Search the archive:
 YaBB - Yet another Bulletin Board
 
   
 
  Simviation Forum › Current Flight Simulator Series › Flight Simulator X › FSWC's back in progress!
(Moderators: Mitch., Fly2e, ozzy72, beaky, Clipper, JBaymore, Bob70, BigTruck)
‹ Previous Topic | Next Topic ›
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 ... 13
Send Topic Print
FSWC's back in progress! (Read 40842 times)
Reply #30 - Jan 1st, 2008 at 12:21am

NickN   Offline
Colonel
FSX runs fine... the problem
is you or your system

Posts: 6317
 *****
 
pwheeler wrote on Dec 31st, 2007 at 10:57am:
Hi guys,

thought I'd register here as I think we're on the right course for a massive improvement in look of the water.

Firstly, I modified a version for SP2 that was done by Jase over on AVSIM. He got Ingvaars original shader mod working in SP2. I don't know if he did anything differently to you Nick to get it working in SP2.

All I did was add muliplication factors against the texture colour and the specular lighting, and also remove the entry that created that annoying moon glow. The first two are scalable so hopefully Str1ker you can add them into FSWC. Although I removed the moon glow line, it is probably scalable too by adding a multiplication factor to it rather than delete it.

There seems to be seven components to the water - base texture colour; sun diffuse lighting; moon diffuse lighting; sun specular lighting; moon specular lighting; reflections (sky (low), clouds (mid), terrain (high), autogen (max)); bump mapping.

I think these are all controlled within the shaders so theoretically they are all modifiable.

I have a few more things that I have been trying to work on. Any help would be appreciated:

1. Someone on AVSIM asked if I could remove the moon glow from DX10. This file is quite different to the DX9 file and apparently just removing the line I removed in DX9 didn't work. I havn't tried to mulitply the line instead as I don't have a DX10 GPU to test it on. Can someone with DX10 try changing this line in the water40.fx (not fxh) and add the bit in red to see if it works?:

Color = float4(lerp(Color.xyz + (g_vSunDirectional * specularFactor.x) + (0.3 * (specularFactor.y +
0.1 *
saturate(dot(g_vSunVectorWorld_Moon,vSurfaceNorm)))).xxx, baseColor.xyz, fAlpha.xxxx),fAlpha);

There's alot of guess work involved as I really don't have a clue what I'm doing  Wink

2. The modification I made to the specular lighting reduces their intensity. This is not quite what I wanted to achieve. What I really wanted was to reduce the size of the specular reflections. With my mod the specular glints are not pure white, I essentially just reduced their opacity. I want them to be pure white just not such a wide area. Any ideas?

3. I've been trying to work out how to reduce the intensity of the reflections. It seems to be the envColor.rgb variable that draws the reflections. However it also seems to draw the sun diffuse lighting too and multipliying by ,say 0.3, tends to make the water too dark, although it does reduce the reflections. I'm sure that there is a line somewhere else in the shader which can be muliplied to reduce reflections without reducing the diffuse lighting.

4. What I would really like to accomplish is control over what is reflected at the different water 2x levels. i.e. have the terrain rather than the clouds reflected at water 2x mid. This should help with performance and I'd rather see the terrain reflected than the clouds. Not sure if this is controlled by the shaders. Any ideas?

5. Alot of people have noted the star reflections are way out of proportion. I imagine they are reflected in the same way as the sun, moon and sky. Any one have any ideas how we can remove them? My guess is we can't without removing the sun, moon and sky reflections too, unless they are reflected using an env map rather than what is actually in the sky.

I know the FEX guys are looking into some of these issues with regards to implimenting them in FEX, so maybe they'll come up with something.

Anyway, sorry for the long post.

Happy new year!!!

Paul



Welcome aboard Paul and thank you for your work and the follow up. Our resident GUI programmer for this is Str1ker who also continued the work on the SP1 file project. All I did with SP2 was import the original code. I happened to come across your edits when googling for info about FSX shader code and posted what you had done here.

I am not a graphics code programmer but I do know my way around the textures somewhat. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.  Smiley

I see that the Dx10 rain issue was figured out  Wink

Hopefully between everyone who is chipping in with shader code edits, a good GUI programmer and perhaps some ENV texture edits we can come up with a wiz-bang water fix everyone can enjoy.

