Since I started doing shaders I've begun to stare a lot at things. I stare at the ground. I stare at walls. I stare at rocks...and when autumn hit I started staring at fog...puddles....mud... This week I've been working on puddles and fog in keeping with that spooky October/November vibe. I worked out a pretty good mud puddle shader which I'll post next but I figured this one is done and I've tweaked the **** out of it so I need to stop at some point and know when it's done. This shader is made
In Leadwerks, required files were always a slightly awkward issue. The engine requires a BFN texture and a folder of shaders, in order to display anything. One of my goals is to make the Ultra Engine editor flexible enough to work with any game. It should be able to load the folder of an existing game, even if it doesn't use Ultra Engine, and display all the models and scenes with some accuracy. Of course the Quake game directory isn't going to include a bunch of Ultra Engine shaders, so what to
A few years ago, some folks at NASA asked for my help with some VR projects they were working on. They had switched to Leadwerks and were getting better performance with that, but it still wasn't fast enough for what they were trying to do. I flew from California out to Goddard Space Flight Center to meet with them. When I saw what NASA was doing with my software, my jaw hit the floor.
Goddard Space Flight Center
Rendering performance in VR is critical because if the framerate dr
The new editor is being designed to be flexible enough to work with any game, so it can be used for modding as well as game development with our new 3D engine. Each project has configurable settings that can be used to handle what the editor actually does when you run the game. In the case of a game like Quake, this will involve running a few executables to first compile the map you are working on into a BSP structure, then perform lightmaps and pre-calculate visibility.
You can also
Many games store 3D models, textures, and other game files in some type of compressed package format. These can be anything from a simple ZIP file to a custom multi-file archive system. This has the benefit of making the install size of the game smaller, and can prevent users from accessing the raw files. Often times undocumented proprietary file formats are used to optimize loading time, although with DDS and glTF this is not such a problem anymore.
Leadwerks uses built-in support for encr
At last I have been able to work the plugin system into the new editor and realize my dreams.
The editor automatically detects supported file formats and generates thumbnails for them. (Thumbnails are currently compatible with the Leadwerks system, so Leadwerks can read these thumbnail files and vice-versa.) If no support for a file format is found, the program just defaults to the whatever icon or thumbnail Windows shows.
The options dialog includes a tab where you can examine each pl
I've been wracking my brain trying to decide what I want to show at the upcoming conference, and decided I should get the new editor in a semi-workable state. I started laying out the interface two days ago. To my surprise, the whole process went very fast and I discovered some cool design features along the way.
With the freedom and control I have with the new user interface system, I was able to make the side panel extend all the way to the top and bottom of the window client area. This g
Ultra App Kit 1.2 is now available on our site and on Steam. This is a bug fix update that resolves numerous small issues reported in the bug reports forum.
To download the latest version, see My Purchases.
One of my goals in Ultra Engine is to avoid "black box" file formats and leave all game assets in common file formats that can be easily read in a variety of programs. For this reason, I put a lot of effort into the Pixmap class and the DDS load and save capabilities.
In Ultra Engine animated textures can be stored in a volume texture. To play the animation, the W component of the UVW texcoord is scrolled. The fragment shader will sample the volume texture between the nearest two slices on
Back in the summer of 2017, I started experimenting with the idea of a puzzle game by placing launch pads on surfaces. The first build was very sloppy, and there wasn't any wall launching at this time. This build however was the first step of the experimenting process. Only one map was ever made and I just reused old Vectronic assets.
I shelved this concept until Winter of 2020 asI developed an itch to work on something and I wanted to get familiar with GIMP. This build again
Ok so I didn't quite do one shader a week but I got to 52. I wasn't sure I could pull it off but hopefully the shaders are diverse enough to give something to work with for most occasions. I tried to keep the language consistent throughout and organize them sort of from easy to hard. I threw in all kinds of links because I don't know a lot of the technical terminology. I don't know how Ultra is going to be but I get the impression it's not going to be too much different. From what I understand,
According to learnopengl.com PBR - or physically based rendering - is "...a collection of render techniques that are more or less based on the same underlying theory that more closely matches that of the physical world...[it] aims to mimic light in a physically plausible way...[and] generally looks more realistic compared to our original lighting algorithms like Phong an Blinn-Phong...PBR is still nonetheless an approximation of reality...which is why it's not called physical shading, but physic
When it comes to complex projects I like to focus on whatever area of technology causes me the most uncertainty or worry. Start with the big problems, solve those, and as you continue development the work gets easier and easier. I decided at this stage I really wanted to see how well Vulkan graphics work on Mac computers.
