*posts screenshots of gameplay*
;-)
Anyways, a graphics technique has recently caught my eye, I saw the IOTD here, and I remember reading about it in the Crytek paper...'Screen Space Ambient Occlusion' [ SSAO ]. It is an interesting screen-space algorithm that in theory generates ambient occlusion data based off the depth [ and maybe the normals ] of the scene, the Crytek paper is frustratingly sparce on information...so I relied on the description in the IOTD and there was another source out there [ just google for SSAO ], which has some good info.
I decided to spend a few hours playing around with it, to see what it could get me. I was disapointed with my results...constant banding issues, bleeding of shadowing off objects, and depth value issues I'm too busy to spend hours working on.
Though I did stumble across the beginnings of a toon-shading algorithm of some kind...actually it's basically just edge detection with some fudged ambient occlusion, but still...I thought it looks interesting and could maybe give me a fresh visual direction to go in.
Just food for thought...one of the 100 things I'm juggling right now...I'm not interested [ or allowed? ] to post day to day progress on the game anymore...so I'm just going to post things like this every so often.
Anyways...down to the screenshots.
First off...here are 2 new weapons for the game [ remember there are 30 total ].
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/mp5k.jpg)
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/c4.jpg)
Now down to the SSAO -
Here is a screengrab from the Crytek paper. How SSAO is supposed to look.
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/Crysis_SSAO.jpg)
My two failed attempts...after an hour or so...
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_3.jpg)
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_4.jpg)
Now the fun stuff...I stumbled accross this...[Ignore the frame-rates...I'm rendering all the other aspects of the scene as well as the SSAO, they're just not visible.] Plus my new monitor @ 2560x1600 kinda slows windowed apps down with 20 other things running in the background on my measly 8800GTS.
Final composite...on a car.
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_14.jpg)
Raw output of the early toon/hand drawn look...
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_7.jpg)
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_8.jpg)
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_9.jpg)
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_10.jpg)
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_11.jpg)
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_12.jpg)
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_13.jpg)
Inputs into the algorithm...
Depth
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_1.jpg)
Normals
![](http://www.radioactive-software.com/urbanempires/October11/SSAO_2.jpg)
That is all.
- Danny
eh... anyway... could always have SSAO as a bonus feature for paying customers post-release.
Jack