models instead of using pre-defined ones from Dexsoft etc. and using a great editor like Blender saves a lot FPS and nerves. Plus the result will look better if you work stylistically confident.

@Superku: Very impressive. You`re a wonderful coder.

I just finished on some models... after quite some time not modeling





regards

Aztec

Thank you, Rondidon!
Last update on this topic: (Almost) finished this rendering setup, now with bloom. I think the subtle shadows/ fake AO add nicely to the depth perception:


(lower screenshot taken without fake motion blur, without fake AO and without bloom)

May not look as nice as other solutions and I've got a fast pc, but runs at 390+fps on 1280x720 screen resolution.

The lack of depth clipping on objects that are very far away from an edge is actually pretty cool,it looks like a crazy blend between cartoon and realistic.

@Rodidon :
If you play Need For Speed etc .. i think it's textue not 3D !
Some othesr uses 3D tiles or a tool that allow to "gleu" any type of pluggable 3D tiles road made to be "glued" together !
or you could use Texture projection on top of 3D road also.
But if you plan polygons and the engine handles all that, go for it !

@Redeemer:
My photo is included in 3D coat by default
Just kidding, it's photo from the author of 3D Coat !