Hey guys wanted to update you on a few things about
C17 and the issues we fought porting it to ASW, and other general stuff. We decided that porting over to ASW was going to be more of a hassle than we originally thought. It also became a matter of what unforeseeable issues we would run into likely causing the porting process to be more difficult than it already is.
Here were a couple of issues we ran into porting to ASW:- GCF mounting. GCF mounting plain doesn't work in ASW. We tried a couple of various methods, even implementing HLlib directly into the engine, but no dice. We didn't want to ship with all of the hl2 content like Fakefactory does, mainly because that's retarded, and also no one wants to sit there and download an 8gb mod. Our solution was to build a program that extracts all the needed content via an installer. This unfortunately seems to be the most practical and easiest way.
- No Custom Shader Support AT THE TIME FIXED NOW THANKS TO BIO. C17 has a buttload of shaders in it, so for sure we didn't want to throw that away.
- Model Format. Models with animation files completely crash ASW Hammer, and occasionally the engine. Fixing this requires decompiling the model, fixing any issues that process may cause, and then recompiling the model with ASW's tools.
- Porting AI. This isn't an impossible task for sure, it's just a matter of actually having time to do this, and debug it in the event anything goes wrong, or ai suddenly has issues.
Because of all of these issues we never ended up porting to ASW.
On CSM in Source 2007 The biggest issue here is performance. The lack of multicore means two things: Either your map is gonna have to look ugly (reducing amount of whats being drawn) or you'll have to aggressively tackle how you handle shadow res, and the cascaded LODs. For instance having the LOD levels much smaller, like having the lowest rt res as the second lod.
We realized that with shader power, and generally how much ass source 2007 is, there's no way to realistically achieve a runable framerate unless you throw really high end hardware to fill the gap, and when I say high end I mean running anything above a GTX 480 is SLI. Even then the real limiting factor again is multicore, since the majority of the rendering is CPU limited. With ASW it's much faster, considering mulitcore works there, and runs a lot better. Not to mention optimizations made in general to the engine.
So basically with source 2007, it's a waste of time.
Deferred Rendering Method!!11!! BIG TEXTI wanted to make a little announcement that biohazard has been working on a deferred approach for Source 2010, aka ASW. Whats the big deal in doing that you might ask? Realtime lights, everywhere, all the time, with little perf costs. Deferred offers a couple of other big advantages, such as the ability to explore additional rendering methods and effects that forward rendering, and specifically source 2007 could not do. Because of the nature of how deferred works, you can essentially have an unlimited amount of dynamic lights in a single scene.
With deferred, effects like Dynamic Sunlight Shadows, SSAO, SSGI (Screen Space Global Illumination) and Bokeh DOF are possible because of performance gains achievable with deferred, but also because we're no longer limited to a low res Depth Buffer. We can now have 32 bits of procession. Banding and ugly SSAO be gone!
Best of all, this next level gangsta shit is entirely free. He'll be releasing it to the community. Bio is currently writing the entirety of the system, while me and 1/4 Life will be working on shaders/areas that will help with deferred after he's done, such as SSGI, and various other effects. Here's an example:
IMAGES ARE NOT DEFERRED GUYS, JUST BOKEH.(Yes thats Bokeh DOF, no it doesn't require DX11)Again the one limitation is that this is on ASW, so porting hl2 while not impossible, is something you'll have to figure out on your own, though feel free to ask me if you need help on the subject.
I'll keep you guys posted as information comes down the tubes. Oh and yes, c17 shaders will still be released. Sooner than you guys think too.
If you have any questions you can PM me, or email me at:
mrtwovideocards@gmail.com Thanks and I hope it was worth the weight.