Vulkan doesn't run natively on Mac, but gets run through a translation library called MoltenVK. How well does MoltenVK actually work? There was only one way to find out...
If you liked vertex displacement, you're going to love tessellation. Tessellation is very similar, but incorporates the control and evaluation stages of the shader. The Leadwerks box brush creates a box that has two triangles per face. If you want to use some kind of vertex displacement on it you're going to have a bad time. With tessellation it's different because you are able to subdivide the faces with the shader, so you can use the shader to create more structurally complex models. The contr
Note: In my last post shaders 36 and 37 weren't working correctly so I replaced them. If you got the old ones you can throw those out and re-download the new ones on the same links.
These shaders are based on the Leadwerks soft particle shader, which I was directed to by Marcousik, and which I noobalyzed into a model shader. What the soft particle shader does is create a soft falloff in opacity depending on how close objects are behind it. To clarify, imagine looking down at a water plane,
Hi,
I finally managed to build a first release candidate for a SyntaxEditor-Widget. The Widget is using the famous Scintilla TextEditor-Component under the hood and wraps the control into a UAK-Widget. At this point i only provide binaries (includes and libraries) but i am currently preparing to release the source as well.
The source itself is semi-autogenerated with a manual created body and a tool which generates the main part of the Scintilla-Component based of so called iFace fi
Ultra App Kit 1.1 is now available on our website and on Steam. This free update brings cross-platform development to our fast resolution-independent GUI toolkit. To download the new installers, click on your account purchases.
In addition to Windows, Mac and Linux are now supported, which means you can code once and compile everywhere to easily create cross-platform GUI applications.
Builds on Linux use minimal dependencies and will work on virtually any distro without any additional
Simplistically speaking, you could think of the vertex stage of a shader as the "position" of the object, and the fragment stage as the "color." All you really need is position and color. Vertex displacement manipulates the position to warp or move the object. There are many ways to do it but the whole trick revolves around the ex_vertexposition. You may notice in every model shader you have these two lines in the vertex stage:
ex_vertexposition = entitymatrix_ * vec4(vertex_position,1.0
I have procrastinated testing of our new 3D engine on AMD hardware for a while. I knew it was not working as-is, but I was not too concerned. One of the promises of Vulkan is better support across-the-board and fewer driver bugs, due to the more explicit nature of the API. So when I finally tried out the engine on an R9 200 series card, what would actually happen? Would the promise of Vulkan be realized, or would developers continue to be plagued by problems on different graphics cards? Read on
In addition to the usual metallic looking textures, a few of these have different elements to break up the collection, namely concrete.
In the final pack there will be "metallic" variants of these textures as well. I have the materials set up so that I can import different scanned substances, like cinder blocks or bunker walls. Makes for a cool military look and can be used to ground your setting more into reality, if you wish. Just choose your preferred look.
I will be mixing all the
Wall textures being continually updated. Here is wall #36A (of 3 unshown variants).
99% of housekeeping tasks are now done as well. I say 99% because I am sure there are a few folders that still need to be organized.
I don't deal with noise shaders that much but there are a lot of examples on Shadertoy. It has a lot of uses depending on what you want, but very often I see noise being used with raymarching to create 3D scenes. I prefer using textures because I can get what I want out of them and noise is a lot of math (noise shaders can get very large very quickly), but I figured a good shader series ought to have a noise function somewhere.
I got this noise from iq of Shadertoy fame. Just a nice
Parallax is a cheap way to add a lot of 3D details to any scene. The less vertices on a mesh the better, because parallax doesn't actually add any geometric information. And it requires only the bare minimum number of vertices to work. That makes it fast. And the effect is believable. All you really need is a heightmap and a dream... It's a lot of fun trying different textures with it, and if I could I'd use it for everything.
However, there are a few limitations to parallax. The first prob
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