what if tribe terrain was just colorful aluminum foil?

edit: much of this thread was in response to dare whose posts seem to have vanished

i have every intention of releasing.. perhaps we are underestimating how big and complicated this project is

1. the major goal is a tribes graphical extension and overhaul project. no textures look good with my dll until they are optimized for my shaders which are also constantly being tweaked. this is a process. look at the buttmapping video from 4 months ago and look at this video. lots of progress that required all the time i had in that 4 months.

2. i post updates when i make major progress. last night at 2am i achieved loading external normal maps (seen on the terrain), as well as restructured the entire code so the post processing could be captured from fraps (had to talk to fraps devs about this, which i just got a response from YESTERDAY). thus, this video is another proof of concept of major progress. oh also for the first time i was able to add model recognition so that the terrain has its own lighting shader so it can load the external normal map

3. there is so much missing that makes this not releasable that i am working on
- STILL NO WORLD TERRAIN AND BUILDING LIGHTING! (this is a DOWNGRADE from tribes)
- does not automatically load, you have to run a series of keypresses to get it working every time you load/resize/reactivate the window
- specular lighting is finicky
- poor performance from optimized algorithms (huge fps drops that i've been alleviating)
- ssao ruins visibility sometimes, this i'm tweaking
- buildings don't look good yet
- completely unconfigurable
- random crashes
- you can see some textures are flickering

4. next steps towards release:
- make everything configurable for autogenerated normal maps, and importing normal maps, as well as lighting settings per texture, and fog settings
- make fog distance equal to mission fog distance (currently its a fixed constant)
- create or gather textures optimized for shaders
- optimize shader algorithms for performance
- restore terrain lighting somehow
-- either find a way to paint the existing shadow map
-- or try to convert the renderer to deferred rendering for real time shadows

5. i literally pour all my freetime in my project which is maybe every other weekend and get in trouble with my fiance for staying up till 5am working on tribes. u can jog off m8

6. if this was a kickstarter that lasted a year everyone would wait patiently but since im releasing the best pictures and videos casually to tribes apparently u think im being selfish.

7. im looking for all the help i can get once i make a portable alpha version of the plugin so skilled texture gatherers (such as my frens like groove) can tweak settings and add textures and normals that look exceptional that i can bundle with release. hit me on discord without sounding like a maniac if u would like to be part of this process

8. i have put a version of my source on github looking for programmers to contribute their time but nobody has displayed any intention or confidence that they want to help soo i'm doing the 1 man army thing and so this will continue to take forever. sorry
 
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I'd say this resembles crinkled cellophane wrap more than aluminum foil. I could never personally play with it but would be fun to mess with whilst fucking around. I for one support all visual tweaks to tribes just because I like to see what people come up with.
 
Well technically this is tribes talk, and if it aint done yet it aint done yet. I get that you want to try it out, but why release a partially completed project? Has he been self glorifying? I hadn't noticed myself. I just thought he was showing what he has been working on, albeit for a long time.
 
shift check ur rep msg

i see that my likeness has been adopted into a character on dare's wild ride SA TW conspiracy fantasy sitcom

ill enjoy it while it lasts
 
spockhammer said:
i like looking at it too but its more than stupid to self glorify himself for years while not public releasing and tribes talk and tribes scripting and modifying has always been about that, why should he get an exception?
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i released things on tribes. even shift's latest hud in tribes scripting is based on one of my releases. when i first started learning how any of this works i released rainbow plugin too even tho useless it was the only stable plugin i ever made.

only things i hadnt released were things that could be considered cheats, or broken things - such as previous implementation of bloom, which was just a direct3d bloom plugin and an opengl to direct 3d wrapper of opengl32.dll. it was a terrible solution, too bright, and a black box so we couldnt change anything about it and it was basically unplayable because depending on where ur camera was pointed the bloom target would change and it would flicker often. so 5 years ago i tried to do bloom on my own thru opengl and failed using CG shaders and gave up. at that point i hadnt even gotten as far into tribe graphic hack as altimor or greyhound. all this stuff continued to be a pipedream.

until literally just 4-5 months ago cuz of ur msg dare, asking for wireframe rainbow tribe (which i considered a cheat), and i tried to recreate the source and i got excited and found a better path to shader land for tribes, and got ssao, bloom, lighting, normal generation, working from scratch, in the last 4 months.

eat my poo dude

there are no guarantees in this type of hacky project. we only just proved that we could do it.

u wanna talk nepotism my worldview would change if the ppl that have access to compiling t1 sources could give out information but instead im stuck injecting code directly into the opengl pipeline like a shmuck as a cheap workaround for actually reversing the .exe
 
broast said:
u wanna talk nepotism my worldview would change if the ppl that have access to compiling t1 sources could give out information but instead im stuck injecting code directly into the opengl pipeline like a shmuck as a cheap workaround for actually reversing the .exe
Click to expand...

1.40 shuffles around the build order for the objects from the 1.11 order(which is also shuffled around from earlier versions), so I couldn't tell you where the client render happens for example, even though I know the exact line where it occurs.
 
another angle of attack is to study what hudbot changes in a 1.11/1.30 image.

it is too bad Andrew never released his hudbot source - I am sure that would provide some insight in to what was done on 1.40 - i had the impression that 1.40 had integrated hudbot.

hudbot is the only attempt at more ambitious graphics for tribes that I am aware of. any future attempt to do a more ambitious opengl design for tribes would have to start with why and how hudbot does what it does.
 
bugs_ said:
another angle of attack is to study what hudbot changes in a 1.11/1.30 image.

it is too bad Andrew never released his hudbot source - I am sure that would provide some insight in to what was done on 1.40 - i had the impression that 1.40 had integrated hudbot.

hudbot is the only attempt at more ambitious graphics for tribes that I am aware of. any future attempt to do a more ambitious opengl design for tribes would have to start with why and how hudbot does what it does.
Click to expand...

andrew did release the mem.dll source, although it's missing his tribes.h which had structures and the memory locations to be hooked

i have it somewhere on some disconnected drive, if you cant find it online let me know and i'll dig it up.

edit: found it

mem_src_0.04.zip

altho tbch i dont remember if all the hudbot functionality is in there or if its just the more basic mem.dll funcs
 
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yea i dont think the actual hudbot shit is in there now that i look at it

i found it useful at the time for learning tho

somewhere on a dead laptop harddrive, greyhound has the scriptGL source which i'm betting would help too

HUNDEN WHERE R U
 
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