Doom3world

So things are moving along at a faster pace these days, which is great news for everybody. Mapping is still seriously lagging behind which isn’t the best news, so lets get that out of the way. We have a grand total of zero people helping out. What makes it worse is that people don’t seem to know we are actively looking for people who have already made maps for other titles, so we can bring them over to OverDose with OD’s engine and features to create an even better looking version than before. So its not like you need to even do anything, as I can do that.

Right, lets move on to nicer news

Weapons are coming along great as you can see, and the pistol is heading towards being complete as we speak which is great news. I should have some gameplay videos up in the coming weeks btw to show you some of the weapons in action, so stay tuned for those. But another area we are working hard towards is more post processing effects and control, which is the reason for this update.

Colour Grading (Cross Processing)

I’ve had a lot of fun with this, I have to say. Colour Grading as its known to the gaming crowd, also known as Cross Processing, is a specific method used in film and photographic that involved developing the film negative in the wrong type of chemical, thus resulting in a different overall picture tone and colour. It’s used in many things, TV, Cinema, Photographs, you name it. It creates an amazing look and feel that the stock image didn’t contain. When it comes to post processing it works much the same way in that it allows the artist control over each Red Green and Blue channel separately. This isn’t to be confused with what we already had in place, which was colour tinting. Colour tinting tints the entire screen a colour. In other words, cross processing can do the following:



But would it work in games? The short answer… Yes. The long answer? HELL YES. Post Processing can change the entire feel of a location and create an atmosphere otherwise impossible to visualize with other methods. It can take a day light scene and make it look night, it can make an area covered in lava have a warm ambient tone. The limit of course is your imagination.



OverDose implements Cross Processing via simple 256x1 .tga gradient textures. The beauty of this is that it allows you to load a .acv Curve file in Photoshop and use that as your effect ingame. Its simple, its fast and its sexy as hell. I can’t wait to see what people come up with

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5ddiBAH95g

Update on the CMC Pistol, textured in-game with no post processing. Model/texture Ben “EZ Jamin” Dalling:

Don't tell me my bouncy buddy Electro is working on OverDose -- or am I confusing Benjamin Dalling with Benjamin Darling?

Two different people with very similar names/goals by the looks of his 'folio.

Wow, what are the odds. Wasn't sure so's I had to ask.

How are you doing color grading with only a 256x1 texture? If using a 2D texture, you need at least a 256x16 texture for proper range and precision. Also, when doing it on a single channel at a time you're basically doing the same thing as tinting. You need to use all three channels when using a lut.

The number has been kidnapped. Period

Care to expand on that, Sikkpin? Because as you can clearly see from both the final screenshots (Which are in realtime inside OD, as you can see from the video) and the Post Process Editor, this clearly works perfectly fine. As I said in my original post, you can load a Photoshop .acv Curve file, ANY, and use that to get your ingame colour (By applying it to a 256x1 gradient texture). The effect as you can see, is perfect, and EXACTLY the same as using the Curve editor inside Photoshop, hence how I got these LUT effects in the first place. Also the .acv and/or LUT texture applies to all three channels, not just one. The LUT texture REPLACES colours, it doesn't tint them, which is just colour modulation/multiplication. If it was tinting, I wouldn't be able to get some of the effects you see above, such as replacing every single black with a different colour, or hell even a negative image.

With a 256x16 or higher res texture you may be referring to floating point colour buffers, but to be honest I have more concern with you saying what we are doing is simply "tinting" when, lets face facts here, the images above show thats clearly not the case... So I'm a bit confused as to what you was on about there. Unless you are implying that the Photoshop Curve editor is flawed, which is the only way our ingame final results could be flawed as our ingame final visuals are identical to that editor.

Remember, just because X is different to Y in implementation, it doesn't meant either is wrong. We have full control over all three RGB channels separately on a single 256x1 LUT texture. Feel free to send me any Photoshop .acv curve file and I'll send a screenshot of it ingame with default, and with the created LUT file, to show the results. :p

I don't mean to bump, but, yeah... Bump? I wouldn't mind knowing your thoughts on this, just to see your ideas more than anything, as I know our way works but you never know maybe it could be improved.

I didn't mean to sound harsh or to say what you all are doing is wrong because it's not. I just saw the terms "color grading" and "256x1" and thought "how is that possible?", but you pointed out that you're just adjusting the curve. Again, how your doing this is not wrong, it's just limiting and it's not what I would consider "color grading" (even though terms like color grading, color correction, etc. are just umbrella terms) and it's not what they are talking about on that UDK page.

