14 replies to this topic

[rouncer]

raycasting looks so dreamy...

using my gtx690 to the max.

[rouncer]

[rouncer]

gnomish landscape



added water... no reflections or refractions yet, and no skybox, so theres some things still left to improve it.

[Albertone]

I don't want to sound harsh but to me it looks a lot like the Mars demo released in 1994...

[rouncer]

HAHA! i had the exact same thought! ive got to see it with the rover on top of it, then my work here is done
but honestly, i really feel some potential here, especially for a unique looking rts?

had to take the grass fluff off, but its going way faster now, will add the proper water next.

[rouncer]

Yeh, your right, its like off what youd see on national geographic dating back a bit, ive got a running demo now, heres a movie, ill get the exe uploaded next.
Its a great test for your video cards pixel shader.

[rouncer]

The demo is under documents, try (if you would be so kind...) and tell me your framerate and video card specs!

https://mwootton.egn....168.2.45_6280#

[Albertone]

I've not been able to download the demo: the first time I saw a blank screen, and since then I can no longer access.

[rouncer]

try on gamedev, the site i used was pretty dodgy.

http://www.gamedev.n...ith-attachment/

[Albertone]

A couple of frames per second on my GT530.

[Vilem Otte]

Sadly I'm linux user (so no D3D11) and the only Windows I have on single PC is WinXP, so I'm unable to try. Anyways may I ask whether you brute-force the terrain, or whether you build something like octree? Also you could try mip-mapping voxels to get better performance for more distant voxels (it removes flickering and improves cache coherency). I bet that you could get several times better performance by just doing this.

[rouncer]

Im sorta pretending I have a distance field from just a displacement map, I just treat the altitude of the ray as the distance, so I get problems doing this, im kinda already mipping it by skipping larger distances the further away from the camera.
The mountains are made of octaves of noise.

Best frame report ive had so far is 5 fps... noone has as good a video card as I do.
[edit] some guys had some better video cards now, got 10fps at 1920x1000!

You could try lowering the resolution of your desktop if youd like to see it going a little faster.

[rouncer]

just went the whole hog and added one limited bounce of gi goes about 6 fps at 1360x768!
this version is available at the gamedev.net link, a little later on...

[Vilem Otte]

Still, by doing larger jumps you save some computation time, but actually computation time isn't your problem, you've got plenty of it ... your problem is (as in case of every raycasting/raytracing function) memory access. Therefore at moderate distance you read from different part of memory (not mentioning that means you experience cache miss), and the higher the distance from camera is, the worse it gets.

Actually every sparse voxel octree ray caster solves this (and thats why they're that fast).

Anyways 6 fps is nice, but I bet you could do it at at least 30 fps on your gpu .

[rouncer]

hmm! Ill have a think about sparse voxel octrees then! All I can think of, is storing the whole thing before I trace it... is there any other solutions?

I tell you what, if only this thing did run at 30fps... (with full bounce)


But this last shot is a major fix, ive actually got the soft shadows working! running 15 fps!