Refactoring Arx Fatalis: Difference between revisions
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*** Improved fog | *** Improved fog | ||
*** Nicer water | *** Nicer water | ||
*** Have actual text rendered on in-game notices/signs (just so we have an excuse to implement distance field text rendering) | |||
* '''Long-term goals''' to keep in mind: | * '''Long-term goals''' to keep in mind: |
Revision as of 02:14, 30 January 2013
Subsystems - Discussion regarding the engine initialization and its major components
Scripting
- Remove / cleanup the script parsing in GetInfosCombineWithIO
- Parse scripts into some form of IR instead of executing directly.
- Share loaded scripts between IOs
- Match timers by name when loading savegames
- Cleanup GetInfosCombineWithIO()
Savegames
- Keep the SaveBlock instance open througout the game (and create it at game start to simplify things)
- Autosave when changing levels - almost all needed information is already saved here
- Track which IOs changed and don't always save all of them!
Audio
- Implement environmental effects (reverb) for the OpenAL backend using the EFX OpenAL extension. Reverb is available in the DirectSound backend when EAX is available (Creative drivers only?)
Interface
- Rewrite that mess.
- Fix aspect ratio of some interface elements for non-5:4 resolutions.
Renderer
Current state
- Lighting is done on the CPU
- Static light components are pre-calculated for static scene meshes
- Other lighting is done per frame
- Lighting is per vertex only - there is no support for per-fragment lighting effect (normal maps, ...)
- Vertex transformation is done on the CPU, except for static scene meshes
- Animation is done on the CPU
- OpenGL doesn't directly support the pre-transformed vertex format used, we currently use a small vertex shader for this
- D3D doesn't clip the pre-transformed vertices - we removed (some of?) the SW frustrum clamping code and this has caused rendering artifacts for some users
- Vertices are already managed in vertex buffers, there is little of the immediate mode GL API
- We don't have any shader infrastructure
- Possibly useful project: shiny
- Vertex colors are stored as the D3D-friendly BRGA format - OpenGL needs the
ARB_vertex_array_bgra
extension for this.
- We have no infrastructure for post-processing effects
- This could remove the need for he normal rendering code to know about some spell effects
- This could be useful to reimplement brightness/contrast/gamma, at least in windowed mode or when not otherwise supported.
Goals
- Hardware transform & lighting
- What OpenGL / Direct3D versions do we want to target?
- Under Linux we should support the open-source Mesa drivers, but for what chipsets
- For D3D we already use D3D9
- For OpenGL we may currently technically be able to run with GL 1.5 but really need some extensions to run well
- OpenGL ES support would be really useful
- We could have multiple backends / code paths with different requirements
- Will we be using forward rendering (used now) or deferred shading
- Transparent objects are in the minority (and often are emissive or don't have normal lighting) while there are many small lights, so deferred shading could be a good option
- However, we probably need to deal with the lights anyway for the shadows and separate real light sources from those that are used to simulate global illumination
- Transparent objects are in the minority (and often are emissive or don't have normal lighting) while there are many small lights, so deferred shading could be a good option
- We want to upgrade the visuals while also staying true to the original game atmosphere
- Some effects that could be nice
- Parallax bump mapping, Legend of Grimrock style :)
- Improved fog
- Nicer water
- Have actual text rendered on in-game notices/signs (just so we have an excuse to implement distance field text rendering)
- Some effects that could be nice
- Long-term goals to keep in mind:
- Support for offscreen rendering and post-processing (with depth buffer available)
- Supports for real shadows (shadow mapping or shadow volumes?)
- Support for HDR rendering
- Support for stereographic rendering
- This means separating updating (physics, animations, ...) and rendering, which is a good idea anyway!
Also see the List of Milestones.
Roadmap
- TODO