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[eddietree]

So much awesome on display here; the generated music is really cool too. Love the distortion shader. 

How interactive will this be? It would make THE best screensaver.

Not planning for this to be very interactive at all. I just wanted to make eye/ear candy involving procedurally generated music and visual. In terms of what users can do, probably not much. Maybe I can expose the editor so people can build their own visuals..

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but how are you drawing the graphics -- geometry or textures? (e.g is a circle made of many verts, or just a quad w/ a circular texture) Are you doing anything special/fancy for anti-aliasing?

Like most of my stuff, since I cannot find an artist to join the project, I usually just procedurally generate it all. However, I cheat sometimes by using textures. For example, the reflection on the lens of the camera uses a reflection texture. Of course, the fonts are textures as well. Everything is else is generated with vertices.

In terms of anti-aliasing, if you are doing mainly 2d stuff, I recommend just wrapping your borders around in lines and enabling GL_LINE_SMOOTH. That is what I am doing to anti-alias the scene and also worked quite well in Kyoto. This method is probably the cheapest in terms of GPU usage since it uses only minimal fillrate on only the thin lines on screen. But if you go 3D, might want to consider full-screen methods:  maybe super sampling or MSAA if your GPU is a beast, but honestly FXAA is quite believable and very fast.

[eddietree]

New site and video here:

illogictree.com/games/psychotropic/

[raigan]

In terms of anti-aliasing, if you are doing mainly 2d stuff, I recommend just wrapping your borders around in lines and enabling GL_LINE_SMOOTH. That is what I am doing to anti-alias the scene and also worked quite well in Kyoto.

I'm really surprised by this -- my experience with GL_LINE_SMOOTH is that it looks terrible at acute vertices (there are no end-caps or joints on the lines, so each line is essentially a rectangle, which means that at acute corners there is a gap between lines (if the internal angle is acute) or a region of overlap (if the external angle is acute)), but your screenshots and video don't seem to exhibit these artifacts at all!

For the shapes which are rendered as dots or lines, are you using textures to define the stencil shape?

[eddietree]

I'm really surprised by this -- my experience with GL_LINE_SMOOTH is that it looks terrible at acute vertices (there are no end-caps or joints on the lines, so each line is essentially a rectangle, which means that at acute corners there is a gap between lines (if the internal angle is acute) or a region of overlap (if the external angle is acute)), but your screenshots and video don't seem to exhibit these artifacts at all!

Ah, I seemed to have misunderstood your original question. GL_LINES is not what I use to render the full geometry because GL_LINES can be total shit if you increase its thickness.  The reason why is because the GPU uses some form of Bresenham's line algorithm to rasterize the lines, which is a brute force line drawing algorithm that totally does not account for connected joints.

I only use GL_LINES of thickness=1.0 on the edges of the polygons for anti-aliasing. For example, if I want a donut shape, I render triangles of the solid donut shape, then I render smooth lines around the edges for anti-aliasing.

Another example would be in my Kyoto tree rendering, I would procedurally generate the vertices of the tree each frame and push them into a dynamic vertex buffer. But during load time, I would offline pre-generate an index buffer for the lines surrounding the shape that samples into the dynamic vertex buffer.

[eddietree]

I re-designed the site.


[ Check it out now, funk soul brotha ]

[Franklin's Ghost]

This project is looking awesome Also prefer the new website design

[eddietree]

Thank you!

Jack and I are working hard to bring to you a build! Stay tuned!

 

[Ouren]

I love the iconography.

[raigan]

I only use GL_LINES of thickness=1.0 on the edges of the polygons for anti-aliasing. For example, if I want a donut shape, I render triangles of the solid donut shape, then I render smooth lines around the edges for anti-aliasing.

Another example would be in my Kyoto tree rendering, I would procedurally generate the vertices of the tree each frame and push them into a dynamic vertex buffer. But during load time, I would offline pre-generate an index buffer for the lines surrounding the shape that samples into the dynamic vertex buffer.

Thanks, this makes sense (also, I hadn't considered that you could pre-generate the outer edge indices even for cases where the geometry was changing but topologically constant, great tip!).

I guess I need to revisit GL_LINE_SMOOTH, because last time I tried it there were artifacts even for thickness = 1. Your graphics look amazingly smooth, so possibly I was doing something wrong.

The worst-case that I found is if a triangle is very thin, near-degenerate (almost a line-segment), you could imagine that the ends of that line-segment won't be smoothed, as the GL_LINES are flat at the ends. Similarly, at concave corners the GL_LINES overlap which can cause pixels that are double-dark.

Maybe I'm just a bit too picky about aliasing, and/or I should be using a higher resolution where single pixel problems aren't noticeable

[eddietree]

Raigan, try fullscreen FXAA. It is prob your best bet.

[raigan]

Raigan, try fullscreen FXAA. It is prob your best bet.

Thanks! I'll message you rather than clutter your thread

[eddietree]

Not totally complete without a triforce!

[eddietree]

Alpha version available! No interactions, just pure eye/ear candy

[ Download now! ]

Of course, any feedback would be greatly appreciated! 

[thebarryman]

Didn't realize how cool this would look running in real-time (not locked at 30 FPS or whatever Vimeo displays it at). Really nice work, I'm looking forward to the interactive bits you're going to work in.

[DustyDrake]

yeah, you're download pages don't like chrome at all.

[eddietree]

yeah, you're download pages don't like chrome at all.

I would appreciate a bit more info. Did it block the popup or what?

[DustyDrake]

it just sat at "Downloading now..."
even trying to pull the download link via the source code (like I did with kyoto) didn't work

[eddietree]

it just sat at "Downloading now..."
even trying to pull the download link via the source code (like I did with kyoto) didn't work

Not sure what is up with your chrome, I guess there is some weird download protection. I will look into a bit more, so far you are the only person that has this case. But I fixed it such that if the download doesn't auto-start, there is a link for your silly buns to click on.

[DustyDrake]

it just sat at "Downloading now..."
even trying to pull the download link via the source code (like I did with kyoto) didn't work

Not sure what is up with your chrome, I guess there is some weird download protection. I will look into a bit more, so far you are the only person that has this case. But I fixed it such that if the download doesn't auto-start, there is a link for your silly buns to click on.

Mmmm...
nope. Still not downloading, and no link. (unless it takes a bit for the page to update to the latest version)

Oh well, that's why I never uninstalled IE

[eddietree]

It is because your browser caches the old site. The new fixes will propagate whenever your browser decides the page is outdated