Iris2.de

Hi guys. Just a small feddback from an Iris fans.

First, great job with the groundtextures and shaders, it's a real nice idea both for reducing mapping complexity and better visual quality.

I noticed that you added some sort of projected shadows to Iris. That's great, but when I compare screenshots of Iris 1 and 2, I notice that in Iris 1, there was some sort of "static" shadows that looked a lot better on the edge of roofs, walls and other surfaces, as we can see in this screenshot :

I wanted to know if you planned to implement something like that in Iris 2. Actually, I found the general look quite "flat".

Another concern is about performance. With the actual build of Iris-Ogre, I barely get 15 fps, whatever settings I use. With the same hardware, I used to got decents framerates on Iris1.

Iris1 engine was only cpu powered. No GPU was used. Iris2 is GPU powered. If your GPU is old, you get low fps.

The shadowing in Iris1 was a hack. A fake shadowmap was used and the shadowing is "completly" wrong.
It's true, that shadows don't look smooth at the moment in Iris2, thats because its hard to write a shader for this. Also i have no time for gfx gimmiks. If someone want to write a shader for this, feel free todo it and post it here .

sidenote: most of the meshes Iris2 uses, has no or wrong normals. So you can't calculate shadows (the 3d models are to old). But i wrote a massconverter for this. I'm already testing, wheater all models look ok. Thats why statics don't show shadows yet.

My specs are AthlonXP 3200, 1 gig RAM, Radeon 9600 (dx 9).

Thanks for the answer about shadowing.

I also have this setup and Iris2 runs with ~50-80fps.

Install newest drivers & directx.

Try to use Direct3D in Windows...because ATI OpenGL drivers are slow and buggy.

does it work faster?

I have to agree, to some degree, that the old Iris1 smooth shadows does look quite nice.

As for Iris2 shadows: At the moment, if im not mistaken, the shadows are the default stencil shadows from ogre. Ive already had working (depth)shadowmapped shadows on my HLSL shaders. Ill be doing them all again in CG once the time comes. Shadowmapped shadows should speed things up considerably.

Current list im going to do is:

- Make working (cgfx) shader in FX Composer 2.
- Convert it to ogre format, material script and shader file.
- Add (depth)shadowmapping in CG, etc.

This is the same thing that i did with HLSL (fx effect files), where i have to see how the fx effect files convert into material script and the shader file.

Nice report.

I'm looking forward.

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