• Welcome to Final Fantasy Hacktics. Please login or sign up.
 
March 28, 2024, 10:06:16 am

News:

Use of ePSXe before 2.0 is highly discouraged. Mednafen, RetroArch, and Duckstation are recommended for playing/testing, pSX is recommended for debugging.


Tethical, online FFT clone

Started by Kivutar, February 25, 2011, 04:38:42 am

MysticKnightFF5

I'd suggest presenting it as a finished project rather than an alpha. Because, it is still an alpha. >.>

Pickle Girl Fanboy

Yeah, that's what I thought.  Keep it under wraps until all copyrighted content is removed.

MysticKnightFF5

Quote from: Pickle Girl Fanboy on June 27, 2011, 07:38:35 pm
Yeah, that's what I thought.  Keep it under wraps until all copyrighted content is removed.

Rather not put Kiv in jail XD

Kivutar

Tethical, an online FFT clone

Lijj

No, we wouldn't want that :shock:
Well I thought I'd post here again... (should I make a separate topic, or is this fine?)
I thought of instead of recoloring with the 3d program the textures would benefit from a direct palette edit more to change the lighting of time of day/night (I'll call it mood from now on).
Also, I thought using two glow effects on the incandescent lights would look good; one bigger yellow and one smaller white on top of that.  I havent added the light fixtures and bulbs yet because I want to see the actual glow effect's result 1st. and I think I can do the the shadows quite easily on my own.. in this example I've only added light but subtle shadows would be very easy to do:
  • Modding version: PSX

Lijj

oh yeah, also I forgot to mention the glow around the windows.. I could probably do that directly on the texture unless it looks good using the 3d program's glow.. a hopefully ambient pale orange color for that.
  • Modding version: PSX

Kivutar

Baked shadows and lights are good for performance, but dynamic lighting allow us to light the sprites.

I still don't get how to draw the lights, maybe with a shader. I also tried to draw the shadows programmaticaly with no result.

Anyway, in the first pic you can see the result with the glow map + removed the backed shadows.

The second one is just for fun. I got this result by chance when drawing lights frustrums.

We should find somene who knows panda or shaders better than I.

@Lirmont, do you know how it works?
Tethical, an online FFT clone

Cheetah

Picture two is what would happen if FFT and Assassins Creed had a child.
Current Projects:

Kaffe

Between all the lurking, I'll just say that I like the progress. ^____^

RandMuadDib

Quote from: Cheetah on June 29, 2011, 12:29:42 pm
Picture two is what would happen if FFT and Assassins Creed had a child.

That would be amazing
I will show you the power of SARDIIIIINES!!!!

lirmont

June 29, 2011, 04:08:06 pm #190 Last Edit: June 29, 2011, 04:32:58 pm by lirmont
I don't know how Panda3D does shadows, but here's a forum post showing something similar to what I think you want to see: http://www.panda3d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5442

Something to keep in mind if you're not very familiar with OpenGL, almost all of OpenGL's techniques require drawing the scene (your geometry) more than once (i.e. "passes"). If you say you tried drawing shadows with no result, did you switch to a different drawing buffer first? Did you save the result from the buffer you wanted (say, the depth buffer in an offscreen drawing buffer)? Finally, did you project that information back over the scene in the buffer that you'd display the actual scene in? Those are all considerations that Panda3D is probably considering for you, but you likely still have to tell Panda3D "This doesn't go on the screen yet!" (offscreen buffer) and "I want to keep this!" (a texture image for what you got out of the offscreen buffer; the "shadow map" per that forum post).

Also, I don't quite understand what you're trying to do with the lights that is making you think "I still don't get how to draw the lights", but, if I had to take a stab at it, are you saying you want the point lights to project onto the ground? That (to the best of my knowledge) requires 2+ lights per spot. The one light is the one you already have that makes the spot around the areas on the map (the light fixtures). You'd have to spend another light that looks from the original point light's "look at" vector (3d coordinate) to a new "look at" vector perpendicular (rotated 90 degrees) on whatever axis you want. You can set different parameters for the second light so that it spreads out wider and maybe diffuses more than what the original spot light does.

Or, rewrite the original light to start from behind the position and shoot through it.

Kivutar

June 29, 2011, 04:59:55 pm #191 Last Edit: June 29, 2011, 05:06:05 pm by Kivutar
Thanks for your detailed reply.

I would like to draw shadows like on the attachement dynamically.

As the map is one model, I have to enable self shadowing. The map have to project shadows on itself.

I found a sample panda script that demonstrate how to achieve this : http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~panda3d/panda3d/samples/view/head:/samples/Shadows/Tut-Shadow-Mapping-Advanced.py

I'm reading it at the moment.

But it looks like that combining the real cg shaders with the shader generator of panda (the abstraction that allows me to have a glow filter without writting cg) is hard.

[EDIT] for now I got the screenshot on the second pic. They used a strange camera instead of the light :/
Tethical, an online FFT clone

lirmont

Just think of the camera as a way to look at what the light would "see". I didn't follow the link, because I don't know python enough to read it well, but they probably changed the culling (to remove the faces of the map that face the camera) and forced the scene that camera was in to draw to a buffer you can use for shadows (what the camera could see). Then it puts it back over the original scene (without removing front-facing geometry).

Pickle Girl Fanboy

How will you implement weather effects, like lightning strikes, rain, snow, and fog?  How about weather that changes the battlefield (icicles, frozen water, snow on ground)?  Or can this wait?

Lijj

I just hope the shadows aren't going to be too strong .. no need for that at night anyway.. That orange glow around the windows is the right color but could the radiance be lessened to about half or less of what it is now? See the mockup I posted and how feint it is?
@ PGF: I think we can do that kind of thing .. at least fog or mist would be easy enough using a transparent custom texture.
  • Modding version: PSX


Lijj

I was going to ask about implementing gifs into the maps, but ..I don't know enough about the 3d dept. to answer that for a big moving piece.
  • Modding version: PSX

Kivutar

@lirmont, thanks for the explanation. I'm going to try to replace this spotlight with a directionnal light for now.

@PGF:
lightning srike: flashing the sky + sound.
rain & snow: panda3d has a particle framework that supports sprites
fog: there is a fog effect in panda, but I think it is now exaclty what we want, so we'll have to think of a new one. Or oa combination of the two.


@Lijj: These shadows would be a nice feature for tethical, but we don't have to use it in our sample game.
We have no control over the glow, it just glows the color of the texture underneath. And yes, we can adjust the radiance, there is 3 levels: small, medium and large. We should switch to medium then.
I can show you how to launch the game so you can see the result of your work + lights + effects.

Another reason to not bake night into the map textures is that using lights allows us to light the sprites as well as the map.

@About animations: panda3d is supposed to support it. So I have to experiment with that too.
Gif is not supported. But texture animations are, so I should experiment with that too.


Tethical, an online FFT clone

Kivutar

I added the support for textures for tiles of the walkable or attackable zone.
So we can draw them like we want without having to touch the source code.

I also upgraded the cursor and the shadow to 40x40px to fit the doubled resolution of our new textures.

You can see the unfinished sprite by Lijj.
I temporary put the map into daylight to let you see the changes.
Tethical, an online FFT clone

Kagebunji

That's beautifull. Looks really nice. But on some frames, here eyes are off(this happens in FFT as well, is it the game causing it?). But to use such sprites, EVERY sprite need to be redone, at least sprites for jobs are a must I guess. I assume water animations aren't done yet, cause the Knight in water is like cut in half.
  • Modding version: Other/Unknown