Caelum - [WARNING: Screenshot intensive]

A place for users of OGRE to discuss ideas and experiences of utilitising OGRE in their games / demos / applications.
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Praetor
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Post by Praetor »

Ok. That's quite a clever system you've worked out then. So, is this map an actual texture, that perhaps an artist can edit easily (relatively) to give customized dramatic results?

I think it's really impressive what you've got going here. I really want to have the time to check this out. I had been interested in sky rendering for a while. Do you use any sort of scattering effect for aerial perspective, or is the standard fog model used?
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Kencho
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Post by Kencho »

The scattering method I use is actually a quick and inaccurate prototype. I would like to use a better one, but as you can guess, there are a lot of things I want to do here, and very few time to do it :(
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Post by xabila »

excellent job !

Are you handling directly clouds ?
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Post by Kencho »

Nope, just partially procedural for now. Hope to add some cloud generation algorithms soon :)
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Post by Azatoth »

How does it handle fallbacks for older cards? When running on a ATI Mobility 9000 I would get a black sky. I.e. is there a fallback for non-shader capable cards and I've just not set it up correctly?

Also, it seems as if the scattering in the latest version (svn 26) is much less than in previous versions. By design?
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Post by Kencho »

About the fallbacks, haven't tried here, but I'll try as soon as I can.

Regarding the scattering, yep, it's much lesser, mainly because I've been playing with things a lot (a full redesign of the shaders is on the way!). I suggest to read the revisions' comments to know which ones are stable and which aren't :)

PS: I'm about to finish a patch for Ogre that will allow very cool particle things, such as a virtually infinite particle system and distance fading. Wonderful for things such as volumetric clouds, fog, thin rain, snow... :)
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Post by Alexander »

Exciting stuff, Kencho. I am looking forward to seeing more on this. :wink:
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Post by Kencho »

Caelum will have to be in a hiatus for some time (studies -> exams!! :(), but I'll try to do a few small updates here and there as often as possible :)

PS: This patch is taking forever to build... :?

[Edit] Patch submitted :) Whether if this patch if added to Ogre or not, you're free to patch your local copy of Ogre and play a little with it :)
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Post by dr_amr »

nice project !

I think the screenshots at the 1st page could be better compiled into one animated gif
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Problems on ATI card?

Post by Shermannx »

Hi!

I've been very interested in weather effects, and was quite pleased to come across your work on Caelum. But I have a few problems that I noticed others having and wondered if anyone's been able to find a solution/workaround.

I'm using an ATI card and running the example project CaelumTest1 I get black splots across my screen as I pan the camera around, plus I don't see any clouds. I've so far tried to disable all the elements of the Caelum system and ended up with just a starfield, and still have the block splots. I'm running it under the OpenGL renderer and using Ogre 1.2.4.

Looking at the Ogre.log I get these errors:

23:33:04: Error at line 35 of LayeredClouds.material: Invalid param_named attribute - you need 3 parameters for a parameter of type float
23:33:04: Error at line 35 of LayeredClouds.material: Invalid param_named attribute - you need 3 parameters for a parameter of type float
23:33:04: Error at line 35 of LayeredClouds.material: Invalid param_named attribute - you need 3 parameters for a parameter of type float
23:33:04: Error at line 35 of LayeredClouds.material: Invalid param_named attribute - you need 3 parameters for a parameter of type float
23:33:04: Error at line 35 of LayeredClouds.material: Invalid param_named attribute - you need 3 parameters for a parameter of type float
23:33:04: Error at line 35 of LayeredClouds.material: Invalid param_named attribute - you need 3 parameters for a parameter of type float
23:33:04: Error at line 35 of LayeredClouds.material: Invalid param_named attribute - you need 4 parameters for a parameter of type float2
23:33:04: Error at line 35 of LayeredClouds.material: Invalid param_named attribute - you need 4 parameters for a parameter of type float2
23:33:04: Error at line 35 of LayeredClouds.material: Invalid param_named attribute - you need 3 parameters for a parameter of type float

And this warning:

23:33:05: Creating CaelumSphericDome sphere mesh resource...
23:33:05: WARNING: Mesh instance 'CaelumSphericDome' was defined as manually loaded, but no manual loader was provided. This Resource will be lost if it has to be reloaded.
23:33:05: DONE


Also if I enable fog management the terrain is always blacked out. I can provide some screenshots if no one knows a solution...

Thanks for your help and the excelent work on this project! I would love to help out but I am still learning lol!
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Post by Kencho »

Yes, with the exception of the black spots, I also get those errors. I still don't know why the material errors appear. As for the second (the warning), it only tells that I created the mesh manually, and that I will need to do it again if the resource is unloaded.
I can't test against ATI cards as I0m using an nVidia, so I will be pleased to add the patches for ATI cards compatibility :)
Thanks for using it and sending some feedback :)
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Fixed the error in LayeredClouds.material

Post by Shermannx »

I can help you test it against the ATI cards, I have a Radeon x1600, not a great card by today's standards I know lol!

