Graphics 9-10: 60 shades

Evening, our loyal supporters, and other random passersby who happen to read this blog, if for no other reason that its choice of font is excellent.

While this period's plan was to get wet (insert Snoop Dogg reference here), shadows were deemed more important and pushed water back to next period. Grass, having already been taken care of at a satisfactory level, will drop off the plan, having been replaced by water.

Here you see the importance map with some more functions of importance: distance from the camera, surface normal, and the luminosity of the seen pixel.

Distance is obvious, close shadows need more resolution than far-away ones. The surface normal function boosts the importance if the surface happens to be facing the camera, as shadows on that are more visible than those on a wall at an angle. And finally, darker pixels need less shadow resolution than brighter ones.

Together, we have approximately 16 times better resolution than good-old-shadow maps.

Then, the work progressed towards soft shadows. You might chip your finger on those hard edges if you're not careful, is all.

Having checked the most often used books on your coder's bookshelf, the Necronomicon and the Book of the Law had nothing on soft shadows, which was greatly surprising. Thus we had to dig deeper, finding an antique copy of Gpu Pro 2 buried in a temple close by.

That book details an incantation of screen-space soft shadows, a scalable spell that produces nice-looking soft shadows from any shadow technique. It's far from a uniform blur; shadows are sharper close to the caster as they should be.

Unfortunately we're not immune to a characteristic of warping shadow techniques: the edges swim. What could be done to limit it has been done, but as shadow pixels vary in size and position, fully stable shadows aren't possible with warping techniques.

Luckily, it's not that noticeable with soft shadows and racing at speed. Still, it highlights how this is still an open problem.

The next bit is for artists.

Here we have the screen and shadow views of a fence. There's slight peter panning going on, but otherwise it's looking good. Artists could help the Pan problem by making the fence thicker.

Going forward next to the fence, we see the shadow suddenly disappear. What's that? A fence made of grass decided to rot and disintegrate in place? No, nothing of the sort, sadly. Not even termites.

In the shadow view we see the issue: uneven warping due to huge triangles. Sure enough, checking the wireframe view, the fence tris are rather big. Warping techniques are sensitive to huge triangles: they can cause artifacts like these. Subdividing the appropriate parts gets rid of that.

And finally, water was started on. We have nice glittering summer caustics here, visible at the pool's bottom. Hard to see in a still picture you say? Aye, it be so. Take a sip of your closest bottle of rum, and repeat enough times that the lights in the picture start to move to get a picture of how it looks like.

So, the remaining time shall be spent in all kinds of wetplay; hopefully 0.8.1 will be out soon, so we can begin integrating the graphics changes. Many of them need updates to tracks so that they can be fully realized, which would push a release back a century or so, give or take 99.8 years.

Graphics 7-8: gods in motion

Long time no ABC, Pöysti mah man.

What you see above is a sneak peek from the latest work of the Great Sitting Artist, samuncle. He's been getting intimate with the new lighting system, and it shows - can you see how much it blushes? It's adorable really.

Back to our regular scheduled program. The topics for the biweek were motion blur and god rays. Bugs were found, and according to the great principles of persistence hunting (a method used by no other animal than humans), were ran after until they collapsed to death from mere exhaustion.

While that certainly takes the fun out of seeing the bugs writhe in pain, at times you simply can't outrun them and need other measures.

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The existing motion blur was a radial blur with protection for a certain area of the screen. It looked good enough, but was a bit slow, and the protection area was static.

Given the task here is eye candy, physical correctness be damned; one had to see how it would act when optimized and tweaked first. Before and after, with the protected area visualized in rogue red:

As you can see, the static area didn't cover the kart when speeding, resulting in blur being applied to it when it shouldn't have.

With that fixed, some optimization improved the motion blur's speed by 33%, and as it still looked good, that was that.

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God rays, light shafts, or a strange sky hybrid of SSAO and radial blur, are this thing you see when your room has not seen a vacuum cleaner in a month and somebody opens the curtains.

Implemented according to the letter and spirit of the long-dead guru GPU Gems 3, may she rest in peace, we draw the sky and sun to a texture, trace the path to the sun, and sample along that path.

Hijacking on the occlusion query for the lens flare, we can determine the visibility of both effects with one stroke, as both are only visible when the sun is.

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This section will be a bit more technical than usual; please bear with us.

Shadow maps, invented by Sir Williams the Fourth in 1887 or thereabouts, are a method not used by ancient Romans to fake shadows in a two-dimensional quantum display, otherwise known as a picture.

The problem of shadows, unlike that of light, is still unsolved, to the dismay of many. There is no known method to have beautiful shadows that scales well. Therefore we limit ourselves to only casting shadows from the sun; as a directional light, it's merely one render pass more, compared to six for a normal point light.

The above picture is an implementation of a basic shadow map. Far from a next gen darkness system, it produces 50 shades of Minecraft, as one can't simply get enough resolution for the whole visible camera range.

Clearly this is not adequate for us; for we are neither Minecraft nor fans of Twilight fanfiction. As it happens, the current state of the art in shades is rectilinear shadow mapping, made public a year ago by Paul Rosen.

Unlike some other publications of the same era, this technique can be fully implemented in GL 2.1+, without requiring any kind of GPGPU or even float textures, and it also runs faster than the previous state of the art solution, cascading shadow maps.

