Better post fx

[psychoanima]

You ppl may laugh but post fx is really a big selling point for indie developers. That's something that I really like with UE, Stingray and even S2. Bloom looks very nice to the eyes, eye adaptation although not very realistic makes your game to feel like a big budget, scene/color fringe is a must these days (Kane & Lynch anyone?), and of course DOF. And many engines now have option to even color grade your scene.

 

I know that game play is what matters, but I am now speaking about aesthetics only. Recently I was playing with S2Engine, and have to say that has really nice post fx inside of it. After turning them all off, whole scene looks, meh...

 

I would really like to see post fx in LE on higher level of quality, like Unreal has and other trending engines.

[Rick]

Josh takes great pride I think in LEs post fx so if you're going to come in with a claim bashing them you better give some solid examples to prove your point.

[psychoanima]

Josh takes great pride I think in LEs post fx so if you're going to come in with a claim bashing them you better give some solid examples to prove your point.

 

Unfortunately LE forum terms of use is not allowing to post any example that is coming from other engines. I can post my own screenshots using other engines, but I am afraid that is also against the mentioned terms. Also, I will not suggest you to give other engines a try to prove my point, but the fact is, in my opinion, that post fx needs more work in LE. You have full right to not agree with me, I am just posting opinion based on my personal experience. I am also supporting the work of Josh and I really love LE, but that doesn't prove the fact that some things could be even better in LE

[Josh]

Thanks for the suggestion. My post-effects tend to be aimed at performance. Shadmar has published many effects, and his tend to be more demanding most of the time, but admittedly some of them look better. You can see this in the "Log Racers" game.

 

I just added a screen-space reflection effect that Igor, Shadmar, and myself all worked on at various times. That one is really impressive.

 

In the future I hope to add adjustable properties to post-effects so the user can fine-tune the settings in the editor to get the exact look they want.

[psychoanima]

Adjustable properties sounds very nice. And yes, SSR looks awesome, although I am not completely sure that I understand difference between probes and ssr.

[reepblue]

Probes build a cubemap texture once based on the location of the entity, and then applies it to the surrounding materials in it's radius. SSR is a post processing effect that in which all reflections update consistently.

 

I haven't take a look at the new SSR, but here's hoping that it follows specular and roughness values.

[Admin]

Presently, SSR creates a reflection based on the specular value at each pixel and roughness is ignored. In the future the screen color buffer will be downsampled to make a blurry image, and then used in combination with the roughness value at each pixel.

[nick.ace]

One thing you should keep in mind is that SSR does not reflect anything that isn't on screen. The techniques aren't mutually exclusive though.