Shaders

[Ark]

Dear commanders forgive my ignorance about shaders but I have some questions.

What is the difference between off, simple and full shader effects?

Does a change in this setting applies instantly or do I have to restart oolite? Switching between those setting does not seem to change anything (except I cannot see the ships in the demo screen)

Is this setting affecting the native ships of oolite somehow because I cannot see any difference?

Does my hardware support shaders (GFORCE 7600GT)

Thank you for your answers and again forgive my ignorance

[Griff]

Hi Ark
I had a quick look at your graphics card spec and it looks like it supports openGl 2.0 which i think is the version of openGl Oolite uses for it's shader effect so you should be good to go!

I'm not sure what the differences are between full and limited shader support, in the release notes for oolite 1.70 Ahruman writes

Added default shader, used for all ships in full-shader mode and for materials with smoothing or options in simple-shader mode. Added material options for illumination mapping, glow mapping and specular mapping, currently only implemented with shaders. Made all ships slightly shiny by default.

These shader effects Ahruman has included on the built in ships are quite subtle though, I've been mucking about with ahrumans example shaders and have come up with a few test oxp's, the shader effects in them aren't that subtle so you should easily be able to tell if they are on or not.
If you have a look in pagroove's "standard station textures" thread in the expansion pack subforum, there's a version of the coriolis station in there with some specularity & glow map shaders on it, it looks like this in game:-


You can check if your shaders are working quite quickly with this oxp as the lights on the stations hull should appear very bright even on the shadowed parts of the station.
The Spacebar in LittleBears Random Hits oxp uses similar shaders to provide various illuminated lights on it's hull so if you have that oxp installed, find a spacebar and have a look to see if it's dotted with lights.

[Ark]

Thanks Griff

Now I can see the difference.

It seems that changing the shader setting on the fly does nothing. You have to restart oolite in order the changes to apply.

By the way excellent work on the coriolis station.

[JensAyton]

Changes to shader settings apply to new entities, but not existing ones. This isn’t the most intuitive thing in the world, I confess. The only realistic alternative is for the change to take effect on restart.

The difference between “Off” and other settings is that no shaders are used in the off setting. :-) The difference between “simple” and “full” is twofold. First, in “simple” mode, shaders are not used for flat (non-smooth) surfaces on ships with no shaders or effect maps. Second, shader authors can choose to avoid more complex calculations in simple mode (by using the “#ifdef OO_REDUCED_COMPLEXITY” and “#ifndef OO_REDUCED_COMPLEXITY” directives).

“Simple” mode will generally improve performance on first-generation shader-capable graphics chips. On modern ones, “Full” mode will typically provide better performance.

The shader level setting in 1.70 is only available if shader support is available.