peachykeen

Well, since I'm looking for testers, absolutely. I have a semi-working MW demo and was talking with shadeMe last night about working with OBGE, so I hope to have some testable copies out here soon. The holidays will be a delay, of course, but I wanted to announce before then. Once everything is working, there will be quite a bit in the way of shaders to play with, and anything made for one game will work with the others as well.

I've been working on this little project for a few weeks now, and have enough of a start that I feel comfortable posting WIP threads around. The basic idea stemmed from my frustration with shaders not working in OBGE, MGE and NWShader, and a few folks requesting a universal shader system for any game. It took a little while to come up with a workable concept, but once I broke ground on it, things have been coming along nicely. What is Voodoo? The Voodoo Shader Framework is a system designed to add special effects and enhanced graphics to a variety of games. It improves the look, and sometimes speed, of old and new games. The goal of Voodoo is to provide a unified, uniform and consistent target for adding shaders to almost any game. At this time, Voodoo has been internally tested in Oblivion, Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights 2. Screenshots from each can be found toward the end of this post. The entire Voodoo project, including all game adapters, is open-source. If any programmers or shader artists have questions or comments as to the specifics, please get in touch with me. What is Voodoo/Sigil? Sigil is the adapter for Oblivion. It handles the details of using Voodoo shaders in the game. At the moment, Sigil is set up to use a single shader for testing purposes. Once I’ve made sure everything works properly, a user-configurable list will be used. Sigil will also support advanced materials (shaders applied to objects in-game, providing current generation rendering effects). Sigil will work with or replace Oblivion’s internal shaders, at the user’s option. What features does/will Sigil have? Voodoo and Sigil provide a comprehensive system for postprocessing and material shaders, including automatic parameter and texture linking and shader render-to-texture features. In simpler terms, that means fullscreen and per-object effects are possible, as well as shaders using or creating textures used in-game. Sigil will not break Oblivion’s water or postprocessing shaders, although it will provide its own versions of these effects. Additional effects, such as SSAO and depth of field, will also be made available. Sigil will be integrated with OBSE to provide script access to shaders and effects. Parameters and textures can be changed ingame, as well as enabling and disabling shaders. Sigil uses a shader system spanning multiple games, and even graphics APIs (Voodoo works with both DirectX and OpenGL). A single target is provided to developers and artists; this means any shader written for Voodoo/Gem will function in all Voodoo-supported games. Having more games supports means a bit more work, but it also means more people testing the system and writing shaders for it. There’s no reason for MGE, OBGE and NWShader to all use different systems for the same thing (the Voodoo project was born from the fact that I was fed up with the little incompatibilities). Voodoo also opens a new family of effects, using the shader-based render-to-texture system. Shaders can create or modify game textures on the fly, making overlays or reactive environments a very real possibility. I’ve only started playing with some of these effects, but they allow for such things as dynamic raindrops on the screen, world textures reacting to the player or scripts, or even letting the player paint a picture ingame. What’s the difference between Sigil and OBGE? Sigil uses the Voodoo Shader Framework, a system designed to make shaders accessible and constant between games. Voodoo shaders written for Morrowind, NWN2 or any other supported game will function in Sigil as well. This opens a lot more developers, artists and testers. I have been trying to get in touch with the OBGE developers, in order to work with them if at all possible. I’d much rather cooperate with them somehow rather than rewrite everything they’ve done, or worse yet create a competing project. So far, I haven’t been able to contact them, and have been doing some test work on my own. I will continue trying for some time, and if any OBGE devs see this thread, please toss me a PM. Depending on whether I do talk to the OBGE devs and what comes out of that, some of these details may change. In the event that I can’t reach them, I’ll be continuing work on Voodoo/Sigil as planned. Screenshots Most of these are little things so far, just test shaders and patterns to demonstrate the system works. As I get more code together and things more complete, fancier screens will be available. Oblivion: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/ScreenShot8.jpg http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/ScreenShot15.jpg http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/ScreenShot16.jpg Morrowind: A delayed picture-in-picture with a color shift: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/Voodoo_GEM_16.png http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/Voodoo_GEM_15.png Fullscreen: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/CopyofGEM_2.png Neverwinter Nights 2: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/nwn2.jpg (the NWN module isn't ready yet, as it takes a bit more infrastructure) How can you help? At this point, I need people willing to help test. You should have a semi-functioning computer and Oblivion (the latest patch is preferred). Testing pretty much consists of downloading the latest files, running Oblivion and telling me if anything goes horribly wrong. Having a variety of systems to test on is important for stability. Everything from Windows 2000 to 64-bit editions of 7 can help make sure there are no nasty little bugs in Voodoo. I am setting up a bug-tracker and merging my shader forum into a larger forum, both will be used to support Voodoo. If you are a code or shader developer with any interest in contributing, or just questions, please get in touch. If you don’t fall into any of the above, cheering on, suggestions, comments and general encouragement are also welcome.

