Comments - [WuTz]!

At first the game will only support the Windows 8 platforms, including Windows Phone 8. Later we might port it over to Android.
And after that there will may be even an iOS port, but iOS is at the very end of our list right now.

You can. There is a technique which allows you to turn any convex mesh you want into fog. It has been around for quite some time now, and we planned to make use of it as well.

Anyways, for smoke you are better off with some nice soft-particles, as you are with clouds. Perfect solution would be a Voxel approach, which is already possible, but pretty performance hungry. I remember it doing well for things clouds, though.

*when we released it :D

Thanks! We do not have an releasedate for the engine yet, but of course you can create FPS with it.

Great news! I lol'd :D

What about some atmospheric scattering? Sky doesn't look too good.

Waynetech lol. Well, actually there is no loading of those LOD-Meshes. They are loaded with the actual mesh, we are not streaming them ATM. This would be a nice addition for later, but currently it's just a rendering optimization.

Streaming for Levels and Content is on the list, though.

At first UIs will be done in code only, but an UI-Editor is already planed. If you take a look at our roadmap you can see it below version 0.19.
Media.moddb.com

Forgot to post the shot with more specular lighting, hehe. We will do this ASAP :)

The Geforce 8xxx series was the first one to support ShaderModel 4.0. 3.0 is supported by waaay older cards. ;)

Mostly developing on my (new) PC and playing some Quake ;)

Nice one! Wish I didn't give up trying to register at your homepage when I still had time for the pre-alpha-access. It wasn't working when I tried. :/

Still, looking good so far! :)

Duh! I seem to have failed at the 3rd sentence :D

You mean like colored shadows? There already is. We using an ADD-Blend when calculation our lights, which means, when a new light is calculated, the results simply get added (+) to those already computed. When a pixel lies in shadow, simply 0 will get added, leaving the former color as it is.
And if it was red, the shadow will be red, too.
I know of other engines just multiplying the shadows with the lighting afterwards, which I can imagine is what you described, but we don't do that.

Wanted to register, didn't work, so: meh.
I'm still lurking on your pages every now and then, though. :)

I was thinking about using Lua in [w]tech at first as well. But then it turned out I don't like it that much. So I did some research and found AngelScript as the better alternative for us.

Btw: I didn't know that you are the guy who made Bounce! Nice work! :)

Can't register - Always says: "Invalid Token". :(

Oh gawd I hate you. I really really really hate you.
(Please take this as a complement :) )

That's what AmbientOcclusion is supposed to do. It simulates the light coming from the sky, which comes from almost all sides in the world.
Imagine you see some car on the street. There will be a very soft shadow underneath it because it blocks the light from the sky. Just using a shadow-casting light won't do the trick to get that shadow. It would be too hard and would feel unrealistic.

Sure, no screen-space approach can get even close to the real ambient occlusion, but current hardware isn't really capable to compute that in realtime (Well, it works, but it isn't really fast). So you're right, it will create shadows where a shadow doesn't belong to sometimes. One of the problems you have with SSAO.

That water-shader looks much better than the one on the last shot!
Good work there!

Little hint: You can compute the specular lighting from the sun in your watershader. A shimmering Ocean looks cool! :)

Still, you should pay attention to the island now. As mobididikas already said it doesn't look that good.
You're still missing vegetation and proper texture blending over multiple vertices (Doesn't have to be the valve-thingy for now).
The blending still looks very rough.

Also your little island is very round. What about some cliffs? You could easily extend the heightmap using other meshes, giving it a more natural look.

And you probably shouldn't let the shadows come from the cameras direction. You already have nice shadows, show them! ;)

The reflections seem nice!
Though, the transition from water to land is too hard and doesn't look good.
You can use the depth-buffer to get some smoothing in there.
Also you should work on how the different terrain-layers are blended together.
Maybe you can to it over multiple vertices softly rather than just one. Another thing that looks good is using some kind of second alpha-map for the blending like valve did here: Developer.valvesoftware.com

And then... Vegetation. Grass, Rocks, Bushes. Your first test-image looked quite good!

( I know this is only a test-shot, I'm just writing down some ideas :) )

Sure we want to bring it to other systems. Only problem is that this is very very much work. Also we can't bring it to consoles like the Xbox360, unless you want to donate like 60.000$ for its C++-Compiler.

But we _have_ the intention to make ports of [w]tech at some time.

Haha! Never thought of this! Our whole team is German btw ;-)

I don't like that overused blooming in games either.
We'll try to keep it low, but nice, even thought it looks just too cool sometimes. ;)

@Bloom != HDR: I use the ToneMapping operator on our bloom as well. It wouldn't look like that without ToneMapping.

I see now, we should have put a screenshot of it used in a real scene into the news. You simply cannot say "it's weird and grey". Maybe it looks a bit weired to you, but it is not grey! :P Why not? It can have it's completely own color. You can make the diffuse light black and the Indirectional light bloodred.

More shots are to come, giving better examples of how it can be used like what's possible with the other light types.
We didn't show a directional light, but you can use our technique to set the lighting of the backfaces.

Knowing the shaders of [w]tech I can say that this one shouldn't be too complex. I didn't see the code of it yet, but I guess it only uses like 2 or 3 texture lookups and some little lighting computation, alone with some extra instructions here and there.

That shouldn't even be a problem for my GeForce 8400GS Go. (I'm coding [w]tech using this GPU by the way. It's one of the weakest DX10 GPUs Nvidia made ;-) )

Oh, is that so? *English-skills improved* =)

the spotlight isn't finished at all. It just "works" for now. I hard-coded some values for now, but I will make them available in the property-panel soon.

We actually can do dynamic lighting on transparent surfaces using forward shading for them.
Another option we can think of is to use a stipple-pattern for the transparent surface which we could then use for one layer of lit transparency.

[v]tech würde man "u-tek" ausprechen, nicht? Naja, wir mischen eben ein bisschen die Sprachen. Oder so ;)

I am away of that there are always people who dislike some style. I personally like it, so I won't change it now. But I have to say, I also like to have the option to customize things in a program, so there will be definitively support for user themes or some kind of settings dialog where everyone can set up his own style.
That would be a nice side point for my Todo-list to work on when I have some part of the code which seems to hate me ;-)