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[GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Sun Feb 03, 2013 3:13 am
by bigf00t92
Hi,

I am a computer science student from Macedonia, and I am interested in participating in GSoC 2013. I found this on the project ideas page:
Create a small game using OGRE to demo its power
and I would like to work on it. I started getting acquainted with OGRE a few months ago, and I've made a game demo as a school project(a simple side-scroller action game). I would like to make another one as a part of GSoC, and I have a few questions regarding this project:

What kind of a game should this be(would a FPS or an action/RPG be OK?), and how big(small) should it approximately be?

Should the game be a part of the Ogre Demos(Samples), or a standalone application?

I'd also like to know if there would be any kind of violence allowed. For example, would the main character be allowed to shoot(or hit) enemies?

Cheers,
Vidak

P.S. Here's a video clip of my game, if anyone wants to check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSjmXsy5d6M . Also, can anyone recommend me a good book for improving my C++, especially for game programming? I'm not a complete beginner, but I'm no expert either. :)

Re: GSoC 2013 Game Demo

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 12:25 am
by drwbns
Kudos for rescuing the big giant Ogre Head :)

Re: GSoC 2013 Game Demo

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 2:41 am
by bigf00t92
Thanks. :)

Re: GSoC 2013 Game Demo

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 10:39 am
by PhilipLB
What assets would you use? :)

Re: GSoC 2013 Game Demo

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 11:56 am
by robert_sasu
Nice little game :) A good book for C++ is Effective C++ by Scott Meyers. It is not so long, but all essentials are in it :D

Re: GSoC 2013 Game Demo

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 10:04 pm
by bigf00t92
About the assets, I'm thinking about using some of the ones that are included in the engine, and I'm going to search for some free to use sounds and 3d models. I don't have a lot of experience with 3d modelling and animation, and I want to focus on programming the game. Also, thanks for the book suggestion, I'll check it out.

Re: GSoC 2013 Game Demo

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2013 10:14 pm
by robert_sasu
I am not a mentor, but as far as I see a Game Demo is not really good for a Google Summer of Project. If you read some more posts from this part of the forum, you may see that these project proposals in general were refused. There are many reasons for this. On of this is that, one person with a help of a mentor can't really make a reliable, playable, good game in 3 months time (too few developers, too few time). Another reason, that this is not a good GSoC project, from my point of view, is that there are many games, game engines and 3D applications which uses Ogre3D as graphic engine. As far as I see there is no more need of a new game to demonstrate Ogre3D's power. You can see the projects on the showcase and on the main announcement page.

Re: GSoC 2013 Game Demo

Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2013 9:06 am
by Zonder
I think it's more down to what Google will accept as a GSoC I think they only accept changes to the core engine or other enhancements to the core project like the testing framework

Re: GSoC 2013 Game Demo

Posted: Thu May 02, 2013 3:34 pm
by maxdelphi
Yes, i love much the ogre's team, and i would like see a demo game proving all graphical power....

I Would like see that made in ogre in realtime:

Here Images for Inspiration from CryEngine 3 ->

Image
Image from CryEngine 3

Image
Image from Cryengine 3

Image
Image from CryEngine 3

Image
Image from Cryengine 3..

I like much ogre, and i am not an expert, but i would like a good-graphical quality (powerful like the images) made in ogre....and that images is for inspiration ;)

Re: GSoC 2013 Game Demo

Posted: Thu May 02, 2013 3:41 pm
by Xavyiy
@maxdelphi
That's mostly a good job from the artist team. Ogre can handle these scenes without any problem.

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Thu May 02, 2013 4:34 pm
by jacmoe
MaxDelphi:
That is SpeedTree talking. Or some other advanced vegetation engine.

Of course, I wouldn't mind if some GSoC student actually went and created a SpeedTree (TM) comparable vegetation engine for Ogre ... :wink:

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Thu May 02, 2013 7:23 pm
by syedhs
Speedtree has been ported to Ogre by sinbad, and you can use it for free provided you show some proof that you have legit Speedtree license. However, Speedtree 6.0 is vastly different than from predecessor so you are out of luck in that regard. I think there is one member here who has done 6.0 Speedtree for Ogre.

Btw, I dont think Ogre can achieve similar rendering prowess as CryEngine 3.0 with acceptable performance hit - the engine has built-in of lots of 'deferred' here and there, and you cannot simply just author shaders and be done with it...

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Thu May 02, 2013 10:49 pm
by greendogo
jacmoe wrote:MaxDelphi:
That is SpeedTree talking. Or some other advanced vegetation engine.

Of course, I wouldn't mind if some GSoC student actually went and created a SpeedTree (TM) comparable vegetation engine for Ogre ... :wink:
That would be pretty cool. I'm surprised that there's not a serious open source project doing something like this yet.

Re: GSoC 2013 Game Demo

Posted: Fri May 03, 2013 6:32 am
by sparkprime
Xavyiy wrote:@maxdelphi
Ogre can handle these scenes without any problem.
This is absolutely untrue.

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Fri May 03, 2013 8:38 am
by Xavyiy
sparkprime wrote:This is absolutely untrue.
Why? I'm not talking about the original tech used to render these images, just about them as-is (because yes, ogre can not handle the tech behind the oiginal scene in cryengine, but these individual images aren't impossible to reproduce in Ogre at interactive framerates)

Just pay some attention to the individual images:
1, 2 & 4: Nothing serious but an aggresive DOF, you can't notice the quality of the scene foliage behing these models
3: No real ocean on this image (you can notice it's not the cryengine ocean, just the solution for river/lakes), just shadows (maybe with HW PCF, which you can't enable with ogre but some more shadow sampling does the trick), and good foliage/models.