Smiley Wink
 
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #31 - Jan 1st, 2008 at 12:31am

Ashton Lawson   Offline
Colonel
FS Water Configurator
Programmer
Phuket, Thailand

Gender: male
 Posts: 1211
 *****
 
NickN wrote on Jan 1st, 2008 at 12:21am:
pwheeler wrote on Dec 31st, 2007 at 10:57am:
Hi guys,

thought I'd register here as I think we're on the right course for a massive improvement in look of the water.

Firstly, I modified a version for SP2 that was done by Jase over on AVSIM. He got Ingvaars original shader mod working in SP2. I don't know if he did anything differently to you Nick to get it working in SP2.

All I did was add muliplication factors against the texture colour and the specular lighting, and also remove the entry that created that annoying moon glow. The first two are scalable so hopefully Str1ker you can add them into FSWC. Although I removed the moon glow line, it is probably scalable too by adding a multiplication factor to it rather than delete it.

There seems to be seven components to the water - base texture colour; sun diffuse lighting; moon diffuse lighting; sun specular lighting; moon specular lighting; reflections (sky (low), clouds (mid), terrain (high), autogen (max)); bump mapping.

I think these are all controlled within the shaders so theoretically they are all modifiable.

I have a few more things that I have been trying to work on. Any help would be appreciated:

1. Someone on AVSIM asked if I could remove the moon glow from DX10. This file is quite different to the DX9 file and apparently just removing the line I removed in DX9 didn't work. I havn't tried to mulitply the line instead as I don't have a DX10 GPU to test it on. Can someone with DX10 try changing this line in the water40.fx (not fxh) and add the bit in red to see if it works?:

Color = float4(lerp(Color.xyz + (g_vSunDirectional * specularFactor.x) + (0.3 * (specularFactor.y +
0.1 *
saturate(dot(g_vSunVectorWorld_Moon,vSurfaceNorm)))).xxx, baseColor.xyz, fAlpha.xxxx),fAlpha);

There's alot of guess work involved as I really don't have a clue what I'm doing  Wink

2. The modification I made to the specular lighting reduces their intensity. This is not quite what I wanted to achieve. What I really wanted was to reduce the size of the specular reflections. With my mod the specular glints are not pure white, I essentially just reduced their opacity. I want them to be pure white just not such a wide area. Any ideas?

3. I've been trying to work out how to reduce the intensity of the reflections. It seems to be the envColor.rgb variable that draws the reflections. However it also seems to draw the sun diffuse lighting too and multipliying by ,say 0.3, tends to make the water too dark, although it does reduce the reflections. I'm sure that there is a line somewhere else in the shader which can be muliplied to reduce reflections without reducing the diffuse lighting.

4. What I would really like to accomplish is control over what is reflected at the different water 2x levels. i.e. have the terrain rather than the clouds reflected at water 2x mid. This should help with performance and I'd rather see the terrain reflected than the clouds. Not sure if this is controlled by the shaders. Any ideas?

5. Alot of people have noted the star reflections are way out of proportion. I imagine they are reflected in the same way as the sun, moon and sky. Any one have any ideas how we can remove them? My guess is we can't without removing the sun, moon and sky reflections too, unless they are reflected using an env map rather than what is actually in the sky.

I know the FEX guys are looking into some of these issues with regards to implimenting them in FEX, so maybe they'll come up with something.

Anyway, sorry for the long post.

Happy new year!!!

Paul



Welcome aboard Paul and thank you for your work and the follow up. Our resident GUI programmer for this is str!ker1. All I did was import the original code. I happened to come across your edits when googling for info about FSX shader code and posted what you had done here.

I am not a graphics code programmer but I do know my way around the textures somewhat. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.  Smiley

I see that the Dx10 rain issue was figured out  Wink

Hopefully between everyone who is chipping in with shader code edits, a good GUI programmer and perhaps some ENV texture edits we can come up with a wiz-bang water fix everyone can enjoy.

Smiley Wink


Good thing you're optimistic.  I've always been a bit of a pessemist myself, but now that this project is really kicking off, I feel confident that I can get the program working, provided you guys can get the shader code sorted out.

I was also thinking, much earlier on, perhaps there would be a way of removing the star effect from Light Bloom, because our eyes don't get that, and it would improve performance, but that's for another time.

Also, I think I might be able to make my program's interface more like FSX's, so it actually looks more like a part of FSX.  Not sure if that would violate copyright or anything though, lol...
 