I've managed to get rid of the error messages from this material, but I'm still not seeing any clouds and still have black splots appearing. I'm going to take a closer look at the scripts and materials.

I changed the function below to get rid of the errors, (by cutting back on the number of values defined against float variables).

file:LayeredClouds.material

fragment_program LayeredCloudFP cg
{
source LayeredCloud.cg
entry_point main_fp
profiles ps_2_0 arbfp1 fp30

default_params
{
param_named time float 0
param_named_auto fogColour fog_colour
param_named sunDirection float3 -1 -1 0
param_named sunColour float4 1 1 1 1
param_named lightInvScattering float 1
param_named absorptionFactor float 0.5
param_named cloudInvScale float 1.5
param_named detailInvScale float 7
param_named noiseInvScale float 31
param_named cloudSpeed float2 0 0
param_named detailSpeed float2 0 0
param_named haloThreshold float 0
}
}
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Post by pricorde »

Kencho, I think you would appreciate to see a video of Caelum in action in the new version of Rigs of Rods (video made by a player) :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te6NkHg_3Dk&eurl=

Just gorgeous!

Cheers!
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Post by Kencho »

Thanks pricorde :) The whole video looks great and promising! Hope I can get the time to help as much as I can with Caelum there :)
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Post by mcblueshar »

Sorry to bump in your forum like this, but i just got this idea: :idea: it would be reallly really nice to have a moon too(witch may eixist in the same sun with the sky) and an eclipse system. Just imagine how beautyfull it will look.
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Post by Kencho »

Moons were planned before even starting Caelum. About eclipses... they're quite problematic, but I would like some too :)
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Re: Fixed the error in LayeredClouds.material

Post by xabila »

Shermannx wrote:I can help you test it against the ATI cards, I have a Radeon x1600, not a great card by today's standards I know lol!
}
Can you tell me what's wrong with the ATI X1600 cause i plan to buy a macpro with this card...

thanks
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Post by Mikachu »

@Kencho:
It seems that the Code::Blocks workspace file has not been updated, some cpp files are missing in the file list, so caelum compiles fine, but when using it, the linker says some classes are missing.
I'd like to provide an updated version, but I'm using non-stlport version of Eihort, so I don't know if you want it.

Sun.mesh is also lacking.. I took this version from the sourceforget svn, did I miss something?
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Post by Kencho »

Adding the Caelum demo to the existing Ogre samples should be fine (as long as you add Caelum resources to resources.cfg). That should work with the svn releases.
About the C::B support, yep, I'm aware of that. If you could please submit the updated project files as a patch in sourceforge, I'd be glad to add it as soon as I put my hands on it again :)
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Post by Praetor »

There are some fast changes going into Eihort. Most of them seem to go around the shaders and materials. I'm going to be trying to keep this project up-to-date with Eihort. I don't have the time to attempt a branch that stays with Dagon. I'll be committing a version compatible with the latest Eihort soon.
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Post by Kencho »

Thanks a lot Praetor. I think we just should stick to Eihort in the future versions, and branch the current one as a maintenance one. What do you think?
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Post by Azatoth »

Kencho wrote:Thanks a lot Praetor. I think we just should stick to Eihort in the future versions, and branch the current one as a maintenance one. What do you think?
I'm using the latest version of Caelum (rev. 26). It seems stable enough. As soon as Eihort is out I'll update Ember to use that (one of the advantages of being a one-man project without any large user base :) ). So for me it's ok if you made further development against Eihort, keeping the Dagon compatability version only in a maintenance branch.
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Post by Praetor »

Branching is fine for me. Eihort shouldn't be too long so I think it is a good idea to stick to it.
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Post by Praetor »

Just an update for everyone so they know what is happening here.

I have an ATI x1900xt, so besides just trying to make caelum stick with Eihort, I'm trying to get rid of the black "flecks" that fly across the sky. If anyone has any insight into what could be happening here, let me know. I'd rather not tear apart the whole system trying to find the problem if it is really something simple.
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Black flecks and no clouds

Post by Shermannx »

I have an ATI card too and get black flecks and no clouds. Also the fog rendering does not work, my terrain is blacked out completely.

So I'm working on this myself, but I'm finding I have to learn about shaders, CG programming materials etc.

What I'd love to be able to do is get some sort of workflow going, I'd like to develope and test shaders and plug them into Ogre but I haven't found the right tools or method of doing it yet. I have ATI's RenderMonkey which looks promising, but as yet I don't know how to transform a .fx file into a material file. I tried using the RM plug-in but haven't had time to fix all the problems with compiling it on my system. (If anyone has a binary I can just shove into RenderMonkey I'd be grateful!)

I have errors compiling the LayeredCloudFP fragment program - which is what I'm trying to fix atm.
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