I wrote this small demo in the past year or so, don’t really know any more when I started.
During this time I developed my OpenGL and C++ Skills and rewrote certain parts of my small
framwork countless Times. Finally I want to start on my first game, so I declare this demo
as finished. I know there would be still much to do and to improve but I simply don’t want
to develop on this demo any more.
Currently it features
- XML shader system (from shader 2.0 to 4.0. System is captable of using geometry shaders but
I didn’t use it in this demo)
- real time shadows (I used a method to improve the quality of the shadows which was developed
by Thomas “Schrompf” Schulze – www.dreamworlds.de)
- Small GUI (used for the value and camera editors)
- value and camera editor (for easily chaning parts of the demo)
- terrain rendering with smooth blending between two detail levels
- Water with “correct” reflections
- some sort of pseudo instancing for the gras. Uses new draw_instanced extension if aviable
- Frustrum culling an lots of other standard stuff
Needed Extensions:
- completely OpenGL 2.0
Download:
Youtube Video:
If you generate some data with the GPU or CPU, for example with the marching cubes algorithm, you don’t have texturecoordinates to texture the generated mesh. To solve this problem I wrote a 3 way mapping shader, which generates texturecoordinates, binormals and tangents only out of the vertex position and vertex normal. This technique was also presented in Nvidia’s “Cascades Demo Secrets” paper. To test the mapping I applied my parallax occlusion mapping shader.
I recently played Freelancer again. While I where playing I had a idea how to create a trail effect with a particle system using a vertex shader.