UniqueOne

Long time no see. Great to see you back again man.

New updates to the grass system. Now runs faster and looks better. Here's some screenshots of some of the climate options with their new grasses. Here's a short video of the new wind gust effects on grasses.

Depends a lot on the quality level you select in the setup menu. The highest quality setting hits fps a bit while the low quality setting barely hits fps at all. There are 3 levels available.

The easiest way is using the web IRC client provided by arlona.net. Here is how to do that. 1. Go to http://www.arloria.net/ 2. Click the "Flash Client" link. 3. Enter a nickname and click connect. 4. Once it finishes connecting, type "/join #warzone"

Since we have changed a lot of stuff like lighting, etc recently, here are some more up to date screenshots.

When enabled, Warzone will add up to 16 volumetric lights to the scene. These can be the sun, or dynamic lights.

Up to 16 dynamic lights are now added to the scene using blinn phong lighting. They are drawn during the normal rendering pass, so there is little or no FPS hit. I might raise or lower this 16 limit in the future. This lighting is independent of the volumetric lighting options and can be used at the same time.

There are various ways to access IRC. The easiest is probably using their web client. Here is how to do that. 1. Go to http://www.arloria.net/ 2. Click the "Flash Client" link. 3. Enter a nickname and click connect. 4. Once it finishes connecting, type "/join #warzone"

Yeah these systems are in the warzone mod only at the moment. The code is available for other mods though. By the way, just looked at your UI project. Very nice. You should jump on our irc channel at some point so we can chat

Over the last few days I have written a replacement grass system that runs nearly completely on the graphics card. Even with much higher visible range then before (2x the old range is the default), it runs much faster for me. New cvars are: r_foliage - turn grasses on/off - default on r_foliageDistance - set distance to draw grasses out to - default 8192 (2x old range) r_foliageDensity - Can use this to tweak the density to suit your PC. A scene with just the new grass. Pretty stable between 100 and 110 fps (with 4x the old visibility range). Mandalore. Up from around 50 to 60 fps before to about 70 or 80 now (with 4x the old visibility range). I am not completely happy with the position of the grasses (they are sunk into the ground a little too much at the moment), but it all works.

Today I added another new climate type, "endorredwoodforest". Here's a few screenshots of the work in progress...

Yet another big update today... I work too hard... Today's new updates: * Added map based climate options to the foliage system and 2 new tree/grass/plant sets. * Replaced most of the old plant textures with new, better, ones. * Replaced the plant model with a new faster one so I can draw grass and the plant at the same location. * Updated test build. Currently supported climate options are: "tropical" - The new tropical forests (test with mandalore). "tropicalold" - The old tropical forests (test with mandalore3). "springpineforest" - A pine forest in spring (test with mandalore2). "snowpineforest" - A snowy pine forests (test with hoth2). "tropical" is default if there is no foliage/<mapname>.climateInfo file for now. This is what each of the new climate options looks like... tropical springpineforest snowpineforest

The foliage system works with nearly any map (as long as the ground surfaces are marked with a compatible material type in the shader). This is a test map I made just for testing. I know the feeling. I'll send you a link in a pm to what I have begun using.

Replaced most of the tropical trees today. Next step with the system will be to add various climate options scripts.

Indeed, but if it's not running at 100% the hit to overall FPS gets greatly exaggerated. If he has a 1gb vid card, enabling texture compression might also help.

I suggest you run a GPU usage monitor tool and check if your video card is running at (close to) 100% usage. If not then you are most likely hitting a CPU bottleneck, maybe caused by r_cubemapping if it is on. Sunlightmode 2 is also really bad if that is on due to rendering multiple views each frame.

The autogen shaders are only used if you don't create one. autogen material types are only used if you don't assign a material type in your shader. If you provide those 2 things in your shader, it won't try to generate either. Otherwise the code will do the "best it can" to generate ones that support the rend2 features. Don't want it to autogen normal map? Add your own. This is the only way to support old maps and models with new features when most of the creators will never return to do it. This means a lot less work for modelers and mappers as in most cases you don't need to create a shader at all. You just create one if you want something specific, or if what it generates is not what you want. As for FPS, no longer an issue at all. You just tried the mod at the point when we enabled rend2 features on everything, but before we had a chance to tweak rend2. The issues you saw in the past were rend2 issues (nearly all of which we have fixed now anyway). Rend2 itself doesn't use it's features due to lack of map/shader support (it's like comparing vanilla to a modern game renderer), so of course there was a FPS hit before it was all tweaked to use the features. You really should update and look for yourself. Just be sure to delete your old warzone settings as a lot has changed.

That HBAO is looking pretty cool man. Nice work. We forked our code from OJK about 1.5 years ago. We increased max player limit to 128, so warzone requires mods to make a few changes to work. For the renderer itself, OJK has changed their renderer API a little since then and so have we, but nothing major has changed, so it wouldn't be too hard to make them work together.

Trees, grasses and plants do sway via GLSL. You can't see it in a screenshot of course The genfoliage command has an option to generate foliages in clusters. This map's foliage info was just generated before I added that. Agreed. I need to add multiple "maingrass" textures, or make the models use a skin to allow for multiple textures to be used on a single model. FPS is always the issue.

Oh man, I don't really like to do this. I have tried over and over to try to convince Xycaleth it is not a lost cause, but his mind is not going to change. It feels like a thread hijack, but since the "official" rend2 is all but dead... I came to the same conclusions about OJK quite some time ago. Although I see no reason to loose backward compatibility for old maps (unless we are able to replace BSP - oh god, of only!). It is not, however the obligation of an engine enhancement to support old mods. Those mods should patch themselves to use new technology. "FutureJK" is exactly what we are working on with Warzone at the moment. We have put our MMO plans on hold to create a base for other mods to use. We have made massive FPS improvements to rend2 (mainly through extended surface merging - made possible mostly due to our use of material types) and now are working on other stuff like foliage and tree systems, and extended AI and AI spawning systems with the spare CPU/GPU time gained. You should try your hbao shader in warzone renderer. We have HBAO already, but I would always be willing to switch it to a better looking one if you feel like playing with it. Also we could sure use some help with the project if you know OpenGL... hell even if you don't we sure need help. I've been doing all this engine stuff myself for a year. Warzone already does foliage and trees. Including distant billboarding of trees. Replacing the crappy Q3 BSP map format, however is beyond my abilities. We are just trying to use it as best we can unless someone comes along that can replace this antiquated BSP crap. Warzone already creates a normal map image in this way. Feel free to look at our code for an example, or join us. If only we could pool all the talent in the JKA community into creating a "FutureJK", we would all be better off in the long run. If not, then Warzone will be done when it is done and you are all free to use it and it's code. All I ask is that if you make good changes, please pass them back to us.

Today I replaced the grass and plant models with more dense ones. Also replaced the default grass texture and made actual plants rarer.

In the first post there is a video to show fps.

Added a few new tree types today. These new ones make areas feel like dense forest and improve FPS at the same time.

Sounds like it might be the sound engine startup causing issues. It does that sometimes because it runs on a different CPU core to the game (which JKA doesn't like sometimes), specially when you start loading map while it is switching music tracks. It's on the todo list, but usually easy avoidable by giving it a moment at main menu to start the music (or add +map <whatever> to the desktop shortcut and skip the menu). Anyway, hope you enjoy it now you have it running.

I have a few ideas, but I think I need more information. Does it crash when you first load the game, or when you start a map from menu? Any chance you could join our IRC channel?