As some of you may have caught, I haven't been exactly pleased with the development of MGE lately. The details are rather technical, but it's been getting to the point where I can hardly use it. Considering most of my releases are shaders, that doesn't work so well. A while back I undertook creating a similar system for Neverwinter Nights; that project went quite well and the shader framework there ended up being a good bit more powerful and flexible than MGE's. After that experience and success, and thanks in part to questions from some of the folks that hang around, I decided to bring my new system back to Morrowind. I now have it working enough to post WIP threads. What is Voodoo? The Voodoo Shader Framework is a system designed to add special effects and enhanced graphics to a variety of games. It improves the look, and sometimes speed, of old and new games. The goal of Voodoo is to provide a unified, uniform and consistent target for adding shaders to almost any game. At this time, Voodoo has been internally tested in Morrowind, Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2. Screenshots from each can be found toward the end of this post. The entire Voodoo project, including all game adapters, is open-source. If any programmers or shader artists have questions or comments as to the specifics, please get in touch with me. What is Voodoo/Gem? Gem is the adapter for Morrowind. It handles the details of using Voodoo shaders in the game. At the moment, Gem is set up to use a single shader for testing purposes. Once I’ve made sure everything works properly, a user-configurable list will be used. Gem will also support advanced materials (shaders applied to objects in-game, providing current generation rendering effects). What features does/will Gem have? Voodoo and Gem provide a comprehensive system for postprocessing and material shaders, including automatic parameter and texture linking and shader render-to-texture features. In simpler terms, that means fullscreen and per-object effects are possible, as well as shaders using or creating textures used in-game. Gem will provide a distant land system comparable to MGE’s. If possible, they will use identical files (to make transitioning between the systems easier). Gem will not break Morrowind’s water shaders and will allow players to keep using them, although it will provide optional enhanced water effects of its own. Thanks to a few tips from Hrnchamd, Gem will support shadows from distant land and, if all goes well, near objects as well. Gem will be integrated with MWSE, v0.9.4a or better, to provide script access to the shaders, land, water and other effects. Script commands will, if at all possible, be byte-by-byte identical to MGE’s MWSE commands, so that scripts won’t have to be recompiled. Additional script commands, to handle material shaders, dynamic parameters and textures and other Gem-specific features, will be added. What’s the difference between MGE and Voodoo/Gem? MGE was designed as a Morrowind-specific shader system, and has been developed over the course of several years by a number of developers (myself included). While an excellent and innovative project, the code has suffered over time, as most does. Gem is intended as a faster, more stable and cleaner re-imagining of the MGE concept. Without MGE, I wouldn’t be involved in this and Voodoo would not exist. It certainly deserves a tip of the hat. :foodndrink: Voodoo/Gem is faster than MGE. It will be more configurable, and turning a feature off will actually mean it gets turned off and has no FPS hit (something not guaranteed in recent MGE builds). Gem provides a powerful shader system, taking advantage of the full syntax of the Cg language. MGE uses a subset of the HLSL language (there is no practical difference between Cg and HLSL, except that HLSL is DirectX-specific). Gem does not make use of archaic magic names, like MGE’s “texture thisframe;†and similar; instead it uses proper annotations to allow shaders to reference textures as needed. This allows shaders to access not only Gem’s textures, but to use game-loaded texture or create their own. Gem will use a two-target rendering system to provide depth information to shaders (the color and depth buffers will be drawn simultaneously by a single shader). MGE caches renders and redraws them, causing a significant speed hit and memory increase. On systems not capable of using multiple render-targets (very old cards), Gem will fall back to a two-pass render method. Gem uses a shader system spanning multiple games, and even graphics APIs (Voodoo works with both DirectX and OpenGL). A single target is provided to developers and artists; this means any shader written for Voodoo/Gem will function in all Voodoo-supported games. Having more games supports means a bit more work, but it also means more people testing the system and writing shaders for it. There’s no reason for MGE, OBGE and NWShader to all use different systems for the same thing (the Voodoo project was born from the fact that I was fed up with the little incompatibilities). Voodoo also opens a new family of effects, using the shader-based render-to-texture system. Shaders can create or modify game textures on the fly, making overlays or reactive environments a very real possibility. I’ve only started playing with some of these effects, but they allow for such things as dynamic raindrops on the screen, world textures reacting to the player or scripts, or even letting the player paint a picture ingame. Screenshots Most of these are little things so far, just test shaders and patterns to demonstrate the system works. As I get more code together and things more complete, fancier screens will be available. Morrowind: A delayed picture-in-picture with a color shift: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/Voodoo_GEM_16.png http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/Voodoo_GEM_15.png Fullscreen: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/CopyofGEM_2.png Oblivion: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/ScreenShot8.jpg http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/ScreenShot15.jpg http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/ScreenShot16.jpg Neverwinter Nights 2: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/peachykeen000/Voodoo/nwn2.jpg (the NWN module isn't ready yet, as it takes a bit more infrastructure) How can you help? At this point, I need people willing to help test. You should have a semi-functioning computer and Morrowind. Testing pretty much consists of downloading the latest files, running Morrowind and telling me if anything goes horribly wrong. Having a variety of systems to test on is important for stability. Everything from Windows 2000 to 64-bit editions of 7 can help make sure there are no nasty little bugs in Voodoo. I am setting up a bug-tracker and merging my MGE shader forum into a larger forum, both will be used to support Voodoo. There may be some issues with the Steam releases of Morrowind, I’m unable to test those myself but will be trying to get in touch with the folks at Steam to see what I can find out about their setup. If you are a code or shader developer with any interest in contributing, or just questions, please get in touch. If you don’t fall into any of the above, cheering on, suggestions, comments and general encouragement are also welcome.

