Videogames such as Q3A and COD4 (Call of Duty 4, and probably 3 etc) have engines that have the capability to allow shaders to tell the engine to create additional surfaces while the map is being run.

What this is used for is making tall grass and the like (for hiding in etc) that is realistic and doesn't have the problems sprites have.

Would you like DP to have this capability?
Will you help if so?
It requires many man hours of code changes, not a simple patch, but ofcourse can be done if enough people commit to working on the code.

Until Nexuiz/DP has multi-stage shaders, this won't work. People have already been discussing those for quite a while.

Btw, the Quake3 implementation of grass (q3map_fur, etc) was really slow.

q3map_surfaceModel modelpath density odds minscale maxscale minangle maxangle oriented

q3map_fur layers offset fade

these can be used right now. not as advanced as above mentioned titles, but its something.

Last time I tried them, neither of those worked in Nexuiz. Has something changed?

q3map_surfaceModel always worked. its compile time. it basically dumps a pile of models over a surface.

never tried the other one,

Ah, yes, I remember. Morphed used Surfacemodel in that map of his- but I doubt using Surfacemodel for grass is very efficient (I'll do some tests, maybe it can be done in clusters).

I don't believe q3map_fur works though. Can someone verify this?

Multi-stage shaders have little to do with weather DP can create additional surfaces in the map on runtime. That's just a buzzword, akin to "you need cycronic-billagio-engines to create that kind of heat", the person just announced one "backbox" that is able to create that amount of heat, not how it goes about doing so, nor the process that creates the heat.

The "Whaaaaaa?????????????/////???? You St00pid!!!" option was for people who didn't know what was being talked about and thus wanted to dismiss the whole discussion.

The important question of how many people have the ability and desire to improve DP remains at zero.

Lord Havok is mostly working on his new engine. If any of you have knowlege of advanced geometry and know how to write a few lines of code you could be of assistance in improving DP into the future as Nexuiz further matures.

I suppose that's not so easy as it sounds. C knowledge is not enough, you need to know opengl (and probably not only the basics stuff).

Alien wrote:I suppose that's not so easy as it sounds. C knowledge is not enough, you need to know opengl (and probably not only the basics stuff).

Yes, it involves many changes in diffrent parts of the engine I hear. It is not "just support multi-stage shaders".

Since LH is working on other things from now on, Nexuiz does need C programmers versed on OpenGL to help on DP. I'm suprised there are none in the Nexuiz croud.

To my knowledge, q3map_fur requires multi-stage shaders. That's all I said, as I was responding to your original post. Obviously a different method would require other solutions, but YOU were the one who mentioned Quake3's method for drawing grass.

As far as I am concerned, I'm only going to lend my advice as long as you can stay civil, respectful, and non-confrontational.

DP has to beable to render new surfaces in the map before deciding on the way to signal DP to do that. It doesn't have the code to create the new surfaces as of now and that will require much code change in many areas. Basically: DP needs a coder or two.

I'm up for anything that can improve the game visually and this sounds like a great feature which I also seen in other games. I think Nexuiz would look good with surface-generated 3D grass, especially if one day we may have large outdoor maps with terrain and vehicles and we would need such a thing. I'm totally not good with coding sadly so I can't do anything but I'm +1 for this feature and do hope to see something like that sometime. ONS-Reborn is a good example of a map that could very much use this... I think the grass it currently has is BSP-made each piece if I'm right (and it looks bad in my opinion alongside being more difficult to make that way).