SSAO+FakeDR for Tribes 2
Let's face it, Tribes 2 is child's play for your modern machine. It would probably run on your phone.
What to do with all that excess processing power?
Well how about we apply 2011 graphical operations to a 2001 game?
This is using QindieGL to wrap T2's OpenGL to DX9 (the D3D of T2 is DX7 and rather assy). This allows it to be hooked by an ENBseries mod to add dynamic Bloom, Color Correction, and Ambient Occlusion.
This is a work in progress still, and there are issues with BSP rendered buildings and trees being ignored by the depth map, but it's still a hell of a trick. I've also done a lot more tweaking to keep the gamma in the same range as the original game, and you have to hotkey it off during main menus and loading screens. There is a noticeable performance hit on my old 8800s (like... 300+FPS to ~45FPS), but any modern card should have little trouble.
What to do with all that excess processing power?
Well how about we apply 2011 graphical operations to a 2001 game?
This is using QindieGL to wrap T2's OpenGL to DX9 (the D3D of T2 is DX7 and rather assy). This allows it to be hooked by an ENBseries mod to add dynamic Bloom, Color Correction, and Ambient Occlusion.
This is a work in progress still, and there are issues with BSP rendered buildings and trees being ignored by the depth map, but it's still a hell of a trick. I've also done a lot more tweaking to keep the gamma in the same range as the original game, and you have to hotkey it off during main menus and loading screens. There is a noticeable performance hit on my old 8800s (like... 300+FPS to ~45FPS), but any modern card should have little trouble.
Comments
What it lacks when it misses BSP objects (buildings and such in 'optimized' original maps) it definitely makes up for by working perfectly in Construction Mod.
Don't worry, I cleaned up my spam...
B
http://code.google.com/p/glintercept/
Directly calling OpenGL functions will prove fruitful in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing...
First screenshot:
What I happened to get at some point when trying to render a 3D triangle. A catastrophe.
Second screenshot:
The closest I had managed to get, where the triangle stuck to your face indefinitely (think, screencap one) until you walked into a building for which the triangle would stick at the door and render in front of everything until you walked back out.
Third screenshot:
Working direct injection of OpenGL commands to draw arbitrary junk on screen in TWO DIMENSIONS. As demonstrated in the other pictures it's much harder to achieve in three dimensions ...
Point is, you can possibly find a better way to do things through this with direct access to OpenGL.
To do things like shader effects (like SSAO, bloom, dynamic range compression emulation, etc.) is more complicated with GL Intercept, because T2 uses "legacy" OpenGL (1.x). The various matrix transformations are done in fixed pipeline, which would be challenging to reconcile with a new vertex shader (designed to do those transformations in the programmable pipeline).
In any case: doing a full graphical overhaul of T2 without source code is out of the scope of the TribesNext project. While it is possible to replace the rendering pipeline by swapping out bits of Tribes2.exe compiled code with pieces of the Torque Game Engine, doing so would be more work than it would be worth. You could apply global shaders (especially ones that work primarily on the fragment level) in the way Ranzear did, but, to get good results, you'll need to tag different objects with different shaders (and hope the game's scenegraph is arranged in a way that shader program context switches don't kill your performance). Easier to just write a new Tribes game from scratch, though, in my opinion.
Yes, it was just an idea as I remember having messed around with this in the past but this isn't exactly where my knowledge is as of now so I just figured I'd mention it.