ok, here it goes... let the whining begin...

so far, via the generousity of some of the talented coders here who have made their work available, i've been able to get shaders working in 3dgs... and some of my attempts at emulating the next DOOM3 looking scenery didn't look too bad...

that's the good part...

i've found though... that making a game with extensive use of shader effects in 3dgs is still not practical... at least not for me...

i'm talking bumpmapping / normal mapping shaders here...

just the simple act of mixing a water shader, a level shader on a few non complex blocks, and adding a shaded moving model to the scene, causes a noticable slowdown of the animated water, and jerkiness in the camera movement... to the point of being totally unusable for gameplay...

also... with the exception of interior scenes, making any environment that needs fog and lighting and shadows look like anything, is a task set forth by the gods...

shadows act up... shaders aren't affected by fog... more than a few lights slow the scene down to a crawl...

so far, 3dgs and shaders looks like it's limited to limited demos right now... at least from where i'm standing... err, sitting... as my ability to mod the shader code is minimal at best...

my only small bit of success has been with the older, static lit shaders that took the shadow/lightmapping that the engine does when compiling a level... the newer stuff appears to be a lil too taxing for the system...


hey... i warned ya... it was a whing session you were netering...

has anyone gotten anything on the order of a game utilizing shaders working, or past the point where it looks like it's gonna work out... (if so, a link to the site, screenies, demos, anything would be appreciated)

... i could use a lil motivation to get me out of this whining phase i'm going through.

to be honest... none of the other comparable game dev tools has shaders working that good yet either... all seem problematic at this stage...

what about future engine forecasts... anything on the horizon along these lines...


thx for listening

--Mike

---- deleted by me (sorry, i forgot about this. I will do us all a favor and just delete my posts as i mentioned some time ago.... just needed a quick reminder what this is all about) --------

cheers and have a good one

this is relevant to the topic at hand... i would suggest it stays here so that the movers and shader shakers will give it the attention it might deserve to get a wider response and input...

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i would also suggest to move this topic to general or morbius since we should keep the shader part of the forum for shaders only

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while titled "Shader Whining"... it is not off center to the shader discussion, and does bring up relevant points for exchange and for comment and consideration of those who are actually coding these, as well as those who are employing them...

for instance, some of the stuff you just posted...

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+bumpmapping works perfect

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not quite true... there is a noticable and signifcant performance hit... and fog is not affecting any bumpmapped shadered object.

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problem is that most users test shaders in test levels and use the same ones in the end game.

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well, if they aint working in the test level... you'll never get to the end game... i'm missing the point here...

you go on to state that all these shaders work fine... while in some cases that is true, combine one or two of em... watch the results.

and while the use of shadowing is needed for any semi realistic scene development... shadows are still faulty and implementing shadows with shaders again adds to the performance degradation... significantly...

hey... maybe i'm missing a few things here... can i see something that you've made, a small level maybe, that implements some of these shaders successfully...

... help point me in the right direction.



--Mike

---- deleted too -------
(sorry)

...haven't read the whole thread but if fog is missing then the author of the shader simply forgot to handle fog in the vertex shader. with hlsl this is just one line of code. -> http://www.conitecserver.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=SHADER&Number=432085 (my second post in this thread)

thx Vent... looking at it now...


can you comment a bit on how you are finding implementing shaders in your development?

--Mike

@Red: If you want to see how badly full blown shaders can crawl a system then check out the newest Thief game. Of course, there's always Doom 3 but Thief 3 has shaders everywhere, too and it's plain ridiculous at times. I think these types of games are just going to chug along by their very nature and you need a machine from those gods you mentioned to get anything enjoyable out of them. Makes me glad I'm focusing on lame point & click(gasp!) and storytelling(choke!).

All the shaders work fine, but you must use them judiciously. If fogging doesnt work it's because we didn't put it in the shader for some reason. Fog can be easily added.. in any HLSL pass just add this your vertex shader output struct:
float Fog: FOG;

and then in your vertex shader:
// Add fog
float3 PositionWorld = mul(inPos, matWorld);
float ofog = 1 - (distance(PositionWorld, vecViewPos) - vecFog.x) * (vecFog.z*1.5);
Out.Fog = ofog;

In some shaders I don't add fog because they are meant to be used indoors. For instance my Ultimate lighting Shaders were designed to be indoor only, hence no fogging and no sunlight. This can be easily be changed however.

In any case, There are indeed problems with tangent lighting shaders on World geometry. To make it work better, make sure you set all the blocks to "flat" and have "tesselate flat" set to "auto". Here there can be a problem though which I have informed JCL about, but i dont know if he has taken a look at it yet.. sometimes if vertices are welded you can get odd lighting problems. So what i do is either use models for everything, or use blocks where the egdes dont touch.

Of course using shaders will slow you down a bit depending on the complexity and what kind of card you have. There are some specifc optimizations that could be done with the shader system that haven't been done...however, i have good performance in my game- which isn't a "test" level, but huge outdoors areas. My terrain has the max number of faces allowed on a terrain (32,000 or something).
My terrain shader mixes 4 color textures, 2 detail textures, a main normal map,vertex lighting, and an environmental bump map. The framerate is hardly effected by all this. On top of that all my regular models like guns, monsters all have 2 pass, 8 light per-pixel lighting shaders. My water does cubic environment bump mapping. Even so i get good framerates, even with a render backbuffer Dll doing fullscreen Bloom effect.

In general using terrains and models is faster than world geometry. I tend to avoid world geometry whenever possible.

OB - yeah... you're right... i was surprised though, to see DOOM3 working as well as it did on the GeForce5200 2.something GHz machine i have here...


Matt - thx for the tips... i'm modding the bumpmapping shader now with the fog insert...

it is encouraging to hear that you're getting good results on an outdoor scene... quick question...

... i'm using a matrix based water entity that is running lil sinusoidal loop code to undulate the water surface... do you think that another approach might be faster... better... overall when used with the water shader?

also... how are you dealing with shadows?

thx again

--Mike