Came back to look at CS after 5 years... 1'st post and 2 questions

[Giniu]

Hello,

first of all this is my first post there so I would say two words about myself... I'm mathematics student from Poland and computers are just my hobby so my knowledge is not so high in this area... I know few languages - Erlang, Ruby, C++, (Basic v2.0 and Assembler 6502 but those are ancient times), and some not so usefull languages... for everyday I use Erlang so it is hard to get on with OO so forgive my some stupid questions

at first I was looking at this Engine something about 5 years ago... it was version 0.92 if I remember correctly... I was still very young to pc's and only I was able to do was run some demo and it scared me away (Genesis3D looked better)... I thought not so much changed there and started to look around for something else... Genesis3D then, later Destiny3D, some time later Ogre then OSG and Delta3D... but then by mistake (i feel ashamed) I entered CS page again and saw that it isn't so bas as I remembered it - yes I know - old version... - those new screenshots realy are great... also movies that appeard in 2005... so now I decided to give it a try and this is why I have one question that probably was already answered...

Looking at Ogre screenshots one can see many effects like HDRI, DOF, extensive use of shaders... I already saw normal map examples, very nice foliage example, rag-doll movie, nice disco-light movie and specular/stencil demo... also saw "Some Nice Stuff"... must say realy nice stuff... but I wonder how hard is to make HDRI/DOF/other eye-candies that we can see at Ogre screenshots (like http://www.ogre3d.org/gallery/albums/album30/ylin5bm.jpg )? I know - this is another CS vs but I just want to know if such huge amount of effects like on above screen can be pumped through CS with good performance...

second question is about mixed scenes... something like outdoor and indoor scene manager... I know that Ogre for exapmple doesn't do well there, same as other engines I tried - they have strict outdoor optimisation and are forgeting about outdoor or are concerned about indoor and forgeting about outdoor... does have CS some tool for portal generation on load time/pre load time or they have to be placed by artists? Is there some paged scenes with run-time loading on needed chunks? (I confess I wasn't searching for answer for that as it is 1'st at night in my time zone and I already started that post, it orginaly was "Came back to look at CS after 5 years... 1'st post and 1 question" but then this one came in mind)

ohh... what a long post - like always - on any forum I post first post -  far too big - I must learn how to use "cat post | grep important | less" hope someone would be able to read it without faling asleap

best regards,
Giniu.

[jorrit]

Looking at Ogre screenshots one can see many effects like HDRI, DOF, extensive use of shaders... I already saw normal map examples, very nice foliage example, rag-doll movie, nice disco-light movie and specular/stencil demo... also saw "Some Nice Stuff"... must say realy nice stuff... but I wonder how hard is to make HDRI/DOF/other eye-candies that we can see at Ogre screenshots (like http://www.ogre3d.org/gallery/albums/album30/ylin5bm.jpg )? I know - this is another CS vs but I just want to know if such huge amount of effects like on above screen can be pumped through CS with good performance...

With the right artwork and shaders that should be doable.

second question is about mixed scenes... something like outdoor and indoor scene manager... I know that Ogre for exapmple doesn't do well there, same as other engines I tried - they have strict outdoor optimisation and are forgeting about outdoor or are concerned about indoor and forgeting about outdoor... does have CS some tool for portal generation on load time/pre load time or they have to be placed by artists? Is there some paged scenes with run-time loading on needed chunks? (I confess I wasn't searching for answer for that as it is 1'st at night in my time zone and I already started that post, it orginaly was "Came back to look at CS after 5 years... 1'st post and 1 question" but then this one came in mind)

Crystal Space doesn't do automatic portalization yet. So at the moment you have to use manual placed portals to separate indoor and outdoor areas. Paging and run-time loading are in full development at the moment. It is one of the Google Summer of Code projects. PVS (precalculated visibility) is also in development.


Greetings,

[Giniu]

Crystal Space doesn't do automatic portalization yet. So at the moment you have to use manual placed portals to separate indoor and outdoor areas. Paging and run-time loading are in full development at the moment. It is one of the Google Summer of Code projects. PVS (precalculated visibility) is also in development.

That's great ... are those planned for 1.0 or next versions?

-edit==
btw... saw Swig already supports Ruby (http://www.swig.org/Doc1.3/Ruby.html#Ruby) - does it mean Ruby binding are already there or needs only some small changes to *.i files of Swig interface? Ruby would be fun to have as addition ...

[jorrit]

Crystal Space doesn't do automatic portalization yet. So at the moment you have to use manual placed portals to separate indoor and outdoor areas. Paging and run-time loading are in full development at the moment. It is one of the Google Summer of Code projects. PVS (precalculated visibility) is also in development.

That's great ... are those planned for 1.0 or next versions?

For PVS that depends on wether or not the student manages to finish it correctly before we release 1.0.
For streaming loader that is not likely as that involves more internal changes to the engine and we don't want to postpone 1.0 too much. So streaming loader will most likely be for a future release (1.1).

-edit==
btw... saw Swig already supports Ruby (http://www.swig.org/Doc1.3/Ruby.html#Ruby) - does it mean Ruby binding are already there or needs only some small changes to *.i files of Swig interface? Ruby would be fun to have as addition ...

Nobody has done this yet but if swig supports ruby it shouldn't be too difficult.

Greetings,