Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

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Firebrand
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Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Firebrand »

Hi! I've just uploaded a new revision of Vavoom engine, which contains the test for the advanced renderer, this updated version of the renderer has new lightning features (real time shadows, new lightning mode for models, among other nice looking stuff...), we would like to know if it works fine for each of you, please download it and test, also note that this new features are only available in OpenGL rendering mode, using Direct3d might not work properly as of now.

The engine has code that will select the new renderer automatically for you if your hardware supports it, the main requirements for the advanced renderer is that your video hardware supports shaders, video cards from 2 or 3 years ago will not have problems with this AFAIK. You can get the test version from the usual spot at: http://svn.drdteam.org/vavoom/

If you don't see the new renderer, chances are your hardware doesn't supports shaders, if you think your hardware does support renderer and want to test the new features, you can type the following BEFORE starting the game:

Code: Select all

r_level_renderer 2
. If starting the game with this option produces incorrect graphics or a crash, then your hardware can't run the new renderer, you can return to the normal renderer bu typing at the console:

Code: Select all

r_level_renderer 0
Please post your experience with the new renderer on this thread, if you find any bugs, please report them on the usual way, Enjoy!
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Gez
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Gez »

Hmm... It gives me "host_error: advanced rendering not supported by graphics card" which honestly surprised me. It's a GeForce 9600M GT. Supports OpenGL 3.1.0, Shader Model 4 and GLSL 1.40.

PS: Hope you don't mind me moving this to News to give it more visibility.
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Graf Zahl
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Graf Zahl »

I get the same error with a Geforce 8600GT and a GL 3.3 driver. (v197.45)

What's your minimum requirements?
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Enjay »

I can't test it very thoroughly ATM but it seems OK so far on my GeForce 285GTX, Win7 64bit (driver 197.45)
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Graf Zahl »

That confirms at least the hardware requirement (meaning that the vast majority won't be able to use it...)

What ultra-modern feature does this need? The Geforce 8xxx and 9xxx series normally should be good enough for all shader based features.
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Firebrand »

Just to be sure, you are selecting the OpenGL renderer in the launcher? Direct3D always returns false for advanced renderer support, since changes to it aren't complete, as for minimum requirements, the actual check for determining if the video hardware supports the advanced renderer checks for support of stencil buffer, shader support and support for glStencilFuncSeparate method, which is OpenGL 2.0 AFAIK.
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Gez
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Gez »

Firebrand wrote:Just to be sure, you are selecting the OpenGL renderer in the launcher?
I do not use the launcher. I start vavoom.exe directly. Why? Because the launcher always fail to launch the game. Instead it pops up an error messagebox telling me "ChangeResolution: Failed to set default resolution \ Stack trace: ChangeResolution <- CheckResolutionChange <- SCR_Update <- Host_Frame".

So I use the console commands you provided. r_level_renderer 2.
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Firebrand »

Aha! That might explaing the problem you are having, please use the -opengl parameter when running the game and test again :). If you don't specify the renderer to use, it will force the software renderer (which obviously doesn't has any support for advanced renderer).
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Post by Gez »

A few general comments, not renderer-specific:
- Alt-tabbing away and back kills mouselook. It turns it into mousestrafe!
- Keyboard input is still not international-friendly (e.g. it treats an AZERTY keyboard as QWERTY)
- Can't bind mouse4 and mouse5

Now that's out of the way, I've made a quick playthrough in Doom II's first two levels. Two issues I've noticed can be summed up with this screenshot:
Image
It's far from being dark enough, and the way the sprite outlines are blurred is a bit glitched.

In the same place, the missing lower textures around the squares in which you drop provoke HOM glitches far more visible than they are in GZDoom.

Lastly, the crosshair seemed invisible in this mode.
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Firebrand »

I've got some solutions for the problems you mentioned:

- Not Dark enough: You can enable two options that might solve the problem for you, under the advanced options menu there's the darken lights option, activate it and it will make lights darker, you can also activate the simulate faded lights option, which will simulate dooms fading of lights to the distance :).

- Blurred sprite edges: Under advanced options disable the blend sprite borders option.

I haven't really noticed that the crosshair wasn't being drawn, heh! :)
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Graf Zahl
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Graf Zahl »

Firebrand wrote: - Blurred sprite edges: Under advanced options disable the blend sprite borders option.
To do this right you need to post-process the sprite's texture buffer. Have a look at GZDoom's SmoothEdges function. Doing such a thing works wonders.