By request, Bethesda-free Gamebryo demos: "Coldwood Tech Demo" (made it 2007): Emergent tech demo, 2009: Linky Character demo: Not sure if there are others hanging around, but somehow, Bethesda always manages to leave out a lot of the power Gamebryo has (besides adding a bunch of bugs! ). Edit: ah, the source of all this nonsense: http://www.emergent.net/en/Multimedia/Videos/

+10, at least, for posting Tiamat. Brilliant band, I love their lyrics and sound. Aye, at least a few. I've been listening to them as long as I can remember.

I stop in and this is what I find? Huge congrats to the both of you! Of all the things not to come with a readme...

This has happened a few times before. The best fix is to run Windows update manually, a few days after the updates come out. A few bugs slip through (Vista was one), but they usually catch them reasonably quick.

That's insane. I want one (well, not that one, a different one). Heh, soon they'll replace CG in movies with animatronics. Won't that be backwards.

I like how you're all over-analyzing it, when I was just being smart. I think Glaedr got it, though. All parents have kids and all people die, therefore all parents die after having children (as it's not possible to die a parent before having a child).

That's something I avoid like the plague and am deathly afraid of. Although, children are more fatal then any plague in history. 100% of parents die after having children. Not even the darkest hours of European history boast a fatality rate like that. And good luck with your leg and repairs.

You mean a form? Make sure you've opened the form file in the designer and not code view.

It is open. On the right top box, flip over to the solution explorer tab. Your files should be listed.

I'd like to see how it turned out. Glad it helped. DoF is one of those effects you have to be very, very careful with. If used very subtly and given a wide focal range, it generally helps. If you over-do it, it can ruin a scene. Also, combined with bloom or lens flare, it can be a very useful effect. A night scene looks much better if you have depth of field before a good bloom shader. The combination pulls lights out and definitely adds realism. Well, if I guessed it correctly, obviously you did a good job of what it was supposed to be. I'm used to the traditional smooth stone for castles and old buildings (all the old places around here (east coast US) have, usually, smooth-worn granite or marble for nicer buildings), so I didn't expect a stucco. It definitely looks like it, though (I've never seen dark stucco like that before).

Looks pretty good! I'd like to see a full trailer or sample. Couple minor things I noticed, though. Your grass is cutting off when it meets the ground (yes, I know that's how it works). A trick to make it less obvious is decrease the alpha near the bottom (so it fades out quickly and subtly when as it meets the ground). Going from 100%-50% in the bottom 1/4 or 1/8 of the texture doesn't ruin the look of the grass, but can help a lot with that sharp line you usually get at the bottom. I've seen a grass mesh with and without that transparency, and it definitely looks a lot better with (and isn't hard to do). Your rock shader (from one of the fly-bys) is looking a lot like stucko (sp? the thick, spikey stuff they cover some ceilings with). Especially in ruins like that, it should be a lot smoother. Finally, the depth of field is too obvious and is being funny with the edges of things there. You might want to make it softer or spread it further (have it affect near objects slightly and far objects a little less). It reminds me of the DoF in Legendary, which was absolutely terrible (although that game, using the same engine, had some excellent shaders for other areas, especially the flowing water over stones outside the castle).