...&&FS Water Configurator+ has new modifications in the works, plus DirectX 10, Service Pack&&1, and Radeon HD 3+ Series support.
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #32 - Jan 1st, 2008 at 10:06am

pwheeler   Offline
Colonel
Fly Virtual

Posts: 54
 *****
 
Hi guys,

thanks for the welcome.

I do think that we can achieve a great deal with these shader modifications and it should all be adjustable within a GUI front end like Str1ker's FSWC (which I think looks great, by the way).

As for the height of the waves affecting the specular lighting. If you use FEX and chose a choppy wave it does indeed change the amount of specular and also the reflections - as it does in the real world. However, the wave pattern does look really over the top and is not natural, especially for inland water. Its a shame the different water types do not use their own shader - imagine having different wave effects for inland and the ocean.

I know with the up and coming weather engine for FEX they have stated that the are able to change the wave effect in real time. Thus when a storm appears the sea wil get rougher. How effective this will be I don't know. Its supposed to be out in february though!

There should be a constant somewhere to define the reflectivity of the water. This might be something to do with fog. I'm not sure. There are lots of constants in the general shaders but I haven't found one that does this yet. This might effect the specular reflectivity too.

I guess its just a case of the special effects being too over the top. I am a musician and when you're in the studio there is a rule saying that when you are putting an effect on a sound, get it sounding good and then always back it off a bit. When your creating something sometimes your perspective of things goes a bit skew.

When I get a bit more time I'll dive back into the shaders and have another go.

Anyway, off to a new year dinner now. Hope you're all having a good one.


Paul
 
...&&
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #33 - Jan 1st, 2008 at 10:20pm

Ashton Lawson   Offline
Colonel
FS Water Configurator
Programmer
Phuket, Thailand

Gender: male
 Posts: 1211
 *****
 
Ashton Lawson wrote on Dec 31st, 2007 at 11:50pm:
pwheeler wrote on Dec 31st, 2007 at 10:57am:
Hi guys,

thought I'd register here as I think we're on the right course for a massive improvement in look of the water.

Firstly, I modified a version for SP2 that was done by Jase over on AVSIM. He got Ingvaars original shader mod working in SP2. I don't know if he did anything differently to you Nick to get it working in SP2.

All I did was add muliplication factors against the texture colour and the specular lighting, and also remove the entry that created that annoying moon glow. The first two are scalable so hopefully Str1ker you can add them into FSWC. Although I removed the moon glow line, it is probably scalable too by adding a multiplication factor to it rather than delete it.

There seems to be seven components to the water - base texture colour; sun diffuse lighting; moon diffuse lighting; sun specular lighting; moon specular lighting; reflections (sky (low), clouds (mid), terrain (high), autogen (max)); bump mapping.

I think these are all controlled within the shaders so theoretically they are all modifiable.

I have a few more things that I have been trying to work on. Any help would be appreciated:

1. Someone on AVSIM asked if I could remove the moon glow from DX10. This file is quite different to the DX9 file and apparently just removing the line I removed in DX9 didn't work. I havn't tried to mulitply the line instead as I don't have a DX10 GPU to test it on. Can someone with DX10 try changing this line in the water40.fx (not fxh) and add the bit in red to see if it works?:

Color = float4(lerp(Color.xyz + (g_vSunDirectional * specularFactor.x) + (0.3 * (specularFactor.y +
0.1 *
saturate(dot(g_vSunVectorWorld_Moon,vSurfaceNorm)))).xxx, baseColor.xyz, fAlpha.xxxx),fAlpha);

There's alot of guess work involved as I really don't have a clue what I'm doing  Wink

2. The modification I made to the specular lighting reduces their intensity. This is not quite what I wanted to achieve. What I really wanted was to reduce the size of the specular reflections. With my mod the specular glints are not pure white, I essentially just reduced their opacity. I want them to be pure white just not such a wide area. Any ideas?

3. I've been trying to work out how to reduce the intensity of the reflections. It seems to be the envColor.rgb variable that draws the reflections. However it also seems to draw the sun diffuse lighting too and multipliying by ,say 0.3, tends to make the water too dark, although it does reduce the reflections. I'm sure that there is a line somewhere else in the shader which can be muliplied to reduce reflections without reducing the diffuse lighting.

