[PiB]

Originally Posted by PixelEngineer

I am currently working on animations/skeletons. I have not run into any problems. It's just a matter of getting all of the fragments loaded in a way that they can be used quickly when rendering.

I think one issue you will probably run into is that many characters have few or no animations you can load through 0x14 fragments. I am pretty sure the reason was to save space instead of duplicating animations. Many characters seem to share animations. For examples, barbarians, dark/high/half elves, erudites and humans all use wood elf animations with some additions (see video). Same for dragons and quite a lot of mobs. I have made a list of the most common vanilla/Kunark/Velious characters I could find and which animations they use.

Originally Posted by PixelEngineer

For transparency, you really need to use the BSP tree while rendering. I assume you could get away without it but it would be much more work. I render every visible surface that is in the PVS and frustum recursively going front to back to prevent overdraw. Every time I come across a batch of polygons that are transparent, I add the offset and information to my "transparency stack". I chose the stack because you need to render back to front with transparency and a stack is an ideal data structure given the order of entry while rendering front to back.

How do you sort from front to back, do you do it per object/region using its AABB or per face? Or can you traverse the BSP front-to-back somehow? I thought the division between planes were arbitrary. Anyway that's one more thing I have to implement, right now I'm using an octree and frustum culling for this. I guess this is not the most efficient. But it will probably come in handy for keeping track of characters. One thing I was wondering, isn't the usefulness of the PVS limited in outdoor zones like the Karanas where you can see from very far away? Obviously I'm sure this works pretty well in dungeons.

Originally Posted by PixelEngineer

For animated textures, make sure you have created a texture data structure that supports numerous bitmaps. One of the unknowns in the 0x04 fragments is the millisecond delay between texture switching. Keep track of the time and if it goes over the amount in the delay, switch index of the bitmap you will use for that texture.

I am using 2D texture arrays for textures so that I can draw static objects (and eventually characters) in one draw call. This should make it straightforward to have animated textures. Each vertex has a third texture coordinate for the layer in the array. I plan to add a kind of offset table in the vertex shader so that you can specify alternate textures (if animated, or to have different kind of equipments) without changing texture bindings.

Originally Posted by PixelEngineer

The skybox was a bit more tricky. Just picture someone walking around with a dome around their head. Clear the depth buffer and render as usual. I can elaborate on this if needed.

How did you determine the scale of the dome? Do you use some kind of scaling factor that you multiply with the width/length of the zone?

Originally Posted by PixelEngineer

As for lighting, I have implemented just the zone lighting that was in the original zones. Instead of dynamic lighting or lightmaps like Quake 3, they simply shaded the polygons with the color of nearby lightsources at each vertex. They essentially "faked" the lighting.

I think I have tried something similar. I started with determining which lights affect an object and send the array of lights used in the vertex shader for the object. This approach didn't scale very well with a lot of lights. I tried to compute the per-vertex lighting once, when loading the zone files. Then I didn't have to do any lighting in shaders but the result was quite ugly (since it's done per-vertex and old zones have very large polygons). I will try deferred shading next (so I can do per-fragment lighting in one pass) but I think this will be quite a lot of work.

Originally Posted by PixelEngineer

I will work towards getting my code on github this week as well. Probably getting static player/NPC models loaded would be a good place for me to take a small break. Let me know if you have any other questions in the meantime

Sound good, keep up the good work!