One of my goals in Ultra Engine is to avoid "black box" file formats and leave all game assets in common file formats that can be easily read in a variety of programs. For this reason, I put a lot of effort into the Pixmap class and the DDS load and save capabilities.
In Ultra Engine animated textures can be stored in a volume texture. To play the animation, the W component of the UVW texcoord is scrolled. The fragment shader will sample the volume texture between the nearest two slices on
Back in the summer of 2017, I started experimenting with the idea of a puzzle game by placing launch pads on surfaces. The first build was very sloppy, and there wasn't any wall launching at this time. This build however was the first step of the experimenting process. Only one map was ever made and I just reused old Vectronic assets.
I shelved this concept until Winter of 2020 asI developed an itch to work on something and I wanted to get familiar with GIMP. This build again
Ok so I didn't quite do one shader a week but I got to 52. I wasn't sure I could pull it off but hopefully the shaders are diverse enough to give something to work with for most occasions. I tried to keep the language consistent throughout and organize them sort of from easy to hard. I threw in all kinds of links because I don't know a lot of the technical terminology. I don't know how Ultra is going to be but I get the impression it's not going to be too much different. From what I understand,
According to learnopengl.com PBR - or physically based rendering - is "...a collection of render techniques that are more or less based on the same underlying theory that more closely matches that of the physical world...[it] aims to mimic light in a physically plausible way...[and] generally looks more realistic compared to our original lighting algorithms like Phong an Blinn-Phong...PBR is still nonetheless an approximation of reality...which is why it's not called physical shading, but physic
When it comes to complex projects I like to focus on whatever area of technology causes me the most uncertainty or worry. Start with the big problems, solve those, and as you continue development the work gets easier and easier. I decided at this stage I really wanted to see how well Vulkan graphics work on Mac computers.
Vulkan doesn't run natively on Mac, but gets run through a translation library called MoltenVK. How well does MoltenVK actually work? There was only one way to find out...
So we went through a lot of fragment shaders. Did some vertex displacement. Went through tessellation. Now, some geometry. I don't have much to say about it. Just keep poking at it with a proverbial stick and eventually situations start to look familiar and you know what to do because it's similar to stuff you've encountered before. It does seem to me that there's not a lot of variety in geometry shaders. There's a bit, though. Enough to make it interesting. But grab these shaders and you'll hav
If you liked vertex displacement, you're going to love tessellation. Tessellation is very similar, but incorporates the control and evaluation stages of the shader. The Leadwerks box brush creates a box that has two triangles per face. If you want to use some kind of vertex displacement on it you're going to have a bad time. With tessellation it's different because you are able to subdivide the faces with the shader, so you can use the shader to create more structurally complex models. The contr
Note: In my last post shaders 36 and 37 weren't working correctly so I replaced them. If you got the old ones you can throw those out and re-download the new ones on the same links.
These shaders are based on the Leadwerks soft particle shader, which I was directed to by Marcousik, and which I noobalyzed into a model shader. What the soft particle shader does is create a soft falloff in opacity depending on how close objects are behind it. To clarify, imagine looking down at a water plane,
Hi,
I finally managed to build a first release candidate for a SyntaxEditor-Widget. The Widget is using the famous Scintilla TextEditor-Component under the hood and wraps the control into a UAK-Widget. At this point i only provide binaries (includes and libraries) but i am currently preparing to release the source as well.
The source itself is semi-autogenerated with a manual created body and a tool which generates the main part of the Scintilla-Component based of so called iFace fi
Ultra App Kit 1.1 is now available on our website and on Steam. This free update brings cross-platform development to our fast resolution-independent GUI toolkit. To download the new installers, click on your account purchases.
In addition to Windows, Mac and Linux are now supported, which means you can code once and compile everywhere to easily create cross-platform GUI applications.
Builds on Linux use minimal dependencies and will work on virtually any distro without any additional
Simplistically speaking, you could think of the vertex stage of a shader as the "position" of the object, and the fragment stage as the "color." All you really need is position and color. Vertex displacement manipulates the position to warp or move the object. There are many ways to do it but the whole trick revolves around the ex_vertexposition. You may notice in every model shader you have these two lines in the vertex stage:
ex_vertexposition = entitymatrix_ * vec4(vertex_position,1.0
I have procrastinated testing of our new 3D engine on AMD hardware for a while. I knew it was not working as-is, but I was not too concerned. One of the promises of Vulkan is better support across-the-board and fewer driver bugs, due to the more explicit nature of the API. So when I finally tried out the engine on an R9 200 series card, what would actually happen? Would the promise of Vulkan be realized, or would developers continue to be plagued by problems on different graphics cards? Read on
In addition to the usual metallic looking textures, a few of these have different elements to break up the collection, namely concrete.
