Ogre Forums

I'm thinking that several of the new features that I've yet to be seen in Ogre, such as:

• Interactive, destructible environments - The surrounding terrain and buildings can be altered and affected by either with explosives or anything, without the need for scripted sequences or special triggered areas which would add or remove certain predefined level elements, like in Red Faction. Also, the buildings and vegetation (with heavy foliage) will be destructible like those seen in Crysis.

• Subsurface scattering

• HEALPix environment mapping

• Dynamic soft shadows with realistic umbra/penumbra

• Soft particle system

I'm looking forward to the HelpRequested section at the Wiki. These features as mentioned will likely go to the section if they are approved.

Destructible environments is nothing to do with Ogre, that's a physics / game entity issue.

The other things you mention are just shader effects. You can do them right now.

maybe this one can help with the destructible environment?

PolyVoxSceneManager

Thanks, I've checked out PolyVoxSceneManager on David William's site. As for the other features that haven't yet to be seen in OGRE is the DirectX 10.1 support. I know that DirectX 10.1 is an incremental update of DirectX 10.0 which will be shipped with, and require, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 in January next year. DirectX 10.1 will be backwards compatible with DirectX 10.0 hardware, but the new features will not be available until 10.1 compliant hardware is released. The release mainly sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, while giving me more control over image quality. Features scheduled for DirectX 10.1 include, mandatory 32-bit floating point filtering, mandatory 4x anti-aliasing, and shader model 4.1.

Ogre doesn't yet support DirectX 10.0. Sinbad is working on it, building off some preliminary community work, but I think the install base for DirectX 10.0 is still very small.

I've got the DirectX 10.0 rendersystem code from CVS, and I would like to clear this with you before I tackle my own choice of it.

Then what you have is something that only builds -- there is no actual functionality in it yet. Don't hold your breath on DX10 render system -- it will be a while before it's usable; several things internal in Ogre need adjusted to support the way it does things and the assumptions it makes.

xavier wrote:Then what you have is something that only builds -- there is no actual functionality in it yet. Don't hold your breath on DX10 render system -- it will be a while before it's usable; several things internal in Ogre need adjusted to support the way it does things and the assumptions it makes.

That's what I'm going to do. I'm really want to add the functionality in this render system, including geometry instancing, geometry shaders, shader model 4.0, and unified shader models.

Don't bother, unless you clear it with Sinbad first, since you both are working on the same thing. Otherwise, you will end up with a DX10 rendersystem that only you have and use -- Sinbad officially is working on the "official" one.

Also bear in mind that many others have begun and since abandoned the effort, for many reasons but I suspect the primary one is "I had no idea how much work it actually would be", which includes "so much stuff inside the current Ogre systems have to change to accommodate this that I gave up".

I suggest letting Sinbad do it.

or you could ask sinbad which 'bit' to work on and if it turns out good it might go in. Since dx10 has so many different area's it might be possible. Sinbad could make the ogre changes then you could work on the rendersystem for that area... assuming you're good

sub surface scattering is just a shader that can be created if your card supports shader model 3.

Hmmm, what about geometry shader support for OpenGL? That should be fairly easy to add.

What are you doing that requires DX 10.0? I think you are just jumping on the bandwagon that "it must be good". Explain what you actually want to do...I am most certain you don't need it yet.

I personally do have a project that requires geometry shaders, which are part of DX10 (even though I'm using OpenGL right now).
I'm feeding a vertex buffer using CUDA output, which means that it's handled on the GPU without ever touching main RAM, and rendering it to the framebuffer as GL_POINTS.
The points are a particle system (although Ogre3D doesn't know that). I'd like them to have a bit more geometry than a single dot. For this, geometry shaders are perfect.

In my OpenGL-based test code for my graphics, I used a geometry shader to render little arrows, which were even able to display the direction the particle is moving. Much better than telling the hardware to render the same thing 1024 times.