The Official Supermodel Work-in-Progress Thread

[Bart]

I made a slight change to the lighting model today. There are still lots of unknowns concerning how various lighting components interact with the polygon color, and specular lighting is still un-emulated, but I think these most recent changes are along the right track and I wanted to see what everyone else thinks. The attached zip file contains new fragment (F.glsl) and vertex (V.glsl) shaders for curious folks to test out. To use them, extract them to your Supermodel directory and add '-frag-shader=F.glsl -vert-shader=V.glsl' to your command line (or set FragmentShader="F.glsl" and VertexShader="V.glsl" in Supermodel.ini).

For the most part, you won't notice the difference, it's quite subtle. There is a profound effect on the expert course in Daytona 2. I'm afraid it might make the road surface too bright. Can anyone who has recently played the real thing confirm? It does fix the spotlight during the countdown (see attached screen shot) and static shadows on the ground are much more visible. Drive over to the shipyard area and look for the shadows being cast on the track surface there to see what I mean.

[venomv1986]

You just keep amaze us,i can see the difference already
Keep it up.



With shaders on the left!!!!!!


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

definitely made the roads brighter.
And in virtua fighter 3 all character models are very bright.



With shaders on the right

Uploaded with ImageShack.us


But it did fix the specular effect in the beginning!!!

[bearmon2010]

Amazing! Good work! The Lost World Special, anyone ?

[Cyberzinho Punk]

Cool!!!!

[Bart]

You justy keep amaze us i can see the difference already
Keep it up

Haha, thanks, but there's nothing amazing about this. I actually just removed a line that was clamping the light intensity to 1.0. The combined diffuse+ambient light intensity is now unbounded (much like the default lighting models on OpenGL and Direct3D) and in the end, it is the pixels that will saturate if the light is too strong. Before, the pixels could be no brighter than they were in the texture map itself. Lighting could only dim them further. You can see the saturation occurring on the Dodge Viper in Scud Race. Swaths of it will turn white from the brightness. The more I look at it, the more I think it may actually be the correct behavior.

I am a bit concerned about the road surface in Daytona USA 2's expert course and Scud Race's day-time beginner course being too bright. Some of the buildings seem that way as well. In at least a few small cases, I think lighting is supposed to be disabled on some of the very bright polygons but I think that the behavior now is generally correct and I will commit it to SVN for the next release. Lighting in Spikeout seems to look nicer to me with these new tweaks.

[XNIF]

Do you compare to a real arcade machine when you make descissions like you do when you make colours brighter?

[LsrgcBath]

First post in the forum

xD

Very good!

Tested here and now I can say that the appearance of the surface of the tracks appears to be consistent with what we have in the Model 3 version.

Particularly i felt a little dark, especially on the beginner track at Daytona USA 2 and beginner day in Scud Race.

I adjusted a calibration profile on my catalyst control center, and on my monitor, only to let the brightness of the surface more consistent with the palette view in arcade.

Even the beginner track day in Scud Race at the end of the last corner, just after the exit of the dolphin tunnel, the lighting changes, almost like an HDR effect, becoming darker, almost simulating the effect of adjusting the retina. I found this particularly interesting. o_O

In respect of measuring brightness and color, you have to take into account when making comparisons with the arcade counterpart, if the images are offscreen or are direct feed from the source, in this case, the Model 3 framebuffer.

Do not know if can help you, since almost all images of the Model 3 games we found, are of poor quality, scanned from magazines, many seem to be offscreens.

In this link, an collection of photos of daytona usa 2 found and collected by the creator of this site.

http://phantomfullforce.blogspot.com/20 ... chive.html

Link with references:

http://s62.photobucket.com/albums/h116/ ... 20USA%202/

I hope this could help a little.

And speaking as a graphic designer who is insanely focused on visual acuity and IQ, I can honestly say, we are now closer to the visual fidelity seen in the arcade, with much better colors.

^^

forgive my poor English

cheers

[Bart]

Do you compare to a real arcade machine when you make descissions like you do when you make colours brighter?

I don't have access to a real arcade machine but Abelardo, who posts here from time to time, does and I usually run these big changes by him. He's sent me a lot of videos and screen captures that have been immensely helpful. I worked out the spotlight effect largely by looking at frame grabs from his video and taking measurements from them. Some changes are obviously correct/incorrect and I don't really need to verify them. Still others can be verified by looking at some of the Youtube videos of real machines out there (although due to the poor capture quality, there's only so much they can do to help).

[Bart]

First post in the forum
Tested here and now I can say that the appearance of the surface of the tracks appears to be consistent with what we have in the Model 3 version.

Great!

Particularly i felt a little dark, especially on the beginner track at Daytona USA 2 and beginner day in Scud Race.

It's dark with the new shaders or without?

Even the beginner track day in Scud Race at the end of the last corner, just after the exit of the dolphin tunnel, the lighting changes, almost like an HDR effect, becoming darker, almost simulating the effect of adjusting the retina. I found this particularly interesting. o_O

The game appears to do that on purpose by playing with the light intensity. Another example is exiting the cavern on the medium course. White fog is used to simulate the same effect.

[LsrgcBath]

Particularly i felt a little dark, especially on the beginner track at Daytona USA 2 and beginner day in Scud Race.

It's dark with the new shaders or without?

I expressed myself wrong, my English is a mess, sorry dude.


lol

I meant:

it´s dark with the default shaders of version 0.2a.

lighter and brighter with the new shaders,


I have a question Bart, it´ss about the textures. Even though some games still have these known problems of texture, in the case of Daytona, and particularly in the case of Scud Race ... the textures are working properly, or needs more work in this regard?

something as, if they still were not in a high definition, or bilinear filter not working properly ...

I say this because I still have the impression that some textures, especially in Scud Race asphalt, seem to be a little too much blurry, as if were not in high definition, or bilinear filter not working properly ... I don´t know if you understand what I mean, as if they were not properly decompressed, something like that, maybe

Here an shot



some links

http://www.sega-mag.com/images-Scud+Rac ... 1423-2.htm
http://www.shinforce.com/arcade/reviews/SuperGT.htm

by the way, tried new drivers from AMD today, and OpenGL still a mess, texture errors and all kind of glitchs.. and apparently no hope in have this fixed, so early.

At least the frame rate is good.

lol