Ahh - you may well be right - I do apologise.
I took Sphax's statement to be a totally final thing.
Well fingers crossed, we'll see what happens. It's not a bad thing anyway - I was just a bit irked at maybe having to change the effect on nearly all my objects.
Not necessarily. I've done some digging into this, and the only way to do it appears to be to render everything that doesn't need access to the background into one buffer, make a complete copy of that buffer, then render objects that need access to the background, giving them the copy to read from.Originally Posted by Jamie
Essentially, you can't read and write to the same buffer at once.
well that sounds somewhat complicated but I certainly hope it gets done.
Although Additive and Subtract are OK substitutes, XOR is really useful and I can't see how to replace it.
Most of these things we've had since the 1994 Games Factory. It would be really irritating if we had to do without them now.
TGF had ink effects?!?!
Yes, but I don't think it had XOR.
I think it had, but you couldn't change the transparency/inkfx at runtime, afaik.
anyway, btt
I personally think that replacing ink effects with pixel shaders is a way of the future and a big "Finally" for me. If this means dealing with dropping a few nasty low quality ones then so be it, pay someone to remake it as a Pixel Shader I guess.
XOR, OR and AND are very difficult to do as pixel shaders because the relied on colour being "8-bit integer per channel", and in pixel shaders it's floating point. At least in the shader anyway, it'll normally be stored as integers again afterwards.
That and the same issue mentioned above that they need to read from where they're writing to, which isn't allowed.
If you say what you were using them for, there could be an alternative. e.g. replacing the use of "AND" for torchlight by a multiply or mask shader.
If you don't mind me asking though, what exactly is stopping MMF2 from reading pixels behind other objects. I mean considering that all objects are being handled now as polygons, I'm not seeing where the difficulty is coming in.
The only assumption I can come up with, and I'm sure is wrong is.
When you put two polygons on the same exact level, they cause a redraw flicker as the game tries to decide which object should be above the other one. So if Yves has some sort of system set up where objects above other objects, some how make the objects behind it, invisible, then I can see where reading their invisible pixel colors might pose difficulty. Other then that though, I really just don't get it.
Please don't replace the standard ink effects with pixel shaders... My computer doesn't support any kind of shaders.
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