If you use a 256x16 (or a 16x16x16 3D texture if you're engine supports this), you can do any and all color adjustments that you can do in an image editor (curves, levels, color balance, brightness, contrast, saturation, etc.) with a single lookup (single if using a 3D texture, two lookups, lerping between them, if using a 2D texture). The shader code to do this with a 2D texture is very simple and requires one less lookup for much more flexibility and control.

Hi, I'm the programmer behind OverDose, gavavva pointed me to this thread.

Just wanted to say that, yes, for a start the term "color grading" is wrong in this case. I actually don't like the term at all for some reason, even when properly applied.
Anyway, our color correction shader supports the most standard features such as saturation, contrast and gamma adjustments (in a Photoshop "Levels" fashion), and tinting via ALUs, and cross-processing via these LUT textures created from PS curves. I'm well aware of the single lookup method with a 3D texture (and yes, our engine supports 3D textures although only procedurally generated ones are used ATM), but we found it simpler to work with this way. It's not the fastest because the color correction shader has quite a few ALU ops in contrast to a single texture access, but it's no that big a deal for us and, more importantly, allows designers to launch the built-in post-process effects editor while in the game and easily select a LUT texture for adjusting the curves and tweak each of the other parameters (contrast, saturation, etc) with the ability to see the changes instantly in the game (perhaps I should stop being lazy and rebuild/upload a 3D texture whenever necessary, but meh... :p)

I really like that. My only feed back is to take the hair out of the normalmap and highlight it more with specularity. I say this because at the moment his arms look like they have lots of little scratches on them

I really like the post process color effect you guys are doing. I use it in Unreal quite a lot.

Looks top so far! How many levels are you guys planning to make?

We have a few solid ideas, but level guys are something we are coming up short on sadly, and its the only real thing holding us back now.

To be honest i can't wait for release of Your awesome work guys, hope the editor and all the stuff is easy for guys used to idtech4 edititng, OverDose engine looks like a great thing to make machinmations!

It's very hard to find level designers for anything. Even paid level designers are very hard to find.

At Ubi we are constantly trying to find top teir level designers... with no luck.

Actually at this stage, we are looking for already released levels in other mods/games that people have done that we could convert into an OverDose level with our theme/graphics. Its far easier to port somebody elses work, as even I could do that, than it is to find somebody to make a totally brand new level. Even more so on what many people see as new tech. Until we get one level done, theres no chance of the beta coming out, sadly, even as a test level with basic MP.

I'm a terrible level designer and it sucks having so many original ideas that will likely never see the light of day because I can't do them...

Well, what are these solid ideas?

I'm working on a map atm (yes me, even) that’s set in a cove, where the CMC has to make their way along a beach area to the side of a grounded cargo ship... As in, a full size cargo ship. They breach in the side, fight up through the decks, and get to the main deck area where they need to destroy a nuclear device that’s being stationed there. It sounds really simple in theory, but the ship is made of mostly in-lined models as its all on a slightly rotated axis, there’s terrain to think about, the beach, choke points, sniper areas that could be over powered... Madness. That’s one level, called Dry Dock.

Other areas range in style, size, shape etc. We have a large open, heavily fogged area set in a snowy mountainous location where MDR battle it up the side of a mountain to reach a re-conditioned CMC radar station at the top, using cave systems and the like. We have a level planned set entirely on an off-shore oilrig that’s all decimated that the CMC must fight their way up to the middle and sabotage the pumping system that’s being used to bring up oil for the MDR, which once attacked will start a countdown where the CMC need to reach the top for extraction before the whole place goes up. There are others, including a remake of Fuel Dump in our own style from W:ET and even maps made just for DM/TDM (Objective maps are made for DM/TDM by using game specific brushwork and clipping etc to close off locations so that the maps play differently in different modes).

The problem is, of course, that people think "oh shit, it’s OverDose, I’ve never heard of it, that must be hard to map for?" but people don't see they can just use the Doom 3 and/or Quake 4 editors to map for it, including all variants like Dark Rad. We ARE working on ODRad but that’s just for the people who A) want soft shadows rather than stencil and B) can't be bothered to copy the ready made material that works with D3/Q4 from the OD extras folder. Oh and we even have hundreds of textures, map models etc ready made, and can do stuff on request…

So yeah, tricky dicky indeed...

Post some gameplay vids.