4. What I would really like to accomplish is control over what is reflected at the different water 2x levels. i.e. have the terrain rather than the clouds reflected at water 2x mid. This should help with performance and I'd rather see the terrain reflected than the clouds. Not sure if this is controlled by the shaders. Any ideas?

5. Alot of people have noted the star reflections are way out of proportion. I imagine they are reflected in the same way as the sun, moon and sky. Any one have any ideas how we can remove them? My guess is we can't without removing the sun, moon and sky reflections too, unless they are reflected using an env map rather than what is actually in the sky.

I know the FEX guys are looking into some of these issues with regards to implimenting them in FEX, so maybe they'll come up with something.

Anyway, sorry for the long post.

Happy new year!!!

Paul


Hey cool, great to meet you.

I know what you mean about the specular intensity, and it's been the same with me in SP1, we can lower it's opacity, in a sense, but I'm not able to make it actually sharper, but I do have an idea.

You know how there is the bump factor right?  In SP2, I've made the assumption, by looking at the SP2 Water20.fxh, that the shader now takes into account actual changing values by the game, rather than the old shader constants used in SP1.  I thought this meant that the water would actually change it's look depending on conditions, like wind, or cloud coverage, stuff like that.

I don't know if that's true, but I reckon the value to change to get the specular reflection sharper, is the bump value.  When you increase the bump, you increase the apparent angle of the surfaces you are editing, thus making white parts whiter, and darker parts regular, and I think that can decrease the surface area that is white.  I'm not sure if it would work, but if it doesn't, then I suspect we'll have to edit the ocean height field to make it a lot sharper, which shouldn't be too hard, but then if it were that easy, X Graphics and FEX and all those other addons would've done that already.

I don't think we can selectively choose what is reflected, that's probably controlled by the sim, which is really unfortunate.  However, I have experienced some hickups, where I set my water to Max, and in the end, it only reflects clouds, autogen, scenery, and AI traffic, but no terrain, which I thought was really weird.  Perhaps there is a file somewhere which could define what is shown.

I've been looking at the orignal SP1 fxh file, and whilst it might not have much in common with the SP2 file, dod you notice that there is a fog value?  If fog is applied to reflections, then that should be able to control how the visible the reflections are, so increasing the fog value would make the reflections more water-coloured, and decreasing it would make it more like a mirror.  Perhaps you should experiment with that.

SP1 Water20.fxh:
Quote:
// Output vertex color straight to PS
     // The alpha component is used to represent the relative
     // depth of the water, used in computing water translucenty
     // The color component is simply the color scaled by the
     // diffuse sun lighting component
   o.vColor = float4(pow(o.vNormalWS.yyy,3),v.vColor.a);

^In this it mentions the sun lighting and depth of water.  To be honest, I don't know how the depth of water is achieved through shaders, I always though there was a set of textures which would be ocean deep/mid/shallow and tropical deep/mid/shallow, like in X Graphics.

Quote:
// Environment mapping is determined from the screen-space coordinates
   // of our geometry. This implies that we need to divide them by W, and then
   // offset/scale into a 0-1 range. Because of interpolation issues due to front
   // clipped geometry, the info is pre-processed and passed to the PS where the 1/W
   // is applied. We also apply the normal to the data to emulate reflections caused
   // by the animating geometry
   o.TexEnvMap.xyz = o.vPos.xyz+o.vPos.www;
//    o.TexEnvMap.xyz = o.vPos.xyz+o.vPos.www*(1.0+0.25*o.vNormalWS.xzy/fNormalScale);

^Now, note this refers to TexEnvMap, yet there is a part which is commented out.  I'd be interested to see what that does, so perhaps I'll test that soon.

Finally, there's this:
Quote:
float4 Water20PSNoFX(VSWATER20_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR
{
     return Water20PS(Input,false,false,false,false);
}

float4 Water20PSFX(VSWATER20_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR
{
     return Water20PS(Input,true,false,false,false);
}

float4 Water20PSNoFX3D(VSWATER20_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR
{
     return Water20PS(Input,false,true,false,false);
}

float4 Water20PSFX3D(VSWATER20_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR
{
     return Water20PS(Input,true,true,false,false);
}

float4 Water20PSNoFX_Detail(VSWATER20_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR
{
     return Water20PS(Input,false,false,true,false);
}

float4 Water20PSFX_Detail(VSWATER20_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR
{
     return Water20PS(Input,true,false,true,false);
}

float4 Water20PSNoFX3D_Detail(VSWATER20_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR
{
     return Water20PS(Input,false,true,true,false);
}

float4 Water20PSFX3D_Detail(VSWATER20_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR
{
     return Water20PS(Input,true,true,true,false);
}

float4 Water20BloomPS(VSWATER20_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR
{
     return _Water20BloomPS(Input,false);
}

float4 Water20BloomPS3D(VSWATER20_OUTPUT Input) : COLOR
{
     return _Water20BloomPS(Input,true);
}

