Wurm Online

[Dosenbier]

Windowed Mode solved the strange problems.

Now everything looks fine  !

Greets !

[ribot]

Yes, it seems that there are problems with the ATI cards on the mac as well:

When I start the old client I get the following error:

Error starting Wurm online

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegally formatted OpenGL version identifier: "1.4 ATI-1.3.18"

My system: Mac OS X 10.3.4, ATI Radeon 9700 128MB, Java 1.4.2_03

[Markus_Persson]

The old version doesn't like macs at all.

But the new client should hopefully make it a lot more compatible. And prettier.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[ribot]

Offering a sneek-peak jnlp anywhere?  

[Markus_Persson]

It's really not playable at all yet, but I'm working on that. =)

I'll post here when it's done.
(and then you can tell me if it runs or not! =D)

[ribot]

Will you be working on the lag element?  Every time I've logged in to try and play..it's been very slow but renders reasonably well.

[Markus_Persson]

Framerate is one of the things that will be improved in the new client, but Wurm Online really is a very complex game with thousands of visible dynamic objects (including a fully dynamic terrain), so don't expect quake 3 type framerate.

[ribot]

ok.  

but what I was trying to get question was the latency times on your server(s).  Every ten seconds, the whole game would pause, seeming to freeze, only to start animating 2-5 seconds later.  The computer I experienced these issues with was quite a powerful modern day computer with a 512kbps DSL line.  Is this a known issue?  I suppose it is, and all the glorious changes being made for client ver 2.0 will fix most of the problems.  

[Markus_Persson]

I've never seen the rendering pause because of network lag. =/

We use an almost fully asynchronous protocol. The only synchronous bits is when states need to be.. well.. synchronized, like when logging in, and directly after a teleportation.


I'm guessing it might be the gc acting up.

[Markus_Persson]

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[SpuTTer]

 

AWESOME!

[Breakfast]

Very impressive.

[erikd]

Looks incredibly beautiful! I especially like the clouds a lot.

[ribot]

I recognise those cloud structures from a guy in the states called Mark something.  Very nice!  How hard were they to implement?

[erikd]

If I understand correctly from the wurm forums, they got the idea from a programmer from MS flightsimulator 2004, a lady who looks even better than the clouds I might add  

EDIT: Look here for a description http://www.ofb.net/~eggplant/clouds/

[ribot]

ohh, that's a nice link!  

I managed to google my way to the link mentioned before:

Mark J Harris

http://www.markmark.net/clouds/

(a nice technique of light scattering cloud systems + Open source too)

[edit] nice images here: http://www.markmark.net/clouds/RTCRImages.html

[Markus_Persson]

Oooh, thanks for the nice comments. =D


For the clouds, I started off by implementing a system very similar to that flight simulator cloud cover thing (I even used their textures as placeholders at first, but we're using original textures now), but quickly realized that even though it's reasonably fast, I cannot spend that much gpu power on just the clouds.
So placed some more restrictions on it (you can only see the clouds from below, you can't pass them) and reworked a new system. It's basically just a simple array of 16x16 cloud sprites scattered with random offsets and rotations over the skydome, with some tricky hacking with the normals to get them lit up in a way that looks reasonably convincing.

I tried implementing scattering with some other tricks, but lost a lot of dynamic range. I'll look into doing some fragment shader stuff for high end cards.

This system is fast enough, looks real enough, and is very flexible. I'm kinda proud of it.

[Markus_Persson]

ah, that link is great, ribot. =D

I _really_ want proper scattering in the clouds.

[Markus_Persson]

[Markus_Persson]

Weather effects:


Moons and fog:

[Markus_Persson]

[DanK]

You are my Java programming idol :p. Wurmonline looks like a commercial game at this point (maybe not the top end commercial game but still very nice).

[swpalmer]

Hey!  I REALLY like the improvements to the grass in that last pic.  Much nicer.
Now you need improved trees

Wurm is looking sweet.

[Markus_Persson]

Ooh, thanks for the nice comments. =)

I guess I'll keep posting screenshots.

[aNt]

that lighting rocks! shit me i'm having to recode my lighting shader now... git!   - looking very sweet top
job dude...

[Orangy Tang]

Ooo, nice pics.

Incidentally, I recently had great quality results using a simplified form of horizon mapping for terrain lighting/shadowing. Might be worth looking into.

[Markus_Persson]

Checking out horizon maps has been on my todo list for ages.

Was it as hard to implement as I fear it will be?
Am I correct in thinking I can also use it to cull terrain?

[Orangy Tang]

Actually it was pretty easy to implement Finding the horizon values for any given point is pretty easy, then the resulting angles are stuffed into a texture that covers the whole terrain (at one texel per terrain tile resolution). Then a fragment shader compares this interpolated value with the current sun angle for the total light/shadow intensity.

The snag is that I'm using GLSL which makes the fragment bit dead easy to write. I'm not sure how you'd do it with older hardware.

You probably could use it to do some occulsion culling, but I've simplified the horizon values down to a single axis (basically the arc of the sun over the terrain). This reduces the memory use hugely but probably makes it unsuitable for culling.

Quick pic (which doesn't really show it off well, it looks better when you can see the hill shadows slowly extending as the sun sets):http://www.orangytang.net/Junk/23-09-04.png

[Hauk]

I know this question has probably already been asked but how do I increase the frame-rate? I'm running 800Mhz(Crap), nVidia 64MB, 256 RAM.

Very nice game and I never expected this much from Java. Very good work congragulations to all who worked on it  

Cheers,

Hauk

[Markus_Persson]

Turn off everything that can be turned off in the options, and set the rest to the lowest possible setting.

It'll look horrible, but you should get playable fps at least.

The most important settings for you are probably disabling bumpmapped terrain, and turning down trees and tile decorations to singles/none.