Call of Duty 2

[dull oar]

Like outputpvs

[sweet cloak]

Let's take a look a the family tree

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Quake_-_family_tree.svg

I highly doubt it since they're so many branches apart

[dull oar]

But the pvs method is the same as John carmacs which both cod and source use

"Source both use the Binary Space Partition model, based on John Carmack's implementation in Quake. "

[sweet cloak]

I'd have to take a look closer look at it and see if there's any overlap in implentation.

[dull oar]

Not knowing anything about anything but there has to be a bit that works out what leaf your standing in. That's the bit you wanna break, were in all leafs Mr game engine

Rather than removing leafs be in them all and leave leafs alone

Leaf

Them alone

Sorry

[sweet cloak]

Hm. Lemme make a flow chart to what I think the rendering flow is like and then maybe that'll get us on the same page

Or even bring up new plans of attacks

https://www.slideshare.net/JasonCalvert9/quake3bsprendering Slide 22

That's the stuff I was looking for

This is what happens when you never take a data structures class. I have no idea what I was looking for

[dull oar]

Oh snap. So we're changing a 0 to a 1

Can you do that?

[sweet cloak]

Maybe

[dull oar]

I'll take it!

[sweet cloak]

I gotta go find how it was implemented

[sweet cloak]

I wonder if r_skipPvs was left in the retail build..

[sweet cloak]

Could not find that implementation from my search

Hmmm

Wait I think I found it?

if ( (dword_1896FF8 - 1) >> 1 < 0 )
                      {
                        v79 = dword_1896FFC;
                      }
                      else
                      {
                        v79 = dword_1896FFC;
                        v77 = (float *)(dword_1896FFC + 8 * ((dword_1896FF8 - 1) >> 1));
                        if ( v65 < v77[1] )
                        {
                          v101 = (dword_1896FF8 - 1) >> 1;
                          for ( ii = dword_1896FF8; ; ii = v102 )
                          {
                            v71 = *((_DWORD *)v77 + 1);
                            *(float *)(v79 + 8 * ii) = *v77;
                            *(_DWORD *)(v79 + 8 * ii + 4) = v71;
                            if ( (v101 - 1) >> 1 < 0 )
                              break;
                            v79 = dword_1896FFC;
                            v77 = (float *)(dword_1896FFC + 8 * ((v101 - 1) >> 1));
                            if ( v65 >= v77[1] )
                              goto LABEL_143;
                            v102 = v101;
                            v101 = (v101 - 1) >> 1;
                          }
                          v79 = dword_1896FFC;
                        }
                      }
LABEL_143:
                      v72 = 8 * v101;
                      *(_DWORD *)(v79 + v72) = v27;
                      *(float *)(v72 + dword_1896FFC + 4) = v65;
                      ++dword_1896FF8;
                      result = v82;
LABEL_32:
                      ++v25;
                      v76 += 68;
                      if ( v25 >= *(_DWORD *)(result + 32) )
                        break;
                      continue;
                    }

It’s not identical to the quake3 render, but it is a bitwise operation.

And it’s in decent context.

[dull oar]

Ok so skip pvs renders nothing at all.

[dull oar]

r_skippvs 1

https://tenor.com/view/billy-madison-comedy-chris-farley-adam-sandly-hey-hey-gif-3417704

r_skippvs -1

[sweet cloak]

So it skips the whole Pvs system, thus rendering nothing.

I was thinking during the presentation yesterday, it might be better to just light the scene via emissive and thus not need stable hashes for floors and walls.

[dull oar]

I'm an environment artist, I need to be able to swap everything for what I plan to do.

And you don't have a sun so you need something stable to stick it to

[sweet cloak]

True

I’ll just keep chipping away slowly at it

[dull oar]

Thanks man, I appreciate it

[sweet cloak]

At least unlike the sims, this already has a proven solution

[slate plank]

How much of a burden/blocker is the issue with the background effects showing up on top, unless rtx.skipDrawCallsPostRTXInjection = True is set is for COD2 modding?

