Gravity bending Light

I hit the wrong key and didn't notice.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Now that's just a patently ridiculous statement. Haven't you ever fought a Consigliere or an Agony Mage?

lol I was making a joke, I myself have a lv50 Grav/Elec Dom and a lv30ish Grav/Sonic Troller.

Yes, and I have a lv50 Grav/Energy dom, plus three more gravity characters of varying level, all of whom I play. I was just playing along with your joke, dude.

Semantics aside, what I meant was that something needs to be visible on all systems...therefore we can't do an effect which relies on a shader that will only be possible on some, or even most systems.

But you could do something that looked better on higher rendering systems and degraded gracefully to something that showed some effect on lower systems. I'm assuming the entire basis of Ultra Mode is based on that assumption. Unless VFX components have restrictions on that sort of thing the general environment doesn't, I would think you could spawn a swirly vortex that rendered "correctly" on higher cards and rendered a simpler static effect on lower end cards.

Is there a design directive that essentially states things like Ultra Mode can improve environmental rendering, but all power effects and similar graphics must be designed to reasonably render on the lowest supported video card? In other words, no "Ultra Mode" power effects?

This is a design challenge that I find very intriguing. Is it possible though to have certain FX *only* visible in Ultra Mode? I assume not, based on what Ultra Mode appears to do, but adding "special features" to some effects would be interesting indeed.

I know one of my first thoughts when seeing the Ultra-Mode water and reflections was ICE ARMOR!!!! Specifically, will the armors be able to reflect and refract like water does? In fact, powers in general intrigue me. Will ice and crystal powers get the same reflection treatment costume parts/windows do? Will powers like Ice armor and the crystal theme for earth control cast shadows at all, or is light refraction a feature we've not seen yet (in ultra-mode)?

So... many... questions...

[edit] Arcanaville beat me to it, and worded her post better to boot. Dang it.

But I LIKED the Flying-6-Feet-High-While-Sitting-Down Dwarfs in EQ!

From what I gather the Ultra Mode is frosting on the cake everyone is eating now. Bending light means a new cake and your alternative means two cakes with a waitress to make sure you get the cake that wont kill you.

I'm sure it's possible but requires branching, I don't think there is any branching in the FX system right now, even Physx stuff is just more Frosting on the old FX Cake.

I believe we call this the "No Computer Left Behind" initiative. Catering to the lowest common denominator.

Our VFX system doesn't work that way (and no engine I've ever worked with has either). On the one hand it's theoretically possible, it would make some sense...but on the other there's so much manual effort that goes into creating a visual effect that having some kind of tiered system requiring creating multiple versions of an effect seems very impractical. At best, we take a layered approach....everyone would see the sprite particles for fire and smoke, but only people who have video cards capable of rendering distortion would see the secondary effect of heat distortion.

In this very particular case though, where you're trying to represent spatial/light distortion...I think you'd be hard pressed to find a way to make something representative of distortion, without using distortion, that would still look as good (or better) if actual distortion were layered on top of it. This conceptualization of a Black Hole is visually interesting, and might be achievable in a way that could work everyone's hardware...but it's very different from something like Einstein Rings created by gravitational lensing that could only be created with some sort of distortion effect.

Maybe this is more of a terminology thing. Could you spawn a critter at the wormhole site that had a Basic and Ultra rendering path, assuming critter 3D models themselves had two rendering paths in the Ultra codebase?

Even that might be getting me into hazardous territory. I should more properly ask: is there *any* way to render a wormhole-like effect anywhere in the game, by any means, even if its just a static object sitting somewhere? And if so, is there any means of placing such an effect at some location on-demand by the powers system?


By the way, its hard to be sure what a wormhole would look like, because it depends on the method of stabilizing the wormhole, but a wormhole probably would look more like this:



with a distorted image of the exit point, and extreme smearing around the edges, and in a three-dimensional sense it would look less like a hole and more like a sphere surrounded by distortions. But of course, that might be counter-intuitive to many players, and an effect that is physically correct but intuition-defying might not be a good thing.

(From the Art of the Wormhole).

So there is no way to have it set to go to data/standard to pull if ultra mode is off, then pull the graphics from /ultramode if ultra mode is on? Basically a switch that has the client pull from a differnet source? Or is that an issue because the current setup does not require any kind of reloading of the graphics to turn on/off?

Let me see if I can help as someone who recently researched OpenGL (the graphics technology CoH is based on). Hopefully without making things even more confusing.

