Build A World - new massive game, using Irrlicht

[sodandk]

Any chance the BAW engine will have material strength/breakdown calculations?
Because a lot of times when blowing things up, I get ridiculously hanging buildings.

This is very complex, but DevSh has been looking into solutions for this. Its a goal for us,
but loads of processing power is needed...

[sodandk]

Nice, very good goals.
Will the game engine also use ramdisk to speed up maps?
This would be especially helpful with the scenario (world of tanks) maps.

We have several ideas for speeding up generation etc. Also a cache.

[sodandk]

cant help it... love the evening and nighttime screenshots...



as your hear the 2 high speed steam turbines working ...



need to reach the of stage of cars, people, trains etc.

[devsh]

NEW Version is out 0.597

Again, everyone who registered for a free trial before GETS TOPPED UP WITH 1 MONTH OF FREE GAME TIME!
So come again, play and check out what is new in the game!

Some videos of important new features:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnRMxO4IAA4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z88hDBQoX5Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJSbAep1Pbw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04DrnY_W3y8

What's new?

User Rights on Servers: New users who enter a server are automatically a guest, and can not interact with the world. The Server Owner or Admin can change a User from Guest to Normal User by using the TAB-key. Click here for an example movie.

Functional blocks and Signal Lines: can be used with switches, pressure plates, buttons, lights, doors etc.). Use F2 to enable/disable editing of Signal Lines. Click here for an example movie.

Many new blocks and constructions: Uranium ore added to the world, various kinds of smoke emitters and chimneys added for visual effects, power cut off terminal block for the main powersystem, doors (normal, sliding, elevator and shutter) and rubble when blocks hits the ground at high speed.

Player Ranking and Achivement system: Press K to see your current ranking and the entire list of tasks. Ranking ONLY increases in Survival Mode!

Model functions: more modelling functions added. To use 'Take Construction', point at the construction and hit 'Delete' key.

Spawnpoints list: Spawnpoint teleport. Press O to see the overview of spawnpoints (not for Survival).

Big City: Many new buildings for the autogenerated big city. The Nuclear powerplant now powers the entire city via a network of powerlines and transformers. Click here for a walk around at the Nuclear Powerplant. You can also build a Nuclear Reactor yourself, Click here for a demonstration movie, or even a Tactical Nuke.

Full speed gravity (v2.0): gravity has been updated to make blocks fall smoohtly and turn blocks into rubble when they hit ground at high speed. Click here for an example movie.

Many bugfixes: Now also works on Windows 8 64bit with Intel HD GPU.

Always remember F1 for help.

[sodandk]

yeah, the news release here : http://www.buildaworld.net/news/modern-world

[devsh]

Changelog


Update 05-03-2014 (0.597)
- User Rights on Servers using TAB-key (new users are default Guest)
- updated textures and new many blocks
- uranium ore added
- various kinds of smoke emitters and chimneys added (blocks)
- doors (normal, sliding, elevator and shutter) added
- signal lines (can be used with switches, pressure plates, buttons, lights, doors etc.). Use F2 to enable/disable editing of Signal Lines
- power cut off terminal block
- player ranking and achivement system. Press K to see your current ranking. Ranking ONLY increases in Survival Mode!
- more modelling functions
- changed 'take construction' from Construction Tool, to 'Delete' key
- spawnpoints list. Spawnpoint teleport. Press O to see the overview of spawnpoints (not for Survival)
- many new buildings for big city.
- full speed gravity (v2.0) with dust when blocks hit the ground
- rubble when blocks hits the ground at high speed

