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aerostudios
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Posted: 3rd Aug 2009 01:37
I tried the DC SET RAIN function example; but did not see any rain. Not sure what it is supposed to look like. Anyone have a more thorough example? screenshot perhaps?

Russell B. Davis/aerostudios
Todd Riggins
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Posted: 3rd Aug 2009 04:37 Edited at: 8th Aug 2009 00:52
edit: sry... nm

trogdor
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Posted: 3rd Aug 2009 22:40
I just installed and ran my first test.
I noticed that bright clouds look very pixelated


and as they move away from the sun and get darker the pixelation gets less and less noticable.






Is there anything I can do to make it less chunky looking?

Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, where the heck is the ceiling.
BatVink
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Posted: 3rd Aug 2009 23:12
I noticed the texture was 256x256, it probably shows up more with lighter colours.

Maybe an option to set this would be good.

It might also be good to be able to save and reload the initial data to allow for quicker loading of cloud data, rather than having to wait each time.

But for me, I still have to be able to run it I have no answer to why I get a black texture and no clouds.

Roderick_Simul
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Posted: 4th Aug 2009 00:29
BatVink: It may be that the ATI800 you have cannot cope with the 16-bit float textures we use for sky colours and distance-fades - if this is the case we'll need to put in a 32-bit capability and detect at runtime.

Roderick Kennedy
Simul Software
Alien Menace
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Posted: 4th Aug 2009 03:45
Bought it but have the same problem with the ATI x1200 in my year old laptop with the latest ATI drivers, it just shows a black window... How much testing did you guys do before releasing this?

Intel Core Duo2 E6850 3.0 GHz - 2x Geforce 8800 GTS SLI - 2GB RAM - Creative X-FI - Windows Vista Premium
trogdor
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Posted: 4th Aug 2009 07:03
Quote: "I tried the DC SET RAIN function example; but did not see any rain. "

Maybe that's why they did not link that help page to the command list.

I also like both of BatVink's suggestions.

I'm having issues with getting my reflection camera 1 to see the clouds. Camera 1 sees the terrain but not the backdrop. I'm still working at it though.

Now with this awesome cloud system, I need an awesome terrain system to match

Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, where the heck is the ceiling.
Psyko_Monkey
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Posted: 5th Aug 2009 10:41
I don't know why I assumed the clouds would be made as objects....this package seemed too good to be true! Someone mentioned it before, but the idea would be to fly under/through/above the clouds (ie in a plane).

However I cannot do this if they are not objects. There is a lot of potential for this, but the current version didnt satisfy my needs. I wish I had done more research, as for me this limited capability was not worth £30.

Can anyone suggest a way of creating clouds to fly through?!?

I wonder if you can sell this software on 2nd hand, if so, going for £10 here people....
BatVink
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Posted: 5th Aug 2009 11:13
Quote: "Can anyone suggest a way of creating clouds to fly through?!?"


Cloth and Particles pack, but you'll have to put a lot of work in to make it realistic. I've managed explosions., but they only need to last for a few seconds.

Green Gandalf
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Posted: 8th Aug 2009 00:53 Edited at: 8th Aug 2009 01:10
Quote: "But for me, I still have to be able to run it I have no answer to why I get a black texture and no clouds."


Yeah, I get the same on my laptop too (GFX card ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200. I guess the clouds are dark.

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qwe
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Posted: 13th Aug 2009 10:16 Edited at: 13th Aug 2009 10:16
clouds can just be cloud-fluff textures made in photoshop with an alpha channel, posted in bunches slowly moving across the sky. very easy to make a basic dynamic cloud system that you can "fly through"
RanQor
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Posted: 15th Aug 2009 16:52
Love the idea, but before I buy I'm waiting for:
*Stars/moon
*Lightning and Snow weather
*Some way to re-render the exact same cloud formation using a Serial#. This way I could sync online clients to the same weather, and have the Server generate the Serial#.
Alien Menace
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Posted: 30th Aug 2009 08:51 Edited at: 30th Aug 2009 08:53
So, are there any plans to fix this so it will work on ATI cards??? For the $50 I paid, I expected a fix to be available by now...

Intel Core Duo2 E6850 3.0 GHz - 2x Geforce 8800 GTS SLI - 6GB RAM - Creative X-FI - Windows Vista Premium.
BatVink
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Posted: 30th Aug 2009 15:33
It is actively being worked on, but it has turned out not to be a simple issue, hence the delay.

Roderick_Simul
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Posted: 31st Aug 2009 22:53
We've been an all-NVIDIA household so far at Simul. Attempts to debug this remotely didn't help - the ATI cards passed all the runtime checks and still didn't render correctly. I've ordered an X800, and I would expect it will be fixed within a day or so of the new card arriving. After this we'll set up a permanent ATI test machine to make sure it stays fixed.

