XEffects - Reloaded - New Release (V 1.4)

Mel · Post by **Mel** » Thu Oct 15, 2009 3:25 pm

The november 2008 DirectX SDK has that DLL. At least, i could recompile Irrlicht without any trouble. Other thing is that applications done with that SDK also require the d3dx9_42.dll if they don't find it, so, is probably a problem of updating the DXSDK.

Are you compiling with DevCPP? if so, i'd recomend also that you switched to Code::Blocks

bruZard · Post by **bruZard** » Thu Oct 15, 2009 4:03 pm

Thank you very much ... the GLSL problem is solved

bruZard · Post by **bruZard** » Thu Oct 15, 2009 4:07 pm

@Mel: i compile with VC++ Express 2008 ... my download is very slow, i try it at next with the March SDK.

Antaka · Post by **Antaka** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 10:16 am

Hi, I'm having a crash in my game when using XEffect Reloaded, it always crash in this line after a while:
EffectHandler.cpp, line 373

Code: Select all

const u32 CurrentMaterialCount = ShadowNodeArray[i].node->getMaterialCount();

It is accesing a forbbiden part of the memory... may it be that I removed the shadow from a node but it still have the reference in that array?
I'm using the latest XEffect version I've found, XEffect Reloaded 1.2.1.
Thanks.-

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 1:06 pm

Finally it's time for another release of XEffects. This may actually be the last before I decide to officially integrate half of the feature set of the wrapper into Irrlicht (And scrap the rest).

New exciting features include:

- Screen Space Water Example -

Water that gets rendered in a post processing pass. This makes it pretty much totally independent from the actual scene, the only thing needed is for everything to get added into a depth pass so that the positions are known to the water when it's rendered. This water features bump mapped specular highlights, refraction (Special trick to get rid of artifacts without a clip plane), and smooth fading at shorelines.

Just to show how versatile this water is, I removed the terrain scene node from the example (Example Number 4) and added the small room instead, as you can see the water is still rendered adequately:

- Simple Shader Ray Tracing -

This is a bit of fun on the GPU. A very simple post-processing based shader that ray-traces 2 spheres and a plane. Unlike most demos similar to this it also features texture mapped spheres and planes. All the code is available in the shader files for you to study.

- VSM Shadow Mapping -

This is one of the reason I was so excited for the 1.6 Irrlicht release. FP render textures allow you to do many nice things and one of those is hassle-free rendering of VSM shadows (You can do it without but it is buggy and non-portable!). VSM shadows allow you to blur the shadow map before sampling it, and they are naturally bi-linearly filtered so never show any of the typical aliasing artifacts previously found in XEffects shadows. Give them a try!

Here is a close up of the VSM shadow on the tongue of the dragon, you can see it's super-smooth and there is no noticeable aliasing anywhere.

- API changes and improvements -

- All the built-in shaders are contained within the source code now. This also means you don't have to pass in a "shader folder" parameter to the EffectHandler constructor anymore, and loading times should be slightly quicker without having to read all the files.

- Demonstrated in examples 3 and 4, you now have the ability to set custom shader constants in post-processing effects and the ability to create custom pre/post render callbacks that get called before/after a post-processing pass will be/has been rendered.

- All the shadow mapping procedures now use floating point textures (Not only VSM). This generally means less artifacts and more precision. You also have the ability to select 32-bit per channel depth buffers (Recommended for VSM shadows).

- Few bug/glitch fixes here and there.

Cheers I hope you enjoy this release.

3DModelerMan · Post by **3DModelerMan** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 2:41 pm

*Heart attack* That water is awesome.

Virion · Post by **Virion** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 4:03 pm

VERY beautiful BlindSide! I mean the shaders (not you)!

Murloc992 · Post by **Murloc992** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 5:25 pm

The water... is... kickass...

stefbuet · Post by **stefbuet** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 6:01 pm

Ah! just in time for the horor demo contest

Really nice work.
It would be awesone if you could integrate it in futur Irrlicht versions

Thank you!

Adler1337 · Post by **Adler1337** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 11:15 pm

Looks awesome

, but i am having some problems.
Whenever i run one of the examples or my own project i keep getting this error(only in opengl, directx seems to be working fine):

Could not open file of texture: XEFFECTS_SM_512
XEffects: Please ignore previous warning, it is harmless.
FBO has one or several incomplete image attachments
FBO error
FBO incomplete
Could not open file of texture: XEFFECTS_SM_512_2
XEffects: Please ignore previous warning, it is harmless.

After that it crashes. I have tested it on many different computers and the same thing happens. Any idea why this is happening?

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 11:16 pm

Probably the texture format is unsupported in OpenGL. Does this happen in every single example? What about the ray tracing one (Shouldn't happen there I think)?

Of course it's important for me to know the video cards that you tested this on.

Adler1337 · Post by **Adler1337** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 11:40 pm

It happened on all of them including the raytracing one at school, might be just because the computers(ATI graphics card not sure which one) are kind of crappy. I'll look into it more tomorrow. The raytracing one works fine for me at home. I am using a Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS graphics card.

Lonesome Ducky · Post by **Lonesome Ducky** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 11:40 pm

Working perfectly fine here, and excellent work I must say!

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Thu Nov 12, 2009 11:56 pm

Adler1337 wrote:It happened on all of them including the raytracing one at school, might be just because the computers(ATI graphics card not sure which one) are kind of crappy. I'll look into it more tomorrow. The raytracing one works fine for me at home. I am using a Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS graphics card.

Ah for those graphics cards I think you should pass a screenRTT resolution of 512x512 in OpenGL.

Adler1337 · Post by **Adler1337** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 12:10 am

I've passed much larger values to my graphics card and it worked fine before, but anyways i tried 512 and it still errors.