tech:
- global powersystem optimized
- smoothly falling blocks with clipping (stuff doesnt fall through other stuff)
- falling buildings now have "correct" lighting (same color as before falling)
- falling buildings don't leave a static ghost behind anymore (polygons get removed from static map part as soon as building starts falling)
- NVidia Optimus is forced to ON with driver greater than 331.82
- Intel HD Graphics driver now doesn't crash on 64bit Windows 8
- models now pickup light and have self-occlusion as dragging the around the world
- models dont exhibit texture bleeding while being dragged around in the world
- vertex shader particles now visible (bug affected low end machines with Intel HD Graphics (3000 on Windows, any on linux) or below)
- fixed a bug with HDR which caused square halos
- faster HDR-blur rewritten with GLSL 1.40 texture fetching functions
- faster water FFT
- rewrote most shaders for less GPU instructions and GLSL 1.40 compliancy
- rewrote dynamic light shaders (fps up by 30% in light intensive scenes)
- merged with irrlicht 1.8.1
- irrlicht OpenGLExtensionHandler rewritten to use OpenGL 3.2 CORE function names instead of EXT and ARB
- booted glFlush() out of irrlicht causing CPU-GPU syncpoints
- mostly OpenGL 3.2 and GLSL 1.40 compliant shaders
- irrlicht GLSL interface rewritten
"Removed all fixed function renderers and rewrote the 4 most basic material types in shaders
Removed 50% of deprecated OpenGL calls, and rewrote shader callbacks to grab uniform locations at shader compilation time"
- irrlicht built-in materials are OpenGL 3.2 compliant
- fixed a refcounting error causing memory leaks and OpenGL object leak
- GL_ANY_SAMPLES_PASSED used as occlusion query now
- disabled some color planes to save on fillrate as the shaders never modified certain color channels
- general framerate is up by 13%
- framerate in cities up by more than 15%

[sodandk]

maaan, can't help it, I just love the tac Nuke ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LeZ8Ox6IpQ

[devsh]

Yes, yes all upstream stable irrlicht

We are finally giving back to the community and here is our irrlicht

BEHOLD THE GODLY && UNDOCUMENTED
http://sodan.dk/irrbaw/irrlicht.zip

Quick diff between directory of our irrlicht and irrlicht-1.8.1 will reveal all the new features

OVERVIEW:
- OpenGL only
- Reworked Shader Constant Callback and setting uniforms with a more performance friendly mechanism (looking up shader uniforms by name every time you want to set them is REALLY bad)
- Tessellation Shaders (DX11 feature)
- 3D Texture Support
- 2D Texture Arrays Support
- DDS Texture Support (look below for explanation)
- Manual Mip Map specification and loading (useful when you generate your own with the superior sinc filter or load DDS DXT compressed files with explicit mip maps)
- FBO Blitting (super fast rendertarget copy)
- Quasi OpenGL 3.2 core compliance
- No fixed function materials
- All shader materials
- Some other stuff I cant remember but is soo epic

[devsh]

Plans for next release:
- OpenGL Timers (for proper GPU time taken in nanoseconds for rendering commands) DONE
- Indirect Rendering (no CPU readback of occlusion query results)
- Instanced rendering (for rendering all them powercups and flowers)
- Dynamic Instance rendering (for rendering all these instances which are out of sync on animation)
- GPU skinning

[devsh]

Just letting everyone know that Conditional Rendering doesnt work too well if you have many drawcalls (10,000+)

[devsh]

Targeting the 2ms that our HDR takes, by means of an FBO hash base (as Valve suggests) and being able to get IMRT objects with a dedicated FBO and attachments so that framebuffer doesnt have to get created, reattached and revalidated each time I call setRenderTarget

Quote from the internet

"On NVidia hardware under Linux I observed the following:
1) Switching textures with different formats/sizes in a single FBO is the slowest
2) Switching FBOs is much faster, but still is too slow. It can be performed at most 2-3 times per frame without severely harming FPS
3) Switching between textures of the same format in a single FBO is the fastest. It can be performed many times per frame. We use this option whenever possible.

One trick. Sometimes it is "neccessary" to use textures of different sizes. On such example is estimating average frame luminance in HDR rendering. To avoid expensive switches we use textures of the same size, and control region of interest by means of glViewport."

[devsh]

We have patches of terrain, in far render distance settings we have 930 of terrain nodes, now add different shader meshes and you're at ~3000 drawcalls minimum anyway

[devsh]

Nope... that would involve writing a memory allocator for GPU memory as already allocated VBO is immutable

[sodandk]

some users building ... nice style

[sodandk]

On what server and maps are these landscapes and buildings?
It's wonderful, beautiful.

its a non-public map ... by Belphe IV... sometimes he opens it.

actually most of the structures and rooms are underwater...