Sorry for the problems, and the delay in getting it fixed!

Roderick Kennedy
Simul Software
trogdor
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2009 07:12
As seen in my previous post, I'm using DarkClouds with Advanced Terrain.

I like the fact the the sun moves over time, but I'm unable to have a light affect my terrains so shadows move over time as well.

I got the most beautiful sunset the other day, but my terrain stayed bright as ever

I haven't looked into Blitz Terrain yet to see what it has to offer, but I like if Advanced Terrain got a bit more advanced.

Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, where the heck is the ceiling.
Van B
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2009 10:38
Maybe you need to enable lights on AT, there's a way you can do this, it's actually in Green Gandalf's AT shaders demo. Anyhoo, if you have your main light source at the sun position, then you should try enabling lighting on the terrain.

It involves calculating the normals (automatic) and changing the FVF format (automatic) - but the FVF stuff a bit cryptic when you don't have it in front of you, so download GG's lights on AT demo and have a look at that. One problem I do have with this is that it seems to affect the colour map layer a lot more than the detail layer, like it can appear to wash out the colour map rather than darken the whole terrain. It's something to experiment with, but hopefully a shader based terrain would have less issues.


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Plotinus
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2009 13:23
Does the sun have to move? Is it possible to set it so that the time of day remains the same, although the clouds move as normal?
aerostudios
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Posted: 3rd Sep 2009 14:24
I was just wondering the same thing. How to position the light to correspond with the sun's position. I'm thinking the sun is not a light; just a simple graphic in the background. So one would have to move the light source to impact shadows in the scene.

Russell B. Davis/aerostudios
Roderick_Simul
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Posted: 9th Sep 2009 03:09
The sun direction can be obtained from DarkCLOUDS using the DC GET LIGHT DIRECTION commands. A fixed time of day could be simulated by just having time change very slowly, but having fast wind speed. But I think what we'll do also in a future release is allow you to simply set the light direction manually, so it can remain the same time of day.

Meanwhile, we've found the issue with the X800 cards. Although these cards supported floating-point textures, they did not support alpha-blending to floating-point rendertargets - at all! So all that black you were seeing came from procedural textures that should have been blended in the HDR buffer, but were just being drawn without blending. We've put a test in for this capability, and if it fails, we use a fixed-point target - which seems to look fine.

After some testing we'll have this update available for download.

Roderick Kennedy
Simul Software
Duffer
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Posted: 10th Sep 2009 21:32
@ Roderick,

There's a post elsewhere re the dc set time command not working:-

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=155558&b=1

Also, have you come any closer to the stars, moon thing?

Also, is there actually a rain effect? Could you post a screenie of it?

a long time dabbler with DBC and DBPro with no actual talent but lots of enthusiasm...
Duffer
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Posted: 16th Sep 2009 16:36 Edited at: 16th Sep 2009 18:01
ping
[edit]
have also seen the demo of lightning effects on your website - amazing - will they be in a future release with rain effects?, stars, moon?
which is likely first in DarkClouds? any closer to etas?

a long time dabbler with DBC and DBPro with no actual talent but lots of enthusiasm...
trogdor
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Posted: 20th Sep 2009 00:47
DarkClouds should team up with Evolved and take this to the next level.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlZmyBsA88g

Last night I lay in bed looking up at the stars in the sky and I thought to myself, where the heck is the ceiling.
Olby
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Posted: 22nd Sep 2009 04:13 Edited at: 22nd Sep 2009 04:13
Quote: "DarkClouds should team up with Evolved and take this to the next level.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlZmyBsA88g"


You are right! Evolved's shaders are one of the best out there, he definitely needs to team up with someone or at least make some products on his own. If DC would be up to such level I wouldn't hesitate a moment a buy it straight away.

ACER Aspire 5920G: Core2Duo 2.2GHZ, 2GB, GeForce 8600M GT 1280MB, Windows Vista Ultimate SP1, DBPro 7.3, PureGDK 1.1
Duffer
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Posted: 24th Sep 2009 23:45
@ simul - ping...

a long time dabbler with DBC and DBPro with no actual talent but lots of enthusiasm...
Roderick_Simul
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Posted: 30th Sep 2009 15:09
The new version is now available for download, we've tested it with the ATI cards. There's now a command to set the cloud base height as well. Rain has been tweaked to make it more visible, this is controllable as well.

