Shadow Mapping in Source

[Kosire]

doesn't biohazard work at valve?

Haha no

excuse me me but i ehhh - how can i download that?

Use SVN to download the build and source code from the google code page..

http://swarm-deferred.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

[Jordash]

He's finishing uni, but Valve have said the door is open for him when he's done.

[joe_dirt976]

pure fuckin awesome... I aspire to be this good one day.

[Gary]

For those with ATI cards, here is a copy of the mod folder(I recompiled the shaders, so it uses the software 5x5 bilinear gaussian method of shadow filtering):


[ Download - 18 MB ]
Edit: Reuploaded. Accidentally released debug.

Note: Sadly, due this being in software and color space, it's slower than it's Nvidia hardware-based counterpart. Not sure by how much... as it's impossible for me to test. EDIT: Actually, might be faster. And this will also be independent of the GPU. So it will work on both NV and ATI cards.

[dark0r]

When I spoke to Biohazard, he said the software filtering was actually faster than hardware. Great work!

[Gary]

Then why did I have to bother with this at all? If the software method is faster, why not ditch the NV-only method all together?

[dark0r]

Then why did I have to bother with this at all? If the software method is faster, why not ditch the NV-only method all together?

I'm not sure, I think the HW filtering can be improved. Also, did you release debug binaries? I'm getting assertions with your release

[Ken Chan]

This is good, but I have some serious problem here.
I installed this to my mod, but this come with some bugs and a huge problem:

1. Missing weapon's view model if this is enabled. The yellow glow is crossbow glow.


2. If the map use old lighting, it's all DARK. Yes, no lighting.


3. This also break some built in effect like DoF's near depth function(far not affected, but it blur the whole view).


Even Steam Cloud's Screenshots is broken, too!

[Kosire]

This is good, but I have some serious problem here.
I installed this to my mod, but this come with some bugs and a huge problem:

1. Missing weapon's view model if this is enabled. (Should easy to solve, go valve development community for fix)
The yellow glow is crossbow glow.


2. If the map use old lighting, it's all DARK. Yes, no lighting.


3. This also break some built in effect like DoF's near depth function(far not affected, but it blur the whole view).


Even Steam Cloud's Screenshots is broken, too!

Eh, do you even have Alien Swarm installed?

Do you have an ATI/AMD card?

Do your GPU support Shader Model 3.0?

[Ken Chan]

1. This is alien swarm engine. I ported hl2 to it, ok?
2. I use GTX 560ti, you can see the shadows at viewmodel one.
3. Yes.

[Legend286]

This is good, but I have some serious problem here.
I installed this to my mod, but this come with some bugs and a huge problem:

1. Missing weapon's view model if this is enabled. (Should easy to solve, go valve development community for fix)
The yellow glow is crossbow glow.


2. If the map use old lighting, it's all DARK. Yes, no lighting.


3. This also break some built in effect like DoF's near depth function(far not affected, but it blur the whole view).


Even Steam Cloud's Screenshots is broken, too!

You need to add a light_deferred_global to the map because without it there won't be any csm sun shadows.

[Ken Chan]

Yeah, and if you enable default lighting with it, it will crash. :/

[-=Biohazard=-]

The hardware filter on amd does probably run faster than the nvidia hw version because it simply works entirely different... I.e. doing 9 samples (for 3x3) on nvidia manually does apparently cause 36 samples to happen internally where some texels are read multiple times, then you'll get a pre-interpolated value back.
On amd you would use one sample, it would again perform 4 samples internally but you'll get all the samples back, without interpolation, which you have to do yourself. So that'd allow better optimization. But that could aswell not be entirely correct, it's just how I understood it...
The software filters require less shader power (on nvidia) but more vram, so in the end you can't tell which one's better because it's dependent from the context.

The viewmodel isn't drawn because there is no call to its drawing function. You probably just have to add two lines of code to draw it once during the gbuffer and one time during composition.

The dof doesn't work because it's not build for this. If you want to make it work again, try writing depth to alpha of the framebuffer yet again.

If it crashes, run in debug, there are heaps of assertions that should make things easier to fix. The pre-build one seemed to work fine regarding the fallback code, since it didn't actually get enabled for so many people at the beginning because of how source assumes new/unknown cards to not support sm3.0.

[Gary]

Very interesting Bio. It's too bad I know almost nothing when it comes to shaders, or else I would implement an AMD method.

[...]Also, did you release debug binaries? I'm getting assertions with your release

Heh... I did. Reuploaded.

[Botolf]

My hat is seriously off to you. The video inspired awe, as did playing around with this on my own machine. I just... wow. You're going to let Valve gobble you up, right? Right?!