// ------ VS ------
VSWATER20_OUTPUT Water20VSNoFX(VSWATER20_INPUT Input)
{
     return Water20VS(Input,false,false,false,false);
}

VSWATER20_OUTPUT Water20VSFX(VSWATER20_INPUT Input)
{
     return Water20VS(Input,true,false,false,false);
}

VSWATER20_OUTPUT Water20VSNoFX3D(VSWATER20_INPUT Input)
{
     return Water20VS(Input,false,true,false,false);
}

VSWATER20_OUTPUT Water20VSFX3D(VSWATER20_INPUT Input)
{
     return Water20VS(Input,true,true,false,false);
}

VSWATER20_OUTPUT Water20VSNoFX_Detail(VSWATER20_INPUT Input)
{
     return Water20VS(Input,false,false,true,false);
}

VSWATER20_OUTPUT Water20VSFX_Detail(VSWATER20_INPUT Input)
{
     return Water20VS(Input,true,false,true,false);
}

VSWATER20_OUTPUT Water20VSNoFX3D_Detail(VSWATER20_INPUT Input)
{
     return Water20VS(Input,false,true,true,false);
}

VSWATER20_OUTPUT Water20VSFX3D_Detail(VSWATER20_INPUT Input)
{
     return Water20VS(Input,true,true,true,false);
}

Long I know, but notice that each one uses different Boolean values.  I don't really know what the deal with it is, but I intend to find out.  I suspect it might have to do with what is shown in the reflection, but I'm not so sure, because I don't see any where they are all set to true.

Good luck man...


Just thought I'd post my post on the previus page, in case you missed, which can easily happen when we reach a new page.  If you wanna read it, I suggest going back to the previous page, since it's much easier. Wink
 
...&&FS Water Configurator+ has new modifications in the works, plus DirectX 10, Service Pack&&1, and Radeon HD 3+ Series support.
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #34 - Jan 2nd, 2008 at 11:58pm

Ashton Lawson   Offline
Colonel
FS Water Configurator
Programmer
Phuket, Thailand

Gender: male
 Posts: 1211
 *****
 
K, since this thread is slipping to the second page and all, I'll just set this up:

When you have an update on the water effects, call the thread 'FS Water Update' or something of the sort, so we know when to look at it.  That way we can easily spot any updates any of us make. Wink
 
...&&FS Water Configurator+ has new modifications in the works, plus DirectX 10, Service Pack&&1, and Radeon HD 3+ Series support.
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #35 - Jan 6th, 2008 at 10:04am

Ashton Lawson   Offline
Colonel
FS Water Configurator
Programmer
Phuket, Thailand

Gender: male
 Posts: 1211
 *****
 
One other thing guys, I can have my program auto-detect FSX's directories for various things, but I've been looking through the registry, and I can't find any way of detecting what Version of FSX is running, e.g. Clean, Service Pack 1, Service Pack 2, Acceleration, so it'd best be a prompt on application start right?

Also, one other thing, would you guys like me to try and make it look like FSX (graphically, the interface and all) or should I just keep it as regular Windows controls?

EDIT:
Just thought of a shortcut to the version detection:  Check if Water40.fx (or any other SP2/Acceleration-specific files exist).  However, I'll keep the prompt up, for those who know what they're doing Wink.
 
...&&FS Water Configurator+ has new modifications in the works, plus DirectX 10, Service Pack&&1, and Radeon HD 3+ Series support.
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #36 - Jan 6th, 2008 at 11:25am

NickN   Offline
Colonel
FSX runs fine... the problem
is you or your system

Posts: 6317
 *****
 
Ashton Lawson wrote on Jan 6th, 2008 at 10:04am:
One other thing guys, I can have my program auto-detect FSX's directories for various things, but I've been looking through the registry, and I can't find any way of detecting what Version of FSX is running, e.g. Clean, Service Pack 1, Service Pack 2, Acceleration, so it'd best be a prompt on application start right?