As regards the Evolved demo, I think the main stuff in there is more to do with the water and HDR effects, this sort of thing can be combined with DarkCLOUDS quite simply, have a look at the DBPro shader stuff and post-processing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ut2_C4DyaM

Roderick Kennedy
Simul Software
Vues3d on Kalimee
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Posted: 30th Sep 2009 16:58 Edited at: 30th Sep 2009 17:00
Hi there..
Bought the DarkClouds because I was thinking I could save some time in coding...
Result... I spent 35 Euros for nothing... because the sky is AWFULLY pixelized..... and just unusable as it is... also, we are stucked with the few commands and cannot change anything except the light direction and brightness...

Do have they tested this addon on "Little-Windowed" programs???
really cannot believe they an release something not finished and at this awfully high price...

As the function cannot reasonably work in a full screen, I hope I can be refounded now... OR... have the assurance that something is done as an update of DarkCloud...



Here what I got:



Mobiius
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Posted: 30th Sep 2009 17:00
Quote: "Here what I got:"

What is?

Your signature has been erased by a mod because we're sadistic losers with nothing better to do. (joke)
Roderick_Simul
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Posted: 30th Sep 2009 17:57
This pixellation must be either a bug or hardware/driver problem. What is your setup? (graphics card, driver version)

Roderick Kennedy
Simul Software
Vues3d on Kalimee
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Posted: 30th Sep 2009 18:52
Sure isn't a setup problem
I've every single setup up to date...
Directx 10 installed and GFX card is a NVidia GeForce 8600

This comes from the DarkCloud Package... because some other people got the same problem. Sure is a bug.. but in DarkClouds...
The problem seems to come from the fact that the sky uses a 256 X 256 image... and scaled on a screen which is 1680 X 1050 ... it's quite normal that it can be pixelized.
They could had thought about the fact that people would like to play in full screen mode, not only in Windowed mode.
Choosing the resolution of the Texture could have been a good idea...

Roderick_Simul
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Posted: 30th Sep 2009 19:49
Quote: "Sure isn't a setup problem"


Changing the resolution of the texture would only disguise the problem. The issue is not resolution but the lack of filtering. The pixels should be filtered, as they are in the screenshots and videos. Obviously it's been tested in fullscreen and so on.

One thing to try is go to the NVidia Control Panel and check that your filtering settings are on the defaults.

If anyone else has this issue and would like to help us get to the bottom of it, please message me or contact support@simul.co.uk,

cheers

Roderick Kennedy
Simul Software
BatVink
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Posted: 30th Sep 2009 22:54
It's working well here on my ATI setup, thanks for the update

Vues3d on Kalimee
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Posted: 1st Oct 2009 11:30
Quote: "One thing to try is go to the NVidia Control Panel and check that your filtering settings are on the defaults."


Nice tip, I'll try it... but normally, as I didn't changed the main setting, it should be set already on its defaults. But I will give a try and let you informed on what I will find.

Really hope that this comes from the GFX card

Roderick_Simul
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Posted: 1st Oct 2009 21:00
Something else has occurred to me Vues3d:

Can you use a different background texture, with (say) 256x256 resolution, like so:


Where texture 1 is NOT the image created by dc init.
I'd like to see if a non-dc background is filtered or not.

Roderick Kennedy
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Posted: 2nd Oct 2009 03:20
hmmm. wow looks very realistic, the clouds and the sun both look realish =) just one suggestion, the demo should have music on it, makes it more coolish, would maybe make the demo user seem more interested and want to buy it haha.

OpenFPS tester and Coder
Duffer
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Posted: 2nd Oct 2009 10:31
@ Roderick,

Excellent - what about Moon n Stars - and that fantastic lightning effect?

a long time dabbler with DBC and DBPro with no actual talent but lots of enthusiasm...
Vues3d on Kalimee
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Posted: 2nd Oct 2009 16:40
Hi roderick...
I already tryied, and got a good resolution, anyhow, I will create tomorrow different textures 256 x 256 - 512 x 512 in order to check. I'll post the pictures as soon as I've done it.

Also, I doublechecked yesterday the settings of my GFX card, nothing seemed to be wrong. I reset everything to the initial state, and still got the pixelisation...

I'll keep you informed on the results.
Cheers

Vues3d on Kalimee
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Posted: 5th Oct 2009 10:19 Edited at: 5th Oct 2009 10:23
Hi again...
OK. I have more news on my issue.

As seen before, trying to get the sky working in my level, I get pixelized clouds.
I ran the demo (in the windowed mode) and the sky seemed to be OK.
Then, I changed the code in order to have the demo on a full screen view...
The sky looks good, nothing pixelized.
So, then, anyone could think that there's something wrong in my code... but I'm quite sure not, because I just made a COPY & PASTE of the whole code (naturally without the pelican) .. and let the code as it is... so, now, I really don't understand why I'm facing to those 2 different ways of the sky rendering.
Am I forgetting something else?
Display settings?
Mine are 1680 X 1050 32
... but i set the display mode I have in my game in the demo, and the demo is working fine..
Also, the fact that I have a "normal" rendering in the demo, shows that my GFX card works also fine.
Any clue?
Idea?

