UT S3TC OpenGL

[Auric]

http://d1o72.telia.com/~u84406792/

Hey, this might ease the pain for Savage users who are thinking about giving it up for something with a bit more pep.

 

[CyberSax]

Hey, this might ease the pain for Savage users who are thinking about giving it up for something with a bit more pep.

Pardon my bluntness, but why in the hell would anyone with a Savage card want to play GLUnreal?

 

[RoboTECH]

????????

uh, I believe he is saying that UT can now be played under OpenGL using the S3TC compressed textures

 

[BenSkywalker]

SWEET!!!

DLing all the required files now, I'll throw up some screenies as soon as I can(will probably take about an hour or so, I'm on dial up). If a thread isn't started up in GH by then, I'll start one up giving proper links to this thread and props to Auric for providing the linkage(where did you find this??).

For anyone reading this that may be confused, click on the link, it enables S3TC textures to be used on non S3 boards. I hope this patch works properly

Thanks Auric!!

 

[RoboTECH]

yeah dude, a buddy of mine is working on improving the code so that it works even better.


he has been using the patch from Loki in Linux, and he sent me screenshots on his GTS

<jaw drops>

fuggin' gorgeous.....

plays pretty well too, from what he says.

 

[dawks]

Go Ben GO! I love you man!

 

[BenSkywalker]

Edit:For those that still haven't clicked the link, this is for WINDOWS, not the Linux patch we all knew about

It's going to take me a bit longer to get up screenies then I thought(my site host is having issues at the moment), but this DOES work, and it's sweetb

Performance as of now, just playing through some quick DMs is quite a bit faster then running D3D without compressed textures.

Some glitches though- On some boards, all textures fail to load, as in they don't all load, not none of them load. Don't know why, but there are missing textures here and there on some levels, though some are all there. If you install the modified .dll file without adding the portions to your Unreal.ini file you will have serious gamma issues, way overbrite on a GeForce so I imagine other boards would be quite a bit worse. After adding the lines my GF returned to its' normal dark self

As of yet I only have tested on the 4.02 patch, I'm going to DL 4.25/4.28, whichever I find first, and see how it works with that patch. I'll post back and will have screenshots up as soon as my site server is back up to speed

 

[BenSkywalker]

Well, the 4.28 patched version is out of the question, no luck at all no matter what I try.

4.02, OTOH, is now working flawlessly. The missing texture problem is gone(it was my own dumb fault, I should pay a bit more attention), and I'm waiting right now for the screenies to finish uploading....





Still wating....





Man, I used JPEGs and made sure they were nice small files so this wouldn't take so long....



:|


OK, click here for some screenies. Only four shots up right now, two different comparisons. Had several issues playing around with things(required several reinstalls of UT to downgrade versions back and forth), but I'll try to get up some more screenshots a bit later.

 

[sandorski]

As a Viper2 user using Metal I say, welcome to the world of awesome UT graphics!

Savage4 and Viper2 users already have this capability through the Metal API.

 

[BlvdKing]

Is there a link to the 4.28 patch? Since I have already patch Unreal on my machine to 4.28, do I need to reinstall UT and run the 4.02 patch again, or can I just run the 4.02 patch over the 4.28 patched game?

Thanks!

 

[BenSkywalker]

BlvdKing-

I had no luck trying to install the 4.02 over the 4.28, I needed to uninstall and reinstall the game(more then once due to various attempts to try and get it to work). You can give it a shot, just backup your game saves and stats before you uninstall or you may end up losing them all(doh! ).

The 4.28 patch that enables S3TC under OpenGL is for Linux only(right now anyway) and I don't know of any liks for that off hand(anyone else?).

 

[RoboTECH]

nice screenies dude

a friend of mine is working on a 4.28 patch now

 

[Plester]

bump (wanna know if RoboTECH's bud gets the 4.28 patch working)

 

[CyberSax]

About the only times that I had any fun on my Savage 4 is when I was playing UT. Those screenshots taken look very close to what I used to get. It's surprising too, because GLUnreal used to look damn ugly on my RIVA TNT (and slow too, but D3D Unreal was pretty decent); I see they've improved on that too

 

[dawks]

Wow Ben, those are some awsome screens!!
Are those on a TNT based card? Geforce? Is there any problems like in Quake3, IE. The Sky?

 

[BenSkywalker]

DaZ-

GeForce DDR(Herc) running the Det3 6.18 drivers.

No artifacts that I have seen such as those in Quake3, the sky has remained perfect whenever I have seen it(the sky isn't visible nearly as much as in Q3). I have seen one post(over at B3D) that states that the GF screens are blockier then the reference rasterizer, but I have been looking and have yet to noticce anything.

No dithering or banding that I have seen at all, it appears that UT doesn't use compression on lightmaps(which Q3 shouldn't, but does), and that appears to eliminate the problem.

Also, I've been playing through the whole game, and after setting everything up properly, have yet to see any glitches in 32bit though 16bit has some Z-Buffer problems, 32bit doesn't seem to effect performance at all up to 1024x768, and only slightly at 1280x960.