Also, one other thing, would you guys like me to try and make it look like FSX (graphically, the interface and all) or should I just keep it as regular Windows controls?

EDIT:
Just thought of a shortcut to the version detection:  Check if Water40.fx (or any other SP2/Acceleration-specific files exist).  However, I'll keep the prompt up, for those who know what they're doing Wink.



FSX version is in the exe file itself. I think you will find the key which shows the version and other parameters in the uninstall keys here:


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\FlightSim_{A9729B90-D37B-4A69-B66A-7436AC1F7274}]

NOTE: Wow6432Node is only for Windows XP x64. I am not sure how it is set up in Vista because I am not on that system right now but it may be the same. For 32bit OS, eliminate the Wow6432Node

The code in the key may also be unique so you would probably be best served to have it search for a wild card or see if it ID's the key based simply on: Uninstall\FlightSim_

The data in that key includes:

"DisplayIcon"="D:\\Flight Simulator X\\fsx.exe"
"DisplayName"="Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Acceleration"
"Publisher"="Microsoft Game Studios"
"DisplayVersion"="10.0.61637.0" <--------------- I think this is what you are after however I am not sure of the previous values. You will need to look at RTM, SP1 and SP2, SP2/Accel to see what versions are registered


As for the interface, I think that is an artistic call


I do not have time to play with the shaders right now but I am monitoring the thread.



 
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #37 - Jan 6th, 2008 at 7:57pm

Ashton Lawson   Offline
Colonel
FS Water Configurator
Programmer
Phuket, Thailand

Gender: male
 Posts: 1211
 *****
 
Well, I've looked directly at the FSX.exe and I get exactly the same info.  The only issue is, it may sound easy to collect data on each version, but that's just it, each version includes multiple languages, whereas I need only know if the shaders are one, or the other, so I think the checking for SP2/Accel-only files will probably be good enough, and simple enough.

Then again, I could always check the actual Water20.fxh text...
 
...&&FS Water Configurator+ has new modifications in the works, plus DirectX 10, Service Pack&&1, and Radeon HD 3+ Series support.
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #38 - Jan 8th, 2008 at 3:21am

Ashton Lawson   Offline
Colonel
FS Water Configurator
Programmer
Phuket, Thailand

Gender: male
 Posts: 1211
 *****
 
Hey again, just to update, this is what FSWC2 looks like so far:
...

As I've already explained in the screenie, the buttons and such are still to be worked on, but they will hopefully look exactly like in FSX Wink.
 
...&&FS Water Configurator+ has new modifications in the works, plus DirectX 10, Service Pack&&1, and Radeon HD 3+ Series support.
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #39 - Jan 9th, 2008 at 2:58pm

pwheeler   Offline
Colonel
Fly Virtual

Posts: 54
 *****
 
Hi,

The interface looks very cool. Nice work  Wink

I had a little look at the shaders again yesterday but wasn't able to make any progress. I found a variable called fresnelramp which links to a texture - FresnelTest.bmp. I hoped that changing this might affect how the fresnel reflections change with viewing angle, but however I modified this texture it just made no difference.

Do you think I would have to clear the shader cache after I change this texture? I didn't think of that at the time...

Anyway, still trying. Hopefully I'll get a bit of time over the weekend.

Cheers

Paul
 
...&&
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #40 - Jan 9th, 2008 at 7:55pm

Ashton Lawson   Offline
Colonel
FS Water Configurator
Programmer
Phuket, Thailand

Gender: male
 Posts: 1211
 *****
 
pwheeler wrote on Jan 9th, 2008 at 2:58pm:
Hi,

The interface looks very cool. Nice work  Wink

I had a little look at the shaders again yesterday but wasn't able to make any progress. I found a variable called fresnelramp which links to a texture - FresnelTest.bmp. I hoped that changing this might affect how the fresnel reflections change with viewing angle, but however I modified this texture it just made no difference.

Do you think I would have to clear the shader cache after I change this texture? I didn't think of that at the time...

Anyway, still trying. Hopefully I'll get a bit of time over the weekend.

Cheers

Paul


Thanks.

Yeah fresnalramp's been in for quite a bit, but no one seems to know what it does, lol.  As for clearing the shader cache, I don't think it would make a difference, unless there is a texture cache, which I doubt.

Thanks for working hard on this Smiley.
 
