Time for a small rant. On various topics. I'll keep it short to not bore people to death. Some things are somewhat irritating:
1) People who want to test the ICP, have a crash, and post or send me e-mails / PMs saying "it does not work, can you help ?". No, I cannot help. At least, not if you don't explain what the problem is. What are your system specs ? Do you have the latest drivers ? Did you use the search function to see if your problem has been answered ? What happens exactly, can you login, is it crashing, is it freezing, or what ? Sorry, I don't have telepathy skills, I cannot read your mind. The point is: if you're going to ask for help, be precise! I don't have time to waste to extract the useful information for you point by point.
2) People who don't read the dev journals. Seriously, I'm sometimes spending an hour or two writing those journals. Nothing is irritating me more than people who criticize something when that thing was described and explained in the journal a few posts up. Things such as "omg vertex popping".. "omg it all looks the same, boring texture" when I explicitely said that geo-morphing isn't implemented yet, and that the terrain uses only big tiled textures.. wow.
I certainly have no problems with people commenting and criticizing the features that are shown in the video, but please, don't criticize or comment on things that are not done yet.
And please.. read the dev journal before flooding the thread with tons of questions.
By the way, this section is dedicated to SinKing from moddb.com who said the motion blur didn't look good and was unrealistic, thinking he was looking at depth-of-field. Hi :)
Depth-of-field
To be clear, motion blur is the act of bluring pixels in the direction of the motion. Play a DVD, put it on pause, and look at the image of your TV ( especially when the camera or something is fast moving ). That is motion blur.
Depth-of-field is another kind of blur, but this time based on a focal distance. It's the effect you see in movies when the focus is on an object in the middle of the scene: what is close to the camera is blurred, and what is far too.
Keep in mind that I'm exagerating the effects a bit, mostly to debug.
My implementation of depth-of-field is based on a pretty standard technique: the scene is rendered to a texture ( like many effects ); the scene is also rendered to a depth buffer. In a post-processing pass, those two textures are read back: the depth is sampled, compared with the focal plane distance, and the further the pixel is from this plane, the more blurry the scene pixel becomes.
The quality of the blur isn't very good ( by my standards ), as it does not use a separable gaussian yet. It's your basic blur taking N samples in a circular kernel around the center pixel, and averaged together. The size of the kernel is depending on the absolute distance to the focal plane ( and some magic formulas to "feel" good ).
One important thing is also missing: the focal plane distance is currently a constant, that I can change with 2 keys; in the future, I will have to cast some rays in the scene to determine the focus area near the center of the camera. Nothing too advanced technically, I'm not worried.
Pictures
