Well it's always being worked on to some degree as a side-effect of developing the editors. Whether this can ever become a real client who knows, there are a few people interested in helping the development if it ever seems feasible. I have almost all the graphical elements of the client implemented now (just missing the UI I think).testpilot123 said:
I second the motion for making this into a community project.
I wrote up some of the papers I referenced/implemented here: http://www.modthegalaxy.com/forums/thread-client-2-0?pid=6399#pid6399Virtul said:
Thanks for the interest and input! I have a few physically based techniques implemented - my supervisor does research in PBR for film so he got me interested a while back - some are noted in the post I linked above. I agree that doing some form of GI would be a good next step although there are a lot of lower level things to sort out too if I was ever going to take this forward as a serious project. Unfortunately I'm not working in this industry at the moment so finding the time and keeping up my knowledge level is going to be tricky.shadowndacorner said:Been lurking here for awhile, signed up for this. If you're really serious about making this a fully fledged, modern client, you should look into implementing physically based shading and potentially a real time gi technique, several of which (such as light propagation volumes and radiance hints, the latter of which tends to yield superior results) are relatively simple to implement and work wonders for realism.
There are papers scattered throughout the net for PBS, but a great resource may be to look through the UE4 or Unity 5 shader code to get a feel for how they're doing things, especially since you said you're already using a deferred renderer (I would hope deferred shading rather than light prepass since, in my experience, the former tends to be more efficient especially with modern gpus).
As for GI, there are a number of papers here talking about various techniques http://graphics.cs.aueb.gr/graphics/research_illumination.html , many of which include code. If you do end up wanting to implement radiance hints, a good example of it being used effectively is the open source Tesseract game/engine. I haven't personally dug through the code, but it uses a deferred renderer + radiance hints for GI and looks pretty damn nice. More on that here http://tesseract.gg
Also, screen space reflections, which there are plenty of resources around (including a bunch of source code) to get working.
All in all, you've done great work so far - color me impressed. But you could go even further
That's why you should open source itSytner said:
Maybe throw it on a public GitHub repo that way anyone can contribute.
That doesn't require a new client, it just requires someone to do proper plugins for 3ds Max/Maya/Blender/Modo, etc. We'd do it now, but we're both buried to our necks in work.Archlyte said:
Yes, that is correct, at least for the ground stuff, never looked at the JTL code/logic or even thought about it much, so no idea, I suppose that just modifies the Z without any actual physics and ultimately freezes you in space where you stop, but I'm the wrong person to answer that.Archlyte said:
Even in the current client and SWGEmu server, atmo flight is able to be used with a small server side "hack". The client supports the movement, but it does not have any physics. SOE did test adding normal "jump" to SWG, but they said they decided against using it, because most of their object models would have to be remade for 3D collision detection and that was just too much work for them (and for little gain). Everquest II has normal "jump", as well as flying and gliding and it's based on the same "engine" as SWG.Archlyte said:
