you gotta check out this engine

[juliusctw]

supposingly one guy did all these

http://www.projectoffset.com/

[omaremad]

Seeen it before.

But i find it hard to diffrentiate the images betweeen screenshots or concept art.

Maybe the engine is so good it makes things look like really nice paintings

The Offset Engine uses a fully 64-bit floating point HDR

my card cant even do 16 bit floating point.....

Edit: found a couple of screens they look nice, but whats nicer are all the tools they seem to make it easy for the end suer to make their own effects etc..

[needforhint]

still, no interactive demos makes me believe it is not what it looks like in videos or pics

[Eternl Knight]

Actually, given the way most modern engines work - it is possible that there is no interactive demos to prevent competitors from reverse engineering their techniques.

Shader scripts, etc are the "code" for the video card effect and, while not trivial, it is possible to intercept these and work out how certian special effects are done.

Personally, I think it is possible for the REALLY high-end cards to do this. However, I don't think any of the cards we here on the forums have could do it in real time just yet.

--EK

[needforhint]

you can easily hide the shaders implementation. First option is to compile it to asm code... Or another, that irrlicht has, is to write the code as a string in cpp file and compile it, for ever hidden in binary

[hybrid]

Compiling it into an array wouldn't probably even hide for script kiddies. Just use 'strings appname' to get all strings from your binary
And every other technique wouldn't help against library entry point changes. Just provide your own Shader Invocation method and change the d3dx library entry points to first call your method and then go back to d3dx. You could play the game without troubles and get all information passed to dx shader level. Same holds for OpenGL, too. That's why they want to implement these DRM mechanisms to avoid music and movie copies on the PC. They'd check all changes to dlls on the system and stop playing if somethings wrong.

[omaremad]

Strings are clearer than the sun when opened in a hex editor

anyway shaders on their own arent much use, most advanced effects are a combination of shaders and require complex rendering orders.

Here is aflow chart from a document im writting to show one implementation of depth of field.



even if the shaders are extracted the c++ is still hard to dechipher from asm.