To me, better examples of what you can't achieve with ogre (in realtime) are these:

Cryengine:
http://s.pro-gmedia.com/videogamer/medi ... s_3_24.jpg
http://s.pro-gmedia.com/videogamer/medi ... s_3_29.jpg
http://img.youtube.com/vi/Y0ffBZI5PpM/maxresdefault.jpg
http://www.xbox360achievements.org/imag ... r_fire.jpg

UDK:
http://todops4.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/199.jpg
http://gameshaker.ucoz.ru/new/crysis2.e ... 1ksxei.png
http://inksight.iact.edu.my/wp-content/ ... ots-71.jpg

Xavier

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Fri May 03, 2013 1:27 pm
by holocronweaver
Xavyiy wrote:
sparkprime wrote:This is absolutely untrue.
To me, better examples of what you can't achieve with ogre (in realtime) are these...
Interesting compilation. Care to explain why these are not realtime renderable in Ogre?

BTW, a moderator may want to move this discussion out of the GSoC forums. :)

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Fri May 03, 2013 1:53 pm
by jacmoe
It seems to be on topic. :)

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Fri May 03, 2013 7:11 pm
by Xavyiy
holocronweaver wrote:Interesting compilation. Care to explain why these are not realtime renderable in Ogre?
Let's try:)

Cryengine:
"The Rendering Technologies of Crysis 3": http://crytek.com/cryengine/presentatio ... f-crysis-3

Main ogre problems regarding crysis 3 rendering techniques:
  • Lack of full DX11/OGL3+ support (with full I mean production-ready, which is not the case right now, hope it'll be after the summer :wink: ). That means not tesellation at all (even current dx11 impl doesn't allow you to access texture units in hull/domain programs...)
  • Lack of hardware PCF support (in dx11 you can use Gather4, so this only applies to old-gen render systems). Enabling HW PCF for different vendors is a pain in the ass, more info: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=51214 Anyway, we should support it, soft shadows are very important!
  • For big scenes, ogre is VERY slow (the whole scene traversal is single threaded, multiple render_scene passes in compositors do a lot of uneeded work, cache misses everywhere, etc). In brief, all problems described by Matías here: http://www.ogre3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=75459
To me, the lack of full DX11/OGL3+ support is one of the major Ogre3d problems, among with Ogre 1.X performance problems when dealing with big scenes (specially with animated models).

Appart from that, the rest of the crysis 3 render pipeline could be done without much pain in Ogre, but not at interactive framerates with such big scenes. Main problems? Rendering scenes in ogre is quite slow, and that must be done 7-8 times per frame: 1 (forward) + 1 (deferred) + 2 (ocean reflect/refract - without deferred here, only forward contribution) + 3-4 (cascaded shadow maps) = 7-8 times per frame, I can ensure you that Ogre slows down to 10-20 fps even in a good machine... since I'm suffering from it! :mrgreen:

Unreal engine 4:
Even if something similar to crysis 3 could be done with ogre (but no way at 30+ fps even in an high-end machine, so not interactive), really no way of reproducing Unreal 4 stuff: http://www.unrealengine.com/files/misc/ ... x9_(2).pdf
Xavier

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Fri May 03, 2013 10:45 pm
by holocronweaver
Thanks Xavier! I am not familiar with most of the Unreal Engine 3 tech, but you have piqued my interest. Looks like I have some reading to do.

I have already accepted that I will need to create my own custom scene manager and only use Ogre for rendering, but perhaps work by Matias will change my mind. Here's to hoping. :)

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Fri May 03, 2013 11:07 pm
by spacegaier
Yes, Xavier is right, there are some issues currently in Ogre, but he is also correct that we are tackling them. This year's GSoC will most likely complete the DX11 and OGL3+ Render Systems or at least close a big part of the gap and we are also working on performance related parts (the whole "Ogre 2.0" label).

Real fast softshadows would be a great thing though ;) ...

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Tue May 07, 2013 2:00 am
by sparkprime
Xavyiy wrote:I can ensure you that Ogre slows down to 10-20 fps even in a good machine... since I'm suffering from it! :mrgreen:
Yeah this is my major beef too. This summer I am considering ripping out everything except Ogre::RenderSystem and reimplementing it myself in a manner that is specialised for my game engine.

What is needed:

* Uniform buffers working properly to avoid extremely heavy batch cost in full shader pipelines
* One thread pipelining draws into the render system since that is single-threaded
* Far more efficient cache-friendly parallelised frustum culling, including occlusion volumes

I should be able to push 3000 batches at 30fps. Instead, it's more like 300 at the moment because I have a lot of uniforms and there's a lot of overhead all through the pipeline.

Also you didn't mention the lack of compressed normal maps, custom shadow meshes (good for keeping tricount down on those passes) and the shadow projection matrixes aren't calculated very well -- I often see bugs with PSSM cascades going wild in certain situations. Also they're not clamped to world coords (this avoids a lot of the crawling with dynamic sun and/or camera movement). But these can be fixed easily. The main problem is the really poor CPU performance of Ogre, which is systemic.

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Tue May 07, 2013 2:14 am
by sparkprime
People often ask me what we use from Ogre so I maintain this list:

http://www.gritengine.com/game-engine-wiki/Ogre+Usage

Re: [GSoC 2013] Game Demo

Posted: Sun May 26, 2013 4:42 am
by neopangaia
on a side note, your engine is very interesting. http://www.gritengine.com/