wRender to texture and motion blur?

[Trayer]

I had a really good idea for a map, which involved a lot of TV screens and portals which you can see through to where they go (Prey style). I figured this would be a fairly simple render to texture, but I don't think Nexuiz supports render to texture. Is this a feature that will be added any time soon? Also, motion blur seems to be an effect which is being used in a lot of up-coming games and engines. Is a motion blur effect planned?
Sorry for the demanding questions, though it doesn't make sense to apologize for ones post does it ; ).
=Trayer

[GDI+]

I had a really good idea for a map, which involved a lot of TV screens and portals which you can see through to where they go (Prey style). I figured this would be a fairly simple render to texture, but I don't think Nexuiz supports render to texture. Is this a feature that will be added any time soon? Also, motion blur seems to be an effect which is being used in a lot of up-coming games and engines. Is a motion blur effect planned?
Sorry for the demanding questions, though it doesn't make sense to apologize for ones post does it ; ).
=Trayer

I don't think they are currently on the TODO list for the DarkPlaces engine (Nexuiz uses this). They might by planned for the future, LordHavoc (DarkPlaces author) or the other developers here might know the answer.

I think there are currently one or two Quake-based custom engines that utilise at least motion blur effects. I'm not sure if any Quake-based engines have implemented render-to-texture support, or if it's even viable.

Motion blur can look impressive when used in the right places and not overly used.

Check out the features and screenshots sections of Vengeance r2:
http://entar.quakedev.com/
XreaL might be using it in the future since they have plans to implement all the next-gen effects/features:
http://xreal.sourceforge.net/xrealwiki/
Qfusion might support it (I can't find a complete list of features):
http://www.quakesrc.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=12
I don't think FTE or FuhQuake has motion blur but lots of other nice effects:
http://www.fteqw.com/
http://www.fuhquake.net/
...and there are plenty more as well

Be warned the XreaL engine is extremely slow currently. DarkPlaces has had 6 long years of hard work put into it to make it as good as it is now. I'm not entirely sure if those features will really benefit anyone right now. I think most people would prefer bug-fixes as a priority but an option to use some new features would be nice in the future.

[Trayer]

If it's been done in other quake-engines (Motion blur) it should be fairly simple to look at their code and implement it ourselves shouldn't it? Not even direct copy and paste, but actually just look how it's done than code it into dark places. Is darkplaces open-source? Also that vengance engine supports reflective water, wouldn't this use a technique similar to render to texture?
Thanks for reading my likely igorant questions,
-Trayer

[esteel]

Sure its possible.. but DarkPlaces feates a very advanced realtime light and shadows system and it might be hard to impossible to combine those two (I have on clue about this stuff ).. But work on DarkPlaces is continuing so you might get it one day

[GDI+]

Thanks for reading my likely ignorant questions.

Nonsense, there's nothing wrong with asking questions to answers your not certain of.

If it's been done in other quake-engines (Motion blur) it should be fairly simple to look at their code and implement it ourselves shouldn't it?

It might not be that simple. DarkPlaces has evolved over the years into something quite different from the original Quake source. Although, on the face of things, how hard can it be to implement motion blur or a pseudo effect which looks similar? It might simply be a question of the features not being very useful or needed right at this very moment. LordHavoc receives masses of suggestions for new features but he is, after all, only one man (or God ). People are free to help him out or make suggestions. I think he resides on IRC quite often and apparently he is very kind and helpful in regards to curious questions.

TODO list: http://cvs.icculus.org/cvs/twilight/darkplaces/todo?view=markup (endless list of nice features already requested)

Is darkplaces open-source?

Yes, it is open-source. GPL licensed I believe (someone correct me if I’m wrong).

DarkPlaces: http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/

Also that vengance engine supports reflective water, wouldn't this use a technique similar to render to texture?

Not my department I’m afraid. The implementation varies from one game to another. I think the water in Quake/DarkPlaces uses a material shader for water which describes the texture along with its attributes. The properties defined in the shader file affect how the engine renders it in-game. The one in Nexuiz appears to make use of a low resolution texture with a small amount of repetitive motion. I think the engine is only limited to a single-pass for shaders and doesn’t yet support all of Q3’s features, not sure. Real-time reflections can be performance-intensive whereby cube-maps are generally used as a fast and dirty substitute instead. Although, I’m not entirely sure how they are implemented. Cube-maps are just pre-calculated reflections stored and loaded like a texture, I believe.

Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Hopefully some kind person with greater wisdom will pick this topic up and answer your questions definitely.

EDIT:

Darn, esteel was much faster replying and his answer more concise.
Congrats on the GIGA interview by the way, very nicely done.

[Ed]

Water reflections would need multipel rendering passes AFAIK.

[esteel]

Well hdr also requires multible (two) rendering passes so that is in general not a problem.

[Trayer]

Few things a little research found:
http://www.celephais.net/fitzquake/
In the readme mentions a render to texture thing, I'm assuming this means a quake engine has render to texture?