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[motorsep]

- shadowmaps

RBDoom 3 BFG has that (although slow for mid-range PC).

- AO

How would that help?

- Lighting support for blended alpha surface (not alphatest)

That's not possible (afaik). What's possible is edge AA for alpha tested surfaces, which will make it look like blended alpha surface. I wonder if it's achievable in Doom 3 at min. cost.

- some sort of vertex deformation shader (animating vegetation with bones really isn't a good idea, you'd need to make many variations of each plant so they don't all animate the same)

Content wise I was shown by artists who worked at Crytek how to make vegetation, so that is fine, I know the correct pipeline.

There is deformation in Doom 3, but I think deformed surfaces automatically being excluded from interactions.  Most likely it would have to be vertex shader that deforms surface on GPU. Then foliage can be inlined.

Care to share CryEngine foliage workflow ?

[motorsep]

1) No proper translucency.... (fixed by Rich_is_Bored's trick)

Proper translucency is SSS effect and is costly. The trick by Rich is pretty nice.

2) Bad specular control (fixed by Rebb's gloss trick?)

Do you mean gloss? That's true for any surface in Doom 3.

3) Only two vertex colors supported (only 1 if you use Rich's trick)

Afaik there are only 2 vcolors in Doom 3 - black and white (and shades of gray between). Do you mean Doom 3 allows you to paint with any vcolor and use that somehow ?

[Zombie]

http://gamingbolt.com/wp-content/gallery/10-gaming-forests/far_cry05.jpg

Vegetation in DOOM 3 looks similar to that (a little worse becase they baked AO in to the vertices) no shadows, no AO, surface material/texture seems OK, but it doesn't look grounded. Just to be sure I wasn't going crazy I asked 26 people in the office, and they all agreed it needs AO and shadowmaps at least.

http://www.narby.net/img/ce2_tutorial/v7.jpg

With some AO and shadow maps vegetation could look astounding. Even with mediocre content.

AO is used to ground things, it's pretty much a standard. There is a reason why those features exist, because if they didn't we'd have unsatisfactory looking vegetation is almost every game.

Alpha blending was achieved to some degree by using edge dithering, which gave vegetation in Quakewars a soft look. We also baked the AO in to the megatexture, to ground it.

In regards making vegetation the "Crytek way" it's common knowledge, there are a tonne of articles out there using the same technique.

[motorsep]

Oh, I thought it's some special way of making it.

Btw, I get it now what you mean about AO. You can use blend light to create fake AO under plants.

[Zombie]

That's not really acceptable for me

[motorsep]

That's not really acceptable for me

Have you tried it?

It'd look almost identical to baked AO into megatextures or real-time AO. And with blend light you wouldn't worry about proper projection over any surface. I did that for my old game using 1 polygon at the base of an object and pre-baked AO image over it. Granted, too much work compare to modern methods, but looks as good.

I think even with hacks like that it's possible to make vegetation to look very decent in Doom 3. The only thing I am not sure can be easily solved is animation.

[Zombie]

Yeah I tried about 2 years ago and it looks OK, but so much work to do something that shouldn't take any time at all, which is the point of my posts.

[oneofthe8devilz]

Maybe I could interest you in recreating those board game assets ?

I started working on them but compared to you I truly suck at assets creation...

[douglas quaid]

You got a great idea going on there Chris, keep it up!

[bkt]

- some sort of vertex deformation shader (animating vegetation with bones really isn't a good idea, you'd need to make many variations of each plant so they don't all animate the same)

The lateral part of my brain screams that you could make a longer, looping animation and offset different plants starting frames.  However that doesn't fix the other issues you've mentioned.

[motorsep]

The lateral part of my brain screams that you could make a longer, looping animation and offset different plants starting frames.  However that doesn't fix the other issues you've mentioned.

The reason I didn't mention that is that you need to have no limit on func_statics (or be able to have 1 func_static with millions of models, each having unique animations). There is 4096 entities limit. Can double that at some cost from what I know. Still not enough for grass / foliage - you'll run out of entity slots before you even begin placing lights / enemies

[The Happy Friar]

A vertex animation setup would be great for vegetation (and other things).  In Quake 2 I've use Blender's particle paint feature to paint foliage on a map (exported to .obj then imported in to blender).  I then exported whole swaths of foliage as md2's & that would be only one entity.  Q2 "glitches" with animated md2's though so when it's animated (it always looks like it's swaying) which was perfect.  For a bone-only setup you'd need a handfull of bones to modify dozens of different pieces of foliage at once.

[bkt]

The lateral part of my brain screams that you could make a longer, looping animation and offset different plants starting frames.  However that doesn't fix the other issues you've mentioned.

The reason I didn't mention that is that you need to have no limit on func_statics (or be able to have 1 func_static with millions of models, each having unique animations). There is 4096 entities limit. Can double that at some cost from what I know. Still not enough for grass / foliage - you'll run out of entity slots before you even begin placing lights / enemies

Well, you are developing a GPL game.  Why not create a proper foliage system for it?  There's no need to limit yourself to techniques modders need to use to fit within the constraints of the SDK when you have full access to the engine (read: you can do anything that's possible, you just need to weigh up the work involved against the resulting benefit).

[caedes]

anyone has full access to the engine, why not bundle your "mods" with a updated executable?
you can still depend on (and thus use) the original doom3 assets..

[motorsep]

Well, you are developing a GPL game.  Why not create a proper foliage system for it?  There's no need to limit yourself to techniques modders need to use to fit within the constraints of the SDK when you have full access to the engine (read: you can do anything that's possible, you just need to weigh up the work involved against the resulting benefit).

Maybe eventually. It's not as easy as it sounds. It has to have LOD. LOD is tricky without objects being entities as you'd have to reference LOD surfaces in the renderer/shader. And there gotta be an order to those surfaces, consistent through all assets. It's not simple. That's why foliage has to be a part of the gameplay, or there gotta be a rendering programmer who is willing to take on it (and that's borderline wishful thinking).

It's easier to figure out how to make it possible with what engine offers, and maybe tweak it a bit. It won't be Crysis's foliage, but it will be decent for small scale areas.