*** Vendetta 1.8.321
- Added dynamic light sources to many of the "neon-style" floating signs, visible in the prototype DX11 or OpenGL drivers.
- New sound effects: Avalon Torpedo impact/explosions, queen and capship explosions, and special Heavy Assault Cruiser explosion effects.

Note, this looks a lot cooler in-game, when the signs are animating and changing colors, and the light is affecting nearby objects, like the opposite wall, etc. Kudos to Curt for a good job adding lights :).

Only a few signs have had lights added so far. About 5 out of 30, so don't expect to see a ton of them. Looking at the Divinia F6 station is a good starting point.

They should be visible for both DX11 and OpenGL 4 prototype renderers.

Nice improvements.

I would only comment that the avalon sounds sound like someone is throwing a tennis ball at an empty cardboard box. Consider rolling off the top end with a low pass filter for windows/linux/mac players, and possibly adding more low end to make it more cinematic.

Any ideas when the OpenGL 4 renderer will be ported to OS X?

I would only comment that the avalon sounds sound like someone is throwing a tennis ball at an empty cardboard box.

Heh, that's kind of funny, considering it's based on the actual sound of a large-bore tank shell slamming into an object. I already bumped the low end considerably.

Any ideas when the OpenGL 4 renderer will be ported to OS X?

Should be the next few weeks, but not 100% sure. It's a not a small undertaking, as Apple has completely re-worked their graphics APIs and deprecated most of what we use. Some of the architecture requires actual.. changes in thinking about how things work. They really didn't make it trivial. Kind of annoying. Plus there's a lot of "this is for 10.9, but that is for 10.10" stuff, and they deprecate things left and right (even newer APIs).

Real weapon sounds are never as impressive as the Hollywood-style kabooms people expect. :(

Avalons are usually fired in salvos of at least two, if not more. When a whole bunch of them hit a target at once now, it sounds like somebody dropping a microphone hooked up to a gated reverb.

I demand realism - no sound at all unless you are in the ship that is hit.

Whatever low end that exists on the new avalon sound gets lost amidst the ship engine sound.

Sounds great at my house Incarnate, thank you :)

you can't demand realism in VO. It exists in a completely artificial space more akin to a liquid or ether filled universe. In such a case, sound could be transmitted I suppose, but how it would be heard is completely conjecture.

That being said, sound is still played in nearly any space game because the reality of space is utterly boring. Certain liberties need to be taken otherwise you start to wonder if maybe going outside is a more productive use of your time than spending money to play a silent game with what would almost certainly be invisible lasers.

I think Guild Software is on the right track. However, I find their focus on direct X ....disturbing. If resources are limited, focusing on a api that benefits only Windows PC users vs their moblie, linux, mac etc users that all use OpenGL is an unnecessary effort, especially since Windows supports opengl as well. The only platform that may limit itself to direct is Xbox360/one and doing it for that just seems like a utter waste of resources.

Anyway, game on.. keep up the effort.

That being said, sound is still played in nearly any space game because the reality of space is utterly boring.

Actually, there's a real-world RP explanation for the sounds, that they're created by your shipboard computer to enhance the pilot's situational awareness and make maximal use of available (human) sensory input. Frankly, I think this would likely be reflected in reality too.

But anyway, Whistler was not being serious about wanting a silent game.

I think Guild Software is on the right track. However, I find their focus on direct X ....disturbing. If resources are limited, focusing on a api that benefits only Windows PC users vs their moblie, linux, mac etc users that all use OpenGL is an unnecessary effort, especially since Windows supports opengl as well. The only platform that may limit itself to direct is Xbox360/one and doing it for that just seems like a utter waste of resources.

First, that's not how game development works. Roughly same technology (shaders) are used across all platforms. We choose to iterate on the one that makes for the most rapid progress. Once things are stable, *then* we consider bringing it back across to other APIs. Otherwise we're going insane re-writing shaders and debugging things across umpteen platforms at the same time.

Second, the statement: "focusing on a api that benefits only Windows PC users vs their moblie, linux, mac etc users that all use OpenGL is an unnecessary effort" is.. wrong. OpenGL is not OpenGL ES. They're different APIs. You can load ES shaders in mainline OpenGL through the use of sometimes-supported extensions, and there are architectural similarities; but fundamentally the APIs are not the same thing, nor are they compatible at all.

Also, to even support OpenGL 4.x (or ES2 extensions) on the Mac will require a total renderer re-write on that platform, because of Apple's choices. So "full OpenGL" on Mac is not even the same thing, from our standpoint, as "full OpenGL" on Linux.

That all being said, we would LOVE to dump all the separate APIs and have only one, but OpenGL on Windows has always been a very poor second to DirectX in terms of driver stability. And now it isn't even available (Win8+ only has OpenGL 1.1, with default drivers). So we've always had to support DirectX effectively, and now it's really the only option (you may not ship a Windows Store app that isn't DX11, for instance).

There was a big push from the Khronos Group (overseers of OpenGL) a couple of years ago, to have OpenGL ES2 available everywhere (Windows too), which briefly excited us about dumping all other APIs.. but it didn't happen. Microsoft wants to control the API, the same way Apple does (Metal), etc. They all want their own little kingdoms, no one ways to play together. This makes our life considerably more annoying, and it makes new development like this a lot more time consuming.

Finally, there are roughly twice as many Windows users online at any time, than Linux and Apple put together. It's also the platform that all the big GPU makers (NVIDIA, AMD) put their driver-development time into. So it really makes a lot of sense that we would test and prototype our next-generation renderer there. Building this stuff is hard enough, without having to work around craptastic Linux driver issues at the same time ("oh, is that a crappy OEM driver? or the open source one? Or.. oh god my head.."). We would rather at least make things fundamentally work before taking that on.

Android will not be able to handle the next-gen renderer stuff for some time (bits of it, yes, but not everything.. we're building this stuff for brutish desktop cards that double as space-heaters, not for phones).

It's true: I was not serious about wanting a silent game and did not expect that my statement would be taken seriously.

"oh, is that a crappy OEM driver? or the open source one? Or.. oh god my head.."

Windows ain't immune to that one either. Hybrid graphics on laptops! Oh, you have an AMD GPU and an Intel GPU and you can't update the drivers for either because they have to come from the OEM and they haven't released an update since 2011? Oops.

Let's get clever and try to make the Catalyst package from AMD's website work by changing out .ini files! oh god my head...

Computers suck. :)

http://xkcd.com/963/

Yeah, Xorg auto-configures these days. It's pretty sweet. :)