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DarkBASIC Professional Discussion / Advanced Lighting not working anymore

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Cescano
9
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Joined: 4th Sep 2014
Location: Italy
Posted: 9th Sep 2015 17:27
Today I have tried to open the terrain project of the Evolved's Advanced Lighting, but nothing seems to load properly, I only see a black screen with the terrain editing tool thing, look this screenshot.

What could it be the problem? I am looking into this project to see if I can use some effects for my game.

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Ortu
DBPro Master
16
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Joined: 21st Nov 2007
Location: Austin, TX
Posted: 9th Sep 2015 21:48 Edited at: 9th Sep 2015 21:48
has it ever worked for you?

have you made any recent system changes?

did you change versions of AL?

I haven't tried the editing demo since going to windows 10 but AL and the AL terrain in general is still working on my machine.

Kuper
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Playing: Planescape:Torment
Posted: 10th Sep 2015 00:26
Try to download new AL project from Evolved's site and compile it

Cescano
9
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Location: Italy
Posted: 10th Sep 2015 05:58
Yes is what I did, the latest version does not work anymore, some months ago it was working
Cescano
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Location: Italy
Posted: 5th Oct 2015 04:33
Anyone has a clue on what I can't run advanced lighting?
Chris Tate
DBPro Master
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Joined: 29th Aug 2008
Location: London, England
Posted: 5th Oct 2015 13:21
The latest build of all the demo's including his Terrain demo works fine here. It takes a moment to load though; black screen for about 10 seconds. My system specs are below average (if get 70FPS).
James H
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Joined: 21st Apr 2007
Location: St Helens
Posted: 5th Oct 2015 13:46
I get same result and its been similar for every release he has provided since I first came across it a long time ago, for some systems there is a problem with various resolutions producing an all black screen(sometimes with white text but nothing else) and in this last version its the same, only the brush tool is visible on a black terrain along with everything else in the scene being black. If you sift through his forums you should come across comments in various posts detailing similar issues, for example take a look at Samkm's post here http://www.evolved-software.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=7&start=20. I did make a comment myself but after waiting almost a week I changed it to something more appropriate as the issue already highlighted appeared to not be a priority or indeed even worthy of a response towards the end of that thread.

Just change

to


This should work, change to a higher res if you wish to see which ones work for you but know that whatever you choose to use should be offered as changeable to your end user in case they have the same problem.
Cescano
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Joined: 4th Sep 2014
Location: Italy
Posted: 5th Oct 2015 18:08
Thank you very much! that fixed the problem!

Do you have any suggestions on how to get higher fps without lowering too much the quality? Or how can I tweak the graphic quality with variables so that even the end user could select higher or lower quality?
James H
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Location: St Helens
Posted: 5th Oct 2015 20:33
Quote: " how can I tweak the graphic quality with variables so that even the end user could select higher or lower quality?"

This is relatively easy to do, first you need to identify from the functions in his set up code for each aspect that relates to tweakable settings suitable for end user modification. Once thats done its a simple case of creating a menu prior to advanced lighting code; with editable variables that you then pass to the setup functions afterwards. Alternatively you could just create a .ini file the end user can change that you then read the variables from prior to advanced lighting code and once again are fed to the functions they need to be used in. Simple example of identifying tweakables - look at the very obvious function PostProcessing_SetUp - the entries are all flag values which in your settings menu could be listed with a checkbox to enable or disable them, there are a number of functions you need to go through. I could point them all out to you but then you wouldn't learn much from me doing that.
Quote: "Do you have any suggestions on how to get higher fps without lowering too much the quality?"

Sure don't use it at all! Of course I am jesting, but with advanced lighting it really does hit performance a lot, always has. I had started looking at what costs so much of the frames loop time some time ago but got side tracked. I lost the majority of my library of smaller projects that I built up over about 10 years in dbp a while back so I was making a medialess performance timer set of bars for advanced lighting and ended up doing a few more medialess gui projects, which then led onto other projects I had restarted, and now its been a while since I looked at advanced lighting in any depth. If I get time this week I will revisit and post back IF I find anything note worthy, based on working with previous versions you do tend to have to sacrifice quality and effects to get some extra fps.
With advanced lighting, if your serious about using it, you really need to get very familiar with the code, it is not an easy thing to understand but once you get into it you can find your way around with relative ease without knowing much about shaders at all, but you do have your work cut out for you. If you don't already use it I would advise looking at the Indigo IDE for DBP, on the WIP board I think, it is free and roughly about a billion times better than the shipped IDE's. It certainly has helped me get into the advanced lighting projects significantly, I have tried going back to the shipped IDE's at one point as the expiry date for Indigo had passed and it took a day or so for an updated version to be put up - I really hated every moment I spent trying to use the older IDE's for this project.
Cescano
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Joined: 4th Sep 2014
Location: Italy
Posted: 7th Oct 2015 02:14
Seems like everything I change doesn't effect anything, I have tried all the setup flags but nothing changes, somehow neither the resolution of the screen change even if I change it in the code, very weird
Cescano
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Joined: 4th Sep 2014
Location: Italy
Posted: 7th Oct 2015 03:31
Nevermind it was a bug in the editor. By the way why the AL works only on 800x600 and 1024x768, if I try 1280x720 or 1280x768 or 1366x768 I get the black screen problem.

I managed to change a bit the quality changing the values on the PostProcessing_SetUp() function, are there some othere variables I can tweak such as shadow quality?

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