If you try to change it too far from the original engine design, though (say if you made an RTS or RPG on the team shooter engine), you'd want that source access. Unless you have to change some significant mechanics, you should be good. Note though, using Unreal script will (most likely) be a little slower than if you had changed the source, so you might have to be careful there. It has to go through another layer of interpretation, which can't help speed. Heh, cause Epic needs more money. I wouldn't consider UE3 as one of the best engines out there, actually. It's missing a few features and a little slower than others (notably Aurora 3 (The Witcher) and the current generation of Gamebryo (not used for anything yet, I don't think) ), but does scale quite nicely (if you need an engine that scales, only Source and Unreal can provide that). I'd be surprised if they really didn't strip anything out of the indie version but the code, but it is possible. The materials system is nice (I've played with it before), though there's a point where it starts to limit you a little. I'm not sure which language it uses for shaders, but if you have someone skilled in that, there really isn't much you can't do (fur, velvet, mirrors, crystal, chrome, almost anything is possible with a shader). Be careful with the special effects, though. A lot of people still have low-end systems that just can't handle too much, so make sure you have fallback paths and materials for all your high-end ones. As for team: there's a fine balance between too many people and too few. Too few and each has too much work and will eventually fall under the strain. Too many and each doesn't care, or doesn't have enough to do, and will get lost and drift away. You have to judge it just right, and usually it takes constant attention and rebalancing to make sure everyone is interested and involved.

Interesting. I'll have to check that out. Last I saw the price, it was close to half a million dollars, which put me off looking deeper. I'm wondering what they had to strip out to be licensing it for $99 now. Well in that case, excellent material! Tell your shader authors to be very, very careful though: they can't use that material in a dry area. Most developers (Bethesda is especially bad at this) severely over-use specular, which makes everything look wet. Kill specular on your normal/parallax maps, and it'll look way better.

Your screenshot looks nice! (although the shader on the wall could use some work, looks wet ) One thing I can think of with using the Unreal Engine: it costs. A whole bunch. Commercial licenses can easily clear $300,000 USD, and I don't know how much indie licenses are. However, if you can afford it, it's not a bad engine to develop on. It has a lot of features and can be extended/customized nicely, and the shader editor/material system is pretty extensive (you can make things look good easy ). How are you planning on allowing developers to help with modeling or scripting? Unless you can get everyone a copy of the dev kit, that might be a problem. Good luck on your project! I'll be watching and check out any demos.

This is a project I've been working on for roughly the last week (plus a few days). In essence, it's MGE rewritten for Neverwinter Nights. If you have any familiarity with Morrowind Graphics Extender, it upgraded Morrowind's features to use modern hardware. With it, Morrowind can compete with games like STALKER and Crysis for visual quality. One particular example: Before MGE: http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/1874/screenshot3fq.png With MGE: http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/4926/mgescreenshot5.png (both from this post) Backstory: One day, I was playing NWN. It's an amazing game, but could certainly use some of MGE's features, so I whipped out some code I have to hook DirectX, turned it on, and.... nothing happened. I soon learned NWN uses OpenGL, that wonderful alternative to DirectX that I had absolutely no experience with. So after a 2-day crash course in how to program for OpenGL, I started in on this. After many failures, breakages, and other bad things, I have a semi-working (at least on my system) copy. I've been putting in more features as I can make them, and getting things working better. At the moment, I don't have enough testers to help fix things, so I'm looking for people with NWN, willing to try and run it once a day (you don't even have to play ). However, OpenGL varies a lot by system. I need help testing, and making sure it's compatible. I'm not asking for help developing it, just testers! All you need to own is a copy of Neverwinter Nights. NWShader should work with any version, but I can only test on the Diamond Edition. The current demo copy is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nwshader/files/ Along with a few screenshots of it running in NWN. I have it working on my system, I just need to make sure it works for everyone else. The copy on SF is just an extract-and-run version (or should be). This (and NWN itself) requires OpenGL to run. Preferably version 2.0 or better. You can get an OpenGL caps viewer if you don't know, but if you have a Radeon 9600 or better, or the GeForce equivalent from that year (I need to look up exactly what that is) you should be fine. Any video card from 2002 on should work with most of the features.

Welcome!

That's actually a real pain to do, the depth. It took forever, and is just a distant-land re-rendering hack, really. To get to it in Oblivion would be a lot harder, depending on how it's set up. Plus, it'll take hooking a lot more than OBGE does now. I'll look into it, though, if I have a running copy of Obvs.

Hello! And don't worry, you're not the only one forced into coming here. They threatened me with slavery or posting. I'm still regretting my choice.