OpenGL has certain sets of version numbers - 1.1, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, and maybe some in between I can't remember. They're actually designed to make game minimum/maximum requirements very easy to determine, because each version supports a certain set of visual effects that can be activated by software (like CoH).

The game devs can decide that at minimum they want a game system to support OpenGL 2.0, and at maximum 2.5 - which gives them a pretty clear picture of what features they can and can't use when designing the game. But the complexities don't stop there.

The graphics for CoH, and pretty much any game decided for PC or Mac, have to be designed in *layers*. The minimum layer is the "lowest common denominator" that BaB referred to - it *MUST*, and this is an absolute law of video game design, *MUST* contain ALL visual information required for ANY player to complete the game. This minimum layer usually complies with the OpenGL featureset they select as the minimum, and is commonly generated using very simple *software* rendering techniques to ensure that they will always appear no matter how crippled the system it's running on may be. Unfortunately, software rendering techniques are very labor intensive for the devs. More on this in a moment.

After that minimum layer, advanced layers can be added that enhance the appearance of the minimum layer using visual effects. This is commonly generated using *hardware* rendering techniques, depending on what the hardware supports, and includes such things as lighting effects, shadows, particle effects, etc. This layer is where Ultra goes - you need to see windows on a building, but you don't need to see your reflection in them. They're done mostly using hardware effects because that way they're less labor intensive to implement, and not very power hungry (if you meet the requirements).

If you notice the last thing I mentioned in the two paragraphs above, it's also about conserving CPU power. Working out a way to duplicate OpenGL hardware effects in software for lower-end systems is highly labor intensive, and risky - because it's quite likely those systems won't have the horsepower to render it anyway. If you want an example of what can happen when a software workaround is created, I believe FSAA in CoH is a good one (I'm not sure if it's been fixed since).

Also, as a side note, console systems (PS3, Xbox) don't have this problem, as they have a very narrow set of capabilities, and anything written for them can take advantage of the maximum pretty much all the time.

I appreciate the effort, but the graphics technology isn't where the gap in my knowledge exists, its really in the way the game client rendering engine is designed which is outside of my software design experience. Its the primary source of "gibberish" between me and Bab whenever I'm talking turkey with him: I understand the atoms, but not the molecules of what he does. Actually, I'm two layers removed in this case: I don't have very much experience with how OpenGL programmers actually use the primitives in all cases to make actual OpenGL programs (my OpenGL experience is exactly one program, in 1998), and I have exactly zero experience designing MMO game clients. So I understand the atoms, but I have limited experience with using molecules or making bricks out of them. That's why I decided to downshift my question to something that doesn't reference specific terminology at all: most likely I'm not using it right relative to what Bab does.

I believe CoH is targeted at OpenGL 1.2, based on the minimum graphics card requirement. I'm pretty sure the CoH devs *presume* that your OpenGL drivers are essentially processing the opengl state engine basically in hardware: an all software renderer would be very, very, very slow (wanna see an all software renderer? load CoH into VMware Workstation version 7). I think you are confusing software emulation and backward compatibility. The presumption is that CoH targets a certain feature set to guarantee hardware acceleration, because if they target a higher feature set some players will have video cards that either don't work at all or work with some software emulation of certain OpenGL features, or simply omit those rendering steps altogether, all of which would be bad in most cases (but not all: eliminate fog, and the game is still playable).


My suspicion is that Babs is thinking a light-refracting wormhole would require something like a vertex shader, and thus at a minimum OpenGL 2.0. That might orphan some existing player's video setups: their particular drivers (assuming the game worked at all) wouldn't execute the vertex shaders. My question is probably a gibberish question in context, but I don't have the background to know why: why, if Ultra Mode is likely to have two different rendering paths (the current one and the enhanced ultra path) and ultra mode is likely to be using OpenGL 2.0 or higher, is it problematic to have a power create an object that is rendered as a refractive object in ultra mode and just a fixed swirly thing in non-ultra mode.

There are several possibilities:

1. Its highly unconventional to spawn an object like that rather than the effects that powers normally invoke, and it would thus be a weird exception for a singular effect.

2. There's a problem in the tools that make creating such an object non-trivial, even if ultra mode could render them correctly, making it again a weird exception to how they typically design things.

3. The act of making it only look good in ultra mode but not in conventional mode defies BaB's sense of aesthetics.

4. My understanding of what ultra mode is likely to be able to render is inaccurate.

5. All of the above.

6. None of the above.

The number of times Bab has surprised me with #6 being the answer is large enough that I don't make too many assumptions there, even if I think I understand the basics, thus my caution. Bab specifically stated that visual effects require enough work that making multiple versions of them would be too time consuming in the general case. What I'm wondering is whether in this specific case it would be possible to make an object with a distortion shader effect in ultra mode and a fixed texture map swirl in non-ultra mode. My strong suspicion is that this is going to fall into the category of "not impossible, but more effort than its worth."