OH.. was forgetting that..
The only thing I changed is the Texture image number.
As I already had an image having the number 1 I changed it in 10000...
does the bug could come from the change of the image picture?
(Thinking of that just now... and then, I cannot - still - try to change the texture number...

thanx

Vues3d on Kalimee
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Posted: 5th Oct 2009 10:24
I also have a question..
Is it possible to change the color of the sky?
Having it other than blue?

Duffer
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Posted: 5th Oct 2009 21:10
@ Roderick - and dont forget my question too...

a long time dabbler with DBC and DBPro with no actual talent but lots of enthusiasm...
Roderick_Simul
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Posted: 7th Oct 2009 20:51
Vues3d: I'm not 100% clear on your answer - did you test the same code with a different texture, and was it filtered? As filtering is performed in either the render state commands or the shader (depending on the programmer's chosen method), I think this may turn out to be something in the backdrop command where the state is not set, and so defaults to whatever it was before the backdrop texture is drawn. You will only see pixelation with lo-res textures, and the DarkClouds backdrop is lo-res in order to permit volumetric rendering at high framerates. In answer to your other question, the sky can only be blue with the present feature set.

Duffer: Moon is on the list, we'll probably do stars as well but I can't give a timescale. It may require some cleverness as the Moon and stars will need to be hi-res, behind a lo-res sky - for this reason I wouldn't expect we'll have time to look at it for a while.

Roderick Kennedy
Simul Software
CSGames94
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Posted: 8th Oct 2009 01:50
@ Roderick_Simul
Will their be a new demo using DarkClouds 2, so I can see the improvements better. But, so far it looks very good!
Roderick_Simul
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Posted: 8th Oct 2009 17:26
The Game Creators have informed us that the filtering fix to the backdrop commmand will be in the next U75 update to DarkBasic Pro.

Roderick Kennedy
Simul Software
NickH
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Posted: 9th Oct 2009 14:18 Edited at: 9th Oct 2009 14:38
Hmmm I was going to get this, but not sure now. Can't you change the sky colour? I was wanting a more alien planet look to go with my desert landscapes.

Also will my million year old computer (Gforce 5500fx-256mb, 2gb RAM, 2.3ghz single core AMD CPU) cope with this or should I wait till I get a new one?...whenever that'll be!
revenant chaos
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Posted: 9th Oct 2009 15:16 Edited at: 9th Oct 2009 15:17
NickH - your machine isn't so bad. My computer is almost identical to yours, except that I have a 2.2ghz CPU (AMD single core) and a GeForce 9600GT. I haven't yet found a game that I can't play at an acceptable speed. If you upgraded your GPU you would see a world of difference, without needing a while new computer.
Duffer
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Posted: 10th Oct 2009 11:51 Edited at: 10th Oct 2009 11:56
@ Roderick,

Thanks for the update. With moon/stars this would be for me a top rank plugin. Also, any chance of inclusion of lightning effects? If there were there'd need to be some way of knowing when the lightning happened so we could throw in the requisite sound effects...

[edit]

if anyone is wondering what I mean when I say lightning effects... I mean this:-

http://www.simul.co.uk/archives/181

a long time dabbler with DBC and DBPro with no actual talent but lots of enthusiasm...
Mobiius
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Posted: 10th Oct 2009 17:19
They look sweet!

Your signature has been erased by a mod because we're sadistic losers with nothing better to do. (joke)
Vues3d on Kalimee
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Posted: 12th Oct 2009 14:35
Hum...
Mainly I think that I have some issue with the settings of the screen... Why?

- I run the demo in windowed mode... FINE
- I run the demo setting up the display mode as in my own game ... FINE (Huge decrease of the fps.. but not a problem at all
- I just copy & paste the whole code of the demo in my game... GOT the sky pixelized...

I checked the code of the demo, seens something strange.
The demo ALWAYS open in WINDOWED MODE, but havent seen anywhere in the code the settings of the windowed mode, then, is there some hidden settings in the demo?

I really don't understand why I have this quality difference without changing the code...

Roderick_Simul
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Posted: 12th Oct 2009 22:37
Vues3d, it will be some shape or command in your game that disables filtering. There's nothing wrong with this, except that the code to re-enable filtering was not put in the backdrop command. When the next DBPro update comes out, it should be fine.

Roderick Kennedy
Simul Software
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2009 23:58
This thread seems to mention new commands for Dark Clouds, such as Rain commands which don't appear to be listed in the version I brought.. Is there an update and if so does anyone know if the downloads have been updated?

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