One bug with this patch that is somewhat annoying, whenever I switch color depth, the game crashes(make sure to keep us posted RoboTECH).

I'll try and get some more screenshots up from other levels, try and find a bench that works on 4.02 with this patch, and look around to see what kind of luck Radeon and V5 owners are having.

 

[jpprod]

Dang, for the first time in my life I wish I had the full version of UT

Ben, I recall you asked whether UT supports detail textures in OpenGL renderer. In my experience with Unreal (version 2.24 &quot;final&quot; OpenGL renderer and older ones) and Unreal Tournament demo (unofficel OpenGL renderer), detail texture support is currently broken. They were there in the second revision of OpenGL for Unreal, which was slow as hell. Support was gone in 2.24, which worked quite well, and was the last revision released. I've never been able to get detail textures working on UT demo with OpenGL, so I guess the OpenGL renderer is in fact the same as in Unreal 2.24.

But onto running S3TC... With color textures at that high resolution, who needs the close-up detail ones

BTW, about S3TC and Quake III, I don't believe it uses S3TC'd lightmaps: updating them when dynamic lighting is enabled would be too computationally intensive. Worst S3TC issue in Q3 is the sky, and I believe that's because textures like the sky, ones w/ alpha channel data, are the hardest ones to compress accurately.

And then a couple sentences worth of rant... Once again it is proven that Tim Sweeney is businessman first and engine programmer second - if the horrible OpenGL renderer of UT can be patched to support S3TC by gamers with programming skills, there's no technical reason why UT's marginally better D3D renderer couldn't be patched to utilize graphics card DXTC capabilities enabling high-resolution texture support. S3 must've paid Sweeney a hefty sum of money. If it was only for UT I wouldn't give a damn, but UT engine will be used in several promising titles. Epic's politics are actually starting to hamper wide-term utilization of what I consider one of the most important features of modern graphics accelerators: texture compression.

 

[dawks]

Actually there was a petition started a while back in which people wanted Epic to add DXTC to UT. Tim Sweeney wrote a detailed response as to why he cant do it. Not beacuse he doesnt know how, but becuase of the way the engine currently handles textures. If he did want to add DXTC, it would require a huge rewrite of the D3D engine. He says its too late. Its just not possible.

I'll see if I can find the URL of the story.. It was at Gamespy or 3D Action Planet

 

[jpprod]

DaZ: I know Sweeney says something in the lines of the D3D renderer having enough texture problems as it is and not wanting to implement for that reason, but I say these are just excuses.

You can call me anything you like , but I believe Epic/Sweeney signed some sort of contract with S3 which limited the high-detail textures for MeTal API and brought Epic lots of dough. I feel the recent &quot;amateur implementation&quot; of S3TC via Unreal's OpenGL is proof of this rather wild theory.

 

[CyberSax]

S3 must've paid Sweeney a hefty sum of money. If it was only for UT I wouldn't give a damn, but UT engine will be used in several promising titles. Epic's politics are actually starting to hamper wide-term utilization of what I consider one of the most important features of modern graphics accelerators: texture compression.

I don't think this is true at all, because S3 never had very much money to begin with. However, I do know for a fact that 3dfx gave considerable sums of money to Epic Games, in exchange for their delaying the general release of UT, and releasing the Glide version first for Voodoo 3000 owners, or something like that. I wouldn't be surprised if they paid Tim Sweeney off to purposely cripple D3D and OpenGL performance. It took Epic waaaaaay too long (well over a year) to get D3D and GL Unreal to be decent.

 

[RoboTECH]

the problem is that Sweeney obviously isn't a good OpenGL programmer (check UT's implementation of OGL if you doubt me)

Loki hacked UT so that you can use the 2nd CD's textures using S3Tc under OGL in Linux.

I know of someone who is doing that right now for Windows.

Let's hope it works out.

 

[dawks]

DirectX is nothing to OpenGl.

 

[BenSkywalker]

RoboTECH-

&quot;I know of someone who is doing that right now for Windows.

Let's hope it works out.&quot;

I'm running Windows, and the patch linked above is working quite nice for me. Have you given it a shot yet? It works fine with the 6.26s as well as the 6.18s(I know you had a lot of problems with those).

Jukka- Short on time now, but I do have a bit to say about your posts, but quickly have you heard that id may be fixing the compression problems in Q3 in the next point release?

 

[RoboTECH]

naw, nt4 didn't want to play nice with my other OS's, and in the process, I lost a rather important partition.

so I gotta reinstall most of my stuff. I don't even have UT or Q3 installed right now.

blah.

 

[jpprod]

have you heard that id may be fixing the compression problems in Q3 in the next point release?

Interesting, I wonder what kind of fix are they planning to implement. It could be simply that textures with alpha (sky, explosions) aren't compressed at all, or an option of Quake3 itself pre-compressing all textures and storing them for later usage. I hope it's the latter one, that would also boost S3TC/level load times