...&&FS Water Configurator+ has new modifications in the works, plus DirectX 10, Service Pack&&1, and Radeon HD 3+ Series support.
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #41 - Jan 11th, 2008 at 8:13am

Ashton Lawson   Offline
Colonel
FS Water Configurator
Programmer
Phuket, Thailand

Gender: male
 Posts: 1211
 *****
 
I've just got some interesting news regarding my program's new look.

Before, I was going to 'cheat' and use regular buttons, and then draw my own button images on top of them, a very crude way of getting my own, or in this case, FSX's visual style.

However, I've discovered that every control has what's known as an image list, and I, the programmer, have the ability to change that list, to any one I want.  This means I can use the button sprites from FSX and add image lists for every control I want, thus improving performance, and sounding very professional Grin.

Here's the other interesting bit of news.  When you go to aircraft selection, you know how the scroll bar is always the same length?  Well, that's just one point.  If you look just to the side of the scroll area, you can see the edge of the default Windows scroll bar.  What does this mean?  It means ACES have done what I was about to, simply draw their own things on top of the default Windows controls, lol...


EDIT:
Oh, another thing, I've also created my own message box, which can contain text, images, and buttons.  This'll serve as a base for error handling, user warnings, and various other tasks normally associated with messageboxes.  It's basically based off FSX's loading bar type screen, so again, it'll look familiar.
 
...&&FS Water Configurator+ has new modifications in the works, plus DirectX 10, Service Pack&&1, and Radeon HD 3+ Series support.
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #42 - Jan 12th, 2008 at 6:38am

Ashton Lawson   Offline
Colonel
FS Water Configurator
Programmer
Phuket, Thailand

Gender: male
 Posts: 1211
 *****
 
...

Another preview of how it looks.  Yes, I know the controls still look regluar.  That will be changed.  In fact, I promise I won't post another preview pic until the controls have changed. Wink
 
...&&FS Water Configurator+ has new modifications in the works, plus DirectX 10, Service Pack&&1, and Radeon HD 3+ Series support.
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #43 - Jan 13th, 2008 at 10:32am

Ashton Lawson   Offline
Colonel
FS Water Configurator
Programmer
Phuket, Thailand

Gender: male
 Posts: 1211
 *****
 
Okay, I know there's been a lot of double, triple, quadruple, whatever posting, but it's the only way the page updates, so people can get news everytime I make a breakthrough.

Anyway, I have news about the interface's visual style:

Basic:
I've worked out how to changet he images used for the controls, I need only work out how they are structered.

Elaborate (programmers or relatively smart people only):
For every visual control, there is an attribute called ImageList, so, for example:
Code:
closeButton.ImageList
closeButton.ImageList.Images.AddAt
closeButton.ImageList.Images.RemoveAt

Basically, it is what it is named.  A list of images.  Specifically images which are used when drawing the controls.  By changing the images in the list, I can create my own fancy-looking buttons, with alpha masks as well (not really alpha masks, just opaque/transparent flat masks).  However, I don't know what images are what at the moment, so I'll have to write another program to extract and save images from controls, so I can then restructure FSX's images to match the same format.  Once that's done, I shall conquer all controls!
 
...&&FS Water Configurator+ has new modifications in the works, plus DirectX 10, Service Pack&&1, and Radeon HD 3+ Series support.
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Reply #44 - Jan 14th, 2008 at 12:43pm

NickN   Offline
Colonel
FSX runs fine... the problem
is you or your system

Posts: 6317
 *****
 

I played around with the shader code which included the edits pwheer made. I am not a graphics code expert by any means. I really could not find a better way to deal with the reflections. The original edits made by pwheeler were by far the best althoug i did trim them somewhat.

Unless some guru in shader code comes up with more I really think the rest of the answer lies in the ENV textures which evenutally I intend to dive into.

Like I said, I am not a shader code guru so not finding more on my part may strictly be my lack of knowledge in the code.



The interface looks good. You may want to reduce its size a bit. Seems a bit large but thats just an artisitic call  Smiley


 
Back to top 
IP Logged
 
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 ... 13
Send Topic Print
‹ Previous Topic | Next Topic ›
  « Home ‹ Board Top of this page

Simviation Forum » Powered by YaBB 2.5 AE!
YaBB Forum Software © 2000-2010. All Rights Reserved.

Valid RSS Valid XHTML Valid CSS Powered by Perl Source Forge