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