Estranged, the story of a lone fisherman, stranded on a mysterious island during a violent storm. Explore rich environments and meet the curious inhabitants of the island as you find a way back to the mainland.
New Depth of Field and HBAO
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Description
Currently they are performance killers. Not sure if we'll be able to optimize them a lot before Alpha 6 is out but we'll try.
Enjoy the scenery!
Did I just land on next-gen Myst? Seriously - the graphics are that gorgeous!
Have you looked at E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy, a Source Engine game developed and published by an independent, non-Valve studio, and how they implemented Depth of Field? I know from personal experience (would like to stress that part) that game runs at a silky smooth, constant 60FPS with max settings on my GeForce 560 GTX and Intel i7 Quad-Core, including anti-aliasing and Depth of Field.
Also, isn't HBAO something which only runs well on NVIDIA graphics cards?
E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy runs really good for me too, but on my old graphics card there was a little bit of twitching, but thats because the source engine was pushed to it's limits and IIRC it was using source SDK 2007. The 2013 SDK runs alot better and I'm sure supports these new features alot better.
Darn, now I want to go play E.Y.E again.
Yes - HBAO is Nvidia, HDAO is ATI. They're essentially the same, but with different implementations for each card vendor.
The performance drop is mainly caused by the fact that we have to render our own seperate depth buffer because the original Source one uses an 8-bit render target which makes it lacking when it comes to precision.
For our current depth buffer we render to a RGBA32F32F32F32F render target. The problem with that is that it also fills the RGB channels while we only need the alpha channel. So it takes up a lot more memory and makes writing to the rendertarget slow.
We're still trying to find a good solution. There is a format called R32F but we can't use that because depth is rendered to the alpha channel regardless of the image format.
Note: 32F stands for 32-bit float. Default depth buffer is an 8-bit integer target if I'm correct.
I know this would be quite work-intensive, but might it be possible to rewrite the Source Engine depth buffer so it uses a more suitable one? As I recall, Source Engine 2013 has its source code (not sure if it's full or partial access, though) hosted on GitHub, but I don't know if the source code includes the Source Engine's depth buffer code.
I switched Estranged to 2013 a few weeks ago. You get the same level of access to code you did with 2007 unfortunately.
Awesome effects!
HBAO? Never heard of that one, what is it?
I hadn't heard of it before @AniCator introduced me to it, but it's a more accurate and higher quality version of SSAO. There's a Stack Overflow thread here showing the differences: Gaming.stackexchange.com
interesting, i don't remember seeing that in a mod as of yet, i mean dof
This mod evolved quickly, and I'm positive it's only going to get better.
Wow, I hope you release a base mod with all this features.
That looks super nice!
man, i read all the tech info above twice and still am not sure what it is all about lol. But, LOVE how it looks!!!
hope you will be able to get the fps up,
success,
Leon
Metro 2033 Menu Much? anyways nice work, hope to see more
I have problems turning the depth of field and HBAO on,
whats the problem?
Why can't I turn those 2 options on..