I may be way off base, but I think the issue is this :

The low end's effects, currently, are ALWAYS used. Even when you up the quality/particle count/etc. It's the base. They can't have it not happen, currently, and the light refraction/bending/etc would really not work with the base effect. Especially if the base effect is a graphical cottage rule item.

That's BAB's concern.

So I take it you don't have the tech to apply a fancy shader effect if the person's hardware and graphics settings support it and a simpler alternate effect if they do not? Like a cool distortion field that gets replaced with a basic particle effect on lower settings?

From what I've been observing I *think* the source of the communication hiccup is the "multiple rendering path" bit. In my experience watching the way things render in CoH (and I had to do that a lot while the Mac client was in testing) there aren't multiple paths, but it's built up in layers instead.

Again though, this is only my observation, there's likely a whole lot of stuff going on in the background that I can't see and don't know about.

I believe the swirly thing you speak of would be rendered like this: First it would be a geometric shape made in some 2D software and animated to spin in CoH. That wouldn't look like anything yet, because it doesn't have a texture applied yet (it would appear transparent). Then a texture is applied by the game - there would be multiple resolutions of that texture available, and just one loads depending on how far away you are, and what your video settings are. No matter what hardware you have, the polygons will be rendered, and some texture will be applied, because the game is designed to render up to this point no matter what, even if it has to do it all in software (though it will take advantage of hardware acceleration if it can). It can even have some kind of particle effect applied, varying in count by settings and hardware. By this point, the spinning swirly thing would look pretty cool already, with a palpable shape and form, and a colorful texture, and particles of dust floating off of it.

But then there's the part about the bending light effects. Those are not rendered as part of the object, but would be done as real-time after-effects. The best comparison for these after-effects would be like applying a Photoshop filter to a masked area of the display - only different levels of video cards support a different set of effects. The bending light affect is applied to a "mask" bordering the swirly thing so anything that gets near it, including players, are warped and smeared. That's why it's a real-time effect.

Unfortunately, if the *supported* video cards at the low-end are incapable of that effect, you have some players able to see the light-bending, and others who can't. Imagine moving your player close by, and it's not effected at all by the light effect, so it looks stupid. Then a determination has to be made by the devs whether that lack of visual information will impact the game negatively or not, and decide then whether to include it.

FYI, if you've ever tried to load CoH for Mac on Intel GMA 950 video you'd see what I'm talking about first-hand. The lighting and shadow effects are badly broken (which is why it's not supported) so everything has a Lego grey plastic feel to it. Textures don't render entirely, so there are holes in things. This is the kind of experience the devs try to avoid for the minimum supported hardware, and why they have to avoid using certain effects that might impact all players.

At the moment, that's true. But I'm wondering if Ultra Mode introduces them. I find it difficult to believe that the game client will, say, render water with the standard rendering code and then overlay Ultra Mode on top of it. I suppose you could do clever things with the OpenGL state engine that wouldn't require multiple rendering paths, but is that the best way to handle advanced graphics like that? I don't know how this is conventionally done, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't do it that way myself.

Water is one of the few exceptions, along with FSAA (and both have caused problems with various video cards at one point). It appears to be still rendered in layers, but it has an additional software effects mode if the hardware-based effect fails or is turned off. This is likely to ensure that supported hardware that's unable to render the water effects properly can still see water as it was intended to look, since it's one of the foundation effects of the game.

You can see the effects layering at work if you play with the Water Effects and the Shadows toggles in Graphics Options. There's a blue floor, a bluish tinted material. If you have water effects off, there's an animated layer on a top surface that players can pass through. Turn them on, and the effect happens throughout the blueish tinted material instead of just the top surface. Then you can play with the shadows toggle to see how light reflection and shadow bounce off the top surface.

Ultra Mode, and I'm guessing here again, would add an additional layer of effects to the water so you can see yourself reflected and distorted in the surface as you move around, as well as players next to you. Because that effect would be semi-transparent, you would still see the original water effects and light/shadow effects through the reflection. You probably could even turn off Water Effects and see the old software animation through it as well.

Like I said though, the old disclaimer again: I haven't seen Ultra, and it could be something drastically different from my guesses. I'm assuming it's an evolutionary step (to preserve as much backward compatibility as possible without creating too many new bugs) rather than a ground-up replacement/alternative.