XEffects - Reloaded - New Release (V 1.4)

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 12:16 am

Ah ok, so the one at home STILL has problems but not on the ray tracing one, where as the ones at school have problems with all of them. The suggestion to use 512x512 should still apply to the ones at school in order to get the ray tracing example to run.

For the rest can you try search/replace ECF_G16R16F and ECF_G32R32F to ECF_A16B16G16R16F and ECF_A32B32G32R32F in EffectHandler.cpp?

Cheers

Adler1337 · Post by **Adler1337** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 12:35 am

ok thanks, i have to leave right now so i'll try it tomorrow and get back to you.

Adler1337 · Post by **Adler1337** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 1:35 pm

Thanks Blindside everything seems to be working now

Escen · Post by **Escen** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 1:41 pm

Thanks BlindSide, Looks awesome I'm Very Happy.

But I have one question...

I'm also using CGrassPatchSceneNodes and those are not showing.

How can I make theme alive again?

Mel · Post by **Mel** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 2:03 pm

Adler1337 wrote:I've passed much larger values to my graphics card and it worked fine before, but anyways i tried 512 and it still errors.

I got something similar using the example for RTT's (example 13) and OpenGL. It could happen, perhaps that the drivers for the videocard are a bit outdated?

DX went fine, but OpenGL had exactly that FBO incomplete error, when i updated the drivers, and got OpenGL 3, things went fine

Adler1337 · Post by **Adler1337** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 2:34 pm

DX went fine, but OpenGL had exactly that FBO incomplete error, when i updated the drivers, and got OpenGL 3, things went fine

Thanks, i'll check for updated drivers and newer opengl, but everything works when i replaced ECF_G16R16F and ECF_G32R32F to ECF_A16B16G16R16F and ECF_A32B32G32R32F in EffectHandler.cpp

3DModelerMan · Post by **3DModelerMan** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 9:51 pm

I'm getting nothing but errors trying to run even just the demos. I'm trying to use DX9 because my computer doesn't support GLSL.

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Fri Nov 13, 2009 11:06 pm

You have an Intel card, 3DModelerMan? They report incorrect VS3.0 for some reason. You can try replace EVST_VS_3_0 with EVST_VS_2_0 in EffectHandler.

christianclavet · Post by **christianclavet** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 1:57 am

Hi, Blindside.

I've downloaded the 1.3 release and checked the demos. This seem to be really powerfull. I would even propose that XEFFECT be merged with IRRlicht someday, since this add much power to the rendering.

Do you think there is a technique that could render shadow faster? I've got around 900+ FPS in the raytracing reflection example, and it drop below 90 in example 1-2, and around 120 with example 6 (Only 1 mesh). I have the equivalent of a sli setup (NVIDIA 9800GX2)

Will the FPS will drop even more, if I put say 20-30 characters in there? (counting only on shadow processing). From my understanding of the example, you need to define what mesh will produce shadow with the effect handler.

I would like to create medium sized maps with at least 20-30 NPC at the same time. Considering that I will need to add basic AI and other things (particles, input, audio, etc.) to the scene and would like to have at least 60+ FPS; The only thing I'm thinking now could do the trick is the old trick of texture projecting (small blurred circle texture projected at the NPC feet, from a ray collision test with the ground) that could keep the FPS up.

Or is there an alternative to have really fast shadows? (even imprecise, like LOD shadow process, as shadows in the distance are processed longer in time than the shadow that are near the observer)

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 2:25 am

Shadow maps in general are mostly effected by the shadow map resolution and not so much the content of the scene. If you add another mesh to Example 6 I think you will find that the frame rate does not drop very much.

Also like you said you could make it so shadows only update at half or a third of the framerate. Currently XEffects renders 1 pass for the light's depth map, another pass for shadow maps, and then another pass for the actual scene which it merges with the shadow map pass.

The old XEffects only had 2 passes because it replaced the node's material type with a shadow map type that did shadows in the same pass but this restricted you from applying any materials you want to the nodes and made it difficult to have multiple lights. The reason example 1 and 2 are so slow is that they use multiple lights and this means many passes, you will need to think about how many lights you have in the map and the resolution if you want good performance.

Cheers

xDan · Post by **xDan** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 2:01 pm

as usual, the *screenshots* look nice

But not much works on my graphics card (ATI mobility radeon 9700). The first two kind of work on directx (although still shader compilation errors of some kind). With GL it seems the same as the last XEffects (as in screenshots I posted here)

3-6 don't work in either DX or GL. I guess that is to be expected with my graphics card, but I put the output here anyway: http://xzist.org/temp/xeffects/

3DModelerMan · Post by **3DModelerMan** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 2:55 pm

Okay, now it says that there's too many instruction slots used, and that the maximum for 2_0 is 64.

sudi · Post by **sudi** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 5:06 pm

Nice job

You made it work shadow maps in screenspace i gave up on this but your way is actually pretty cool.

ent1ty · Post by **ent1ty** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 8:54 pm

I'm having a strange bug - the ShadowLight moves when the camera moves/rotates. But only on one axis(i think it's x but not sure). I'm not manipulating with the light after it's creation. It happens with OGL and D3D9 both.
Here is the code used for creating the light, dont know if that helps:

Code: Select all

effect->addShadowLight(SShadowLight(512, vector3df(0, 150, 0), vector3df(0, 0, 0),
		SColor(0, 0, 0, 150), 0.0f, 1000.0f, 50.0f * DEGTORAD));

If this was already solved somewhere in this topic then I'm sorry but i really don't feel like reading through all the 27 pages

Oh, and I'm using the newest version.

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Sun Nov 15, 2009 1:19 am

@xDan and 3DModellerman: Most effects aren't supported on SM 2.0 cards. The most you'll get is standard shadow mapping without any filtering. If using this in an application I recommend that you have these effects optional and only enable them when the graphics card can run them. xDan if you pay for shipping I can send you my old AGP Geforce 6200 which can run all the effects but its a bit slow and old.

Sudi wrote:Nice job
You made it work shadow maps in screenspace i gave up on this but your way is actually pretty cool.

No actually I still haven't but I thought about it yesterday, I might run some tests to test the performance vs usual method.