It's been a while since I posted any progress updates about the Osiris project, what spare time I have has been fairly thoroughly sabotaged this year so far by the double whammy of receiving Skyrim for Christmas then just as my interest in that was waning Mass Effect 3 coming out. Instead of working on shaders and infrastructure generation I have therefore instead been largely sneaking up on bandits & dragons and battling the Reapers in deepest space.
I love playing games and I love working on interesting software projects...but it would seem that there just aren't enough hours in the day to do both. Having said that I have managed to devote some time here and there to Osiris and have been primarily working in two areas: working on implementing a new and more flexible texturing solution for the terrain and adding oceans and other bodies of water. I plan to produce more detailed posts describing my experiments in these areas in due course but for now I thought I would whet the appetite a little with a couple of screens from the water experiments.
Although I've done deep water simulation on previous projects (Isis) using a 64x64 FFT grid processed on the CPU, I wanted to try a more modern approach with Osiris so took inspiration from an NVIDIA demo and have implemented a 512x512 FFT using Compute Shaders to do the heavy lifting. This produces a height field, gradient and folding maps that are then fed into the vertex and pixel shaders. The effect is best suited to deep water so works well for oceans - rivers and smaller pools will need something else.
Like I say I'll go in to more detail later, but for now here are the screens - I'm particularly happy with the way the effect scales into the distance which requires a little work to stop the FFT grid visibly tiling:
Looks really nice, but is it just me or do the wave heights not seem to match the level of terrain detail? It kind've looks like the waves are way too big for the terrain granularity. Almost like you're putting this really detailed model into a bathtub, if that makes any sense. Heh.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I check your website daily so I look forward to updates!
Take care.
p.s. I hear ya' about the 24 hour thing - I'm pretty much trying to take a sabbatical from games so I can get some programming done.
Did you ever say whether you were going to release demos or source code? I'd definitely like to look at the code for what you've done.
ReplyDeleteDid you ever hear about Spaceengine http://en.spaceengine.org/ project?
ReplyDeleteLovely! Any chance of a video? :)
ReplyDelete