Rest assured no animals were harmed in the production of this picture; the lines are completely fake leather. What we have here is a packed depth image from above the Jungle level. The area highlighted in white is the back-projection of every visible pixel to this camera, allowing us to find a much smaller area to focus the shadow map on.

The importance map in closer view. In Rosen's algorithm, we determine an importance value for each pixel; in this image, every visible pixel is given an importance of 1, and invisible pixels 0.

What you see on the borders are visualizations of the two 1-dimensional importance maps generated from this image. For each horizontal and vertical line, we take the maximum value to the corresponding 1D importance map. This is done via a per-pixel loop in a fragment shader.

For each importance map, we then generate a warp map of the same dimensions. Red means shift this pixel back, black means stay put, and green is shift this pixel forward.

It's these two 1D warp maps that make the core of this technique. No shadow map area is wasted on pixels not visible (with the exception of those in the same row/column), and the important pixels are bigger than the less important ones. This means that the core area of a shadow might have less resolution than the shadow edges, giving the illusion of a much higher resolution shadow map.

For the exact format, it is a normal RG8 texture, and you can easily use RGBA8 instead with two bytes wasted. The negative range, -1 to 0, is stored in the red channel, and the corresponding positive range in the green channel.

This gives us 16 bits of precision for the warp map, which ought to be plenty.

Here's a warped image of the same Jungle level. As this image only uses the visibility importance, it is not that warped yet; only invisible pixels are removed from the shadow map.

Applying other forms of importance, we can decide that shadow edges need more resolution, or that pixels close to the viewer need more. This is a quite powerful technique using little power or VRAM; 1x512 RGBA textures take 2kb each.

This implementation is not yet complete, there are some remaining artifacts, and optimization & tuning has yet to be done. So expect more shadow work in the coming weeks.

Finishing this investigative report, we have a picture of an old classic game Slicks'n'slide. It's a top-down racing game with weapons, a favorite of mine.

Signing out,

Want to play online ?

Hi you,

After my last post which was very technical about the network, I wanted here to show you at what point is currently the online racing in your favorite open-source game ! So I've decided to make a short video for you to see that you can starting from now play online with other players, as long as you don't have high pings (<100ms).
I didn't know where was the server when I recorded the video but now I can tell, the server is in Paris, France, and my ping to the server is under 50ms. This is important because there is no lag compensation yet, but don't worry hiker is working on it :).
For instance, i played with Arthur who has a ping (from Norway) of 75ms to that server. Turned out that we felt the lag while playing essentially concerning picking powerups.

I won't make you wait, here's the video.

Do not hesitate to send your comments here or on youtube !
Cheers,
Robin 'hilnius' Nicollet

Random ramblings among riveting revisions

Greetings, SuperTuxKart-lovers (and occasional passers-by)! Your benevolent blabbering brat is back, to give some additional updates between all the honest, hard-working heroes writing here nowadays.

Zero point eight point one pontifications
I guess the first thing people are wondering is where did 0.8.1 go. The simple answer is that it's still not quite ready, for various reasons. One being that we didn't anticipate GSoC and all that would entail when giving our first tentative guesstimates, and the other being personal commitments taking up most of the rest of time the developers had. So where is it at right now?

Wiimote support is almost ready. However, the newer Wiimotes with built-in Motion Plus does not work so far, mostly due to lack of developer time. Bringing full support for Wiimotes might be pushed back so as to not stall the release even longer.
Soccer mode has been worked on by Yasin, who was one of the students we would have really liked to have but didn't have room for. Mad props to him for staying with us nonetheless and helping out even though he has various other things to deal with. Right now soccer mode has team support, with markers showing which karts are on which team, and will just need a few additions to be in a usable state. How fun it will be in the first release is left to see, but that will surely be refined later.
The tutorial and Easter egg mode are both pretty much finished, though for the latter there's an acute lack of tracks with eggs defined. 0.8.1 might just become a preview release for this feature, just like soccer mode.

STKSoC(sic)
Then there's the GSoC stuff. Yeah, that's not really exciting, so I guess you don't want to read about it.
Just kidding! Cease fire, please! We just had our mid-term evaluations, which means we evaluate whether the students have done what they've promised, and if not what can be done to repair it to get a passing grade. But due to the hard work of our three students there was no question at all that they would all pass with a spotless record. But don't take my word for it; just read the excellent blog posts they've written! Cand with his fancy-pants graphics (making an old-school grump like me wonder whether I should drool or say 'meh'. I kind of do both at the same time, though I'd never want to go back), hilnius with his back-packet trips back and forth the interconnections, and unitraxx with his... wait, where are his blog posts? Oh, there they are! Be sure to read his musings on being a Google Summer of Code student and how he's solved his tasks with dialogs and obligatory screenings. Congratulations to all of you, and keep up the good work!

Blondes on snowmobiles

What's this? Could it be... yes, it is indeed a new kart and a new character! She's Sara, incidentally also a princess and the mascot of OpenGameArt.org. Our resident 3D artist samuncle's first kart, it also features a unique jump animation, which will also be created for the other karts with time. See it in action here:

That's all the weather for now folks, and if I've forgotten something please remind me.