Demo for erode testing

[jlv]

Anyone have a national demo uploaded somewhere that I could download? I need a good erode demo to test with.

[Logeyboy]

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

[baker]

Anyone have a national demo uploaded somewhere that I could download? I need a good erode demo to test with.

Jlv with the first 2022 post?

[jlv]

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Thanks for that!

Jlv with the first 2022 post?

Depends on the time zone.

[baker]

Jlv with the first 2022 post?

Depends on the time zone.
[/quote]

I was going off the time displayed in the post, which is assuming is UTC.

[checkerz]

When JLV hits with that erode update and it's bad ass...

[Jakob Hubbard]

When JLV hits with that erode update and it's bad ass...

Pretty sure he's just testing his updated reshade code not updating erode lol

[jlv]

Pretty sure he's just testing his updated reshade code not updating erode lol

Yeah, this is going to eliminate reshading. The old way, it baked the overall terrain normals into the cached terrain normal maps, which is fast so long as the terrain doesn't change. But with erode on, the terrain is constantly changing and invalidating the cached normals. The new way the cached normal maps will only contain normals from the decals. The normals for the contour of the actual terrain are generated on the fly as it renders the terrain. So when the terrain changes, the cached decal normals stay valid and the shading updates quicker since I just have to upload some height data to the GPU instead of redoing all the cached normal maps. The fragment shader is a little more complex now but not enough to matter on any reasonable GPU.

It's not too much faster compared to the old code with a high reshade delay but the code is soooo much cleaner now. There was some really ugly code to make it work without using large textures before.

It should also be a little better at showing small details in the terrain now since the old way calculated the normals at the terrain vertices, which softens things a little since the normals at the vertices are the average of the connected faces' normals. The new way the shading halfway between two neighboring heights in the field will be shaded according to the exact slope of that polygon instead of being the average of the normals at those two points.

[Jakob Hubbard]

Yeah, this is going to eliminate reshading. The old way, it baked the overall terrain normals into the cached terrain normal maps, which is fast so long as the terrain doesn't change. But with erode on, the terrain is constantly changing and invalidating the cached normals. The new way the cached normal maps will only contain normals from the decals. The normals for the contour of the actual terrain are generated on the fly as it renders the terrain. So when the terrain changes, the cached decal normals stay valid and the shading updates quicker since I just have to upload some height data to the GPU instead of redoing all the cached normal maps. The fragment shader is a little more complex now but not enough to matter on any reasonable GPU.

This definitely seems like a better way of doing things, less things the cache has to worry about by not constantly updating everything all at once.

It's not too much faster compared to the old code with a high reshade delay.

Most of the problems I encountered were at a low reshade delay (0-8), higher values the problem almost never happened, but since the delay is now eliminated this should be perfect for everyone in erode (if I'm correct?).

But the code is soooo much cleaner now. There was some really ugly code to make it work without using large textures before.

Gotta love no more ugly code

It should also be a little better at showing small details in the terrain now since the old way calculated the normals at the terrain vertices, which softens things a little since the normals at the vertices are the average of the connected faces' normals. The new way the shading halfway between two neighboring heights in the field will be shaded according to the exact slope of that polygon instead of being the average of the normals at those two points.

That's awesome, these exact slopes I think might allow the possibility to get some more accurate erode settings since it's not averaging them out. Doubt most people would do anything with it anyways since most people don't tend to read the tileinfo info and test settings.