One thing that immediately put me off is that it completely ignores my preferred video settings and forces the refresh rate to 60 Hz. Are you explicitly setting the refresh rate? Most other OpenGL software recognizes that I want to use 85 Hz with 1280x1024 but Vavoom only gets to start with 60. That doesn't look nice on my monitor.

Something unrelated: I wanted to check out how Vavoom handles Hellcore's MAP09 but I can't start that WAD because I get a fatal error 'Sprite SSWV is missing rotations.'

1) Why do I get this error?
2) Why is it fatal?

After editing the WAD and going to my favorite vantage point on the steeple the big disappointment sets in:
- 14 fps - second slowest of all ports after Doomsday
- HOMs galore. This map works glitch-free with all other ports I tested it in.
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by dark-slayer-201 »

Very good. This is the first time I have played Vavoom. I cannot get it to use 16:9 aspect ratio though.
Is there any possibility of porting the dynamic lights into gzdoom?
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Gez »

Firebrand wrote:- Not Dark enough: You can enable two options that might solve the problem for you, under the advanced options menu there's the darken lights option, activate it and it will make lights darker, you can also activate the simulate faded lights option, which will simulate dooms fading of lights to the distance :).
I had already those two turned on, actually. :wink: It's still a lot brighter than it is in the original software renderer. GZDoom comes closer to showing the correct darkness level (in Doom sector light mode, and with ambient light level set to the minimum). Maybe different sector lighting modes would be a solution? I haven't seen the option anywhere.
dark-slayer-201 wrote:Very good. This is the first time I have played Vavoom. I cannot get it to use 16:9 aspect ratio though.
Is there any possibility of porting the dynamic lights into gzdoom?
GZDoom already has dynamic lights...
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by dark-slayer-201 »

dark-slayer-201 wrote:Very good. This is the first time I have played Vavoom. I cannot get it to use 16:9 aspect ratio though.
Is there any possibility of porting the dynamic lights into gzdoom?
GZDoom already has dynamic lights...
That has the old hacky ones. I meant pore the Realtime lights.

Edit: typo
Last edited by dark-slayer-201 on Thu May 20, 2010 9:27, edited 1 time in total.
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Firebrand
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Re: Vavoom engine advanced renderer test

Post by Firebrand »

Graf Zahl wrote:To do this right you need to post-process the sprite's texture buffer. Have a look at GZDoom's SmoothEdges function. Doing such a thing works wonders.
I'll have a look to it and try to implement it on Vavoom, thanks for pointing it out ;).
Graf Zahl wrote:One thing that immediately put me off is that it completely ignores my preferred video settings and forces the refresh rate to 60 Hz. Are you explicitly setting the refresh rate? Most other OpenGL software recognizes that I want to use 85 Hz with 1280x1024 but Vavoom only gets to start with 60. That doesn't look nice on my monitor.
Vavoom uses the refresh rate that is set on Windows, I've got mine set to 75 Hz, with the recent changes I can't get more than 70 FPS, even when drawing the automap, performance with the new rendering methods still needs improvements, but it's not easy to get it to the best, I hope that with the time we'll improve them as much as possible :).
Graf Zahl wrote:Something unrelated: I wanted to check out how Vavoom handles Hellcore's MAP09 but I can't start that WAD because I get a fatal error 'Sprite SSWV is missing rotations.'

1) Why do I get this error?
2) Why is it fatal?
I'm not sure, I'll have to check the WAD file and determine what causes it, it shouldn't be a fatal error, I'll discuss it with Janis.
Graf Zahl wrote:After editing the WAD and going to my favorite vantage point on the steeple the big disappointment sets in:
- 14 fps - second slowest of all ports after Doomsday
- HOMs galore. This map works glitch-free with all other ports I tested it in.
As I said, Vavoom's renderer is still slow, there should be a way to improve the renderer, but it's not easy to find it, if anyone has ideas on this, it would be good to hear them, lol.
dark-slayer-201 wrote:That has the old hacky ones. I meant pore the Realtime lights.
dark-slayer-201 wrote:
dark-slayer-201 wrote:Very good. This is the first time I have played Vavoom. I cannot get it to use 16:9 aspect ratio though.
Is there any possibility of porting the dynamic lights into gzdoom?
GZDoom already has dynamic lights...
That has the old hacky ones. I meant pore the Realtime lights.
Vavoom doesn't yet support 16:9 aspect ratio, it might be implemented later.

As for porting dynamic lights, Vavoom's renderer it's very different from the GZDoom renderer, for starters, it's polygonal (based on the Quake renderer) while GZDoom is a slightly modified Doom renderer, I'm sure that it's possible to adapt the renderer to display shadows as the ones in Vavoom, but it might require heavy modifications.
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