Here's a screenshot of an experiment I was doing with HDR rendering. The method uses standard 8-bit integer framebuffers, compressing the HDR data using a format called RGBdiv8. This allows me to render HDR scenes very quickly with little degradation in quality (Theres is some slight banding in the skybox texture, but it's hardly noticeable). It's also good for storing HDR assets (The skybox texture is stored in RGBdiv8 format using PNG images, and is stored as RGBA8 on the graphics card). This format can be linearly filtered as well, a plus over other 8-bit compression formats such as Radiance RGBE. You can also have anti-aliasing + HDR enabled on all cards that support the EXT_framebuffer_multisample extension. This method is much faster than using floating point frambebuffers, so it will play nicely with even mid-range D3D9 cards. This is the look I'll probably base my game on when I get to that point.

It's been a while since I've posted any updates on this site. I'm still working on the engine, mostly non-visual stuff at the moment. Over the past year I haven't had much time to work on the engine, but have added many new features and subsystems in that time. These include:

• 3D sound system using OpenAL with support for WAV, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC formats.
• Scripting system based on a heavily modified Lua 5.0.3 VM with a full object oriented standard library. Almost every aspect of the engine is now scriptable.
• Particle systems with support for dual/quad core CPUs.
• New XML based shader system.
• Video playback with sound using the Ogg Theora format for video and Ogg Vorbis for audio. Videos can also be rendered directly to textures.
• x86 64-bit support.
• Various other enhancements/features.

More updates and screenshots to follow soon.

Here is a short video clip of some severely time-lapsed clouds.

clouds.avi (4.2 MB)

I've been fooling around with my cloud shading, and I'm starting to get some very respectable results! I'm taking the normal 2D cloud texture, and raytracing the shading in a fragment program. To simulate multiple scattering, I'm simply blurring the result. It looks much better than the old shading IMO. All 100% GPU based. Here's a screenshot:



I put a few more in the screenshots section. More to come fore sure

I've added some new screenshots to the gallery. Progress is slow these days due to time constraints but every once in a while I get time to play I wrote a window compositor for the GUI system for one. An example of that is shown here. I've also been playing around with HDR rendering. Here's a side-by-side LDR vs. HDR comparisson:

vs.

The difference is pretty amazing i think

A friend of mine, and very talented artist Noel Cower has donated a model of a "hover tank" to the project. I've added some screenshots of it, as well as 2 videos of it spinning around and looking shiny and cool The shader shows a "metalic paint" effect. A texture for the tank is under way by the same artist. It's gonna be fun driving this shiny bastard all over the terrain. Time to get coding!

Videos:
tank.avi (4.9 MB)
tank2.avi (5.0 MB)

Here are two videos of the water with a faked HDR effect. The second video shows a before and after comparison. I think it looks really nice!

Videos:
hdrwater.avi (6.4 MB)
hdrwater2.avi (5.2 MB)

I made a couple videos for some friends who wanted to see what the water in IGNH looked like animated. Check 'em out.

Videos:
water.avi (2.3 MB)
water2.avi (7.3 MB)