In the final pack there will be "metallic" variants of these textures as well. I have the materials set up so that I can import different scanned substances, like cinder blocks or bunker walls. Makes for a cool military look and can be used to ground your setting more into reality, if you wish. Just choose your preferred look.
I will be mixing all the
Wall textures being continually updated. Here is wall #36A (of 3 unshown variants).
99% of housekeeping tasks are now done as well. I say 99% because I am sure there are a few folders that still need to be organized.
I don't deal with noise shaders that much but there are a lot of examples on Shadertoy. It has a lot of uses depending on what you want, but very often I see noise being used with raymarching to create 3D scenes. I prefer using textures because I can get what I want out of them and noise is a lot of math (noise shaders can get very large very quickly), but I figured a good shader series ought to have a noise function somewhere.
I got this noise from iq of Shadertoy fame. Just a nice
Parallax is a cheap way to add a lot of 3D details to any scene. The less vertices on a mesh the better, because parallax doesn't actually add any geometric information. And it requires only the bare minimum number of vertices to work. That makes it fast. And the effect is believable. All you really need is a heightmap and a dream... It's a lot of fun trying different textures with it, and if I could I'd use it for everything.
However, there are a few limitations to parallax. The first prob
In this first entry I will introduce some basics about the internal structure of the Widget class and what the purpose of some of its members is.
For the real basics on how to write a custom Widget I suggest reading this https://www.ultraengine.com/learn/CPP/CustomWidgets first.
Most of the members are self explained, so I will focus in this entry on 4 important methods:
virtual bool Initialize(const WString& text, const int x, const int y, const int width, const int height, sh
Masking is pretty easy and useful for adding some variety to your shaders. Masks are usually just some greyscale image that is turned into a float. In shaders floats have a very broad utility because you can add them just about anywhere. Super useful. And they can be used to blend textures or define areas in your material.
Adding a mask in code is the same as with any texture. The greyscale quality allows you to use a single channel of that greyscale as a representative of all the channels.
Still researching a good car simulation script with LE 4.6, so what's new:
I changed some important parameters of my car script to make the car more nervous, better responsive to the world, rapid and giving more feelings and more controls by driving it.
Maybe it is not 100% what man can expect but it is now more fun to drive and that's important.
The car now calculates and integrates both the forces coming from the world and from the player commands,
That means it checks th
One of those things I wanted to make - and a big reason I think many people get involved in shaders - is water. If you've been following along and grabbing these shaders you have now almost all the parts you need to make a basic water plane. If you understand these parts then you can manipulate them to customize your water as you see fit. I'm going to spend a little time in explanation here.
In making this shader I start with the base shader and add a texture scroll effect on the normals (
One month ago I began work to investigate what it would take to bring Ultra App Kit, the foundation for our new generation of game development tools, to Linux. Today I am happy to share my progress with you and discuss some of the things I have learned.
Developed by MIT in the year 1984, X11 is an interesting beast that is easy to start with, but can become quite difficult once you get into the details. (Wayland support is of course an obvious step in the not-too-distant future but I have t
Another simple shader technique is the skybox (or cubemap) reflection. Cubemaps are useful for creating quick and easy reflective surfaces for objects and work particularly well on curved surfaces or objects with bumpy normals. You can create an impression of a metallic, wet, or polished look quite easily (provided you have a way to generate cubemaps). In code, they are about as easy as fresnel, which gives them something of a broad utiity. Once you have the technique, you can treat it as a "par
If you took a bowl full of water and looked straight down into the bowl, the water would be clear. But if you were to then move the bowl up to your eye and look from the side along the surface of the water, you'd see it becomes highly reflective. That's fresnel.
It's a cool effect. And it's easy to code. You add a uniform vec3 cameraposition towards the top and a fresnel color, and then a fresnel effect is little more than this:
vec3 eyevec = normalize(cameraposition - ex_vertexp
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