[sweet cloak]

Can you show an example? I’m not sure what you’re talking about.

[slate plank]

It's the issue filed here: https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix/issues/150

[dull oar]

I found a way to do that properly. turns out r_drawsun "1" was the issue, swap that for a 0 and decals are fine

I went through each of the 1000 commands one at a time...:P

[sweet cloak]

I have yet to run into that issue tbh

[dull oar]

want me to close this bug @slate plank ?

your using my config aint you adam?

oh i cant close it, but i can comment

[slate plank]

That doesn't fix the issue with background particle effects and other objects appearing on top. Can you share your config where the override is no longer necessary to confirm it's not an issue in COD2 anymore?

[dull oar]

here you go 🙂

[slate plank]

I also believe you previously mentioned that you were unable to do replacement for a sky, which I think this issue could contribute to that. Is that still the case?

Does that config apply to singleplayer, I have been unable to run mp.

[dull oar]

oh for multiplayer to work just plug a pair of headphones into your recorder input on the back of your pc

its looking for a microphone and got stuck

then hangs on black for 1 minute 😛

then its fine

[slate plank]

No, I already tried the workarounds.

[dull oar]

oh nevermind then, single player 🙂

my latest rtx config 🙂

for the sky I cant find the texture in the texture list 😦

I've found the mesh in omni and it has no material

sky_mesh hash

is the name of the instance of the sky but searching the hash gets you the mesh

[slate plank]

Thanks, that config doesn't suffer from the issue. We still want to improve this, but it's good to know it's not a blocker. If you can comment on the issue with your config to unblock any other people seeing the post that'd be helpful.

[dull oar]

no problemo 🙂

commented and uploaded.

[slate plank]

On another note, I see you are not tagging any terrain textures. Does the decal system work good enough for you in this game and/or are there any issues with the terrain system getting in the way? Note, there are some tradeoffs. Decal System will sample the textures at their source asset resolution and handles arbitrary directions, while the terrain system uses actual in-game blending modes as set by the game. Decal System only approximates the intended blending operations.

[dull oar]

i do get issues with decals overlapping and cutting into each other. if you go ingame and load up the level "spdevmap duhoc_assault" you can see the beach after the first cutscene has a lot of issues

swapping to terrain changes its colour and as the cliffs also use the terrain system the textures go all stretched down the cliff

[slate plank]

Yes vertically dominant slopes will suffer. You can bump the resolution of the system to counter that, but that can go only so far depending on the world span of the terrain in the game and how much resolution you need for such steep slopes.

[dull oar]

using dynamic decals on the beach causes this but my carentan level its perfect

[slate plank]

i do get issues with decals overlapping and cutting into each other
I am aware of that and hopefully will have an update for you soon. For future reference, it's best to file it on github as an issue with an rtx.conf and repro steps. Mark does a good job of keeping up with discord, but we can easily miss any posts on here, plus it's easier to track issues on github than here.

[dull oar]

will do mate

is that screen shot good enough for you?

while we're talking decals would love an options to set draw order

marking the same terrain textures as terrain from the beach it rasterizes

[slate plank]

Yes sorry I misunderstood your post. Yes I meant the aliasing decal issue that I have been looking into. The intersecting decals is probably a separate issue.

How does the beach look in non-RT mode?

[dull oar]

to do that just mark this white texture as ui

[slate plank]

OK thanks I will file an internal ticket for it.

[dull oar]

would you like me to set up a bug for the terrain dynamic decals changing the way they blend from this image?

i got this one as well. set it to dynamic decal and your fine. set it to decal or offset decal and you get the second image

i've been playing with decals for the last week. I got issues all lined up and you asked lol

[slate plank]

Yes if you can file it on github that would be helpful.

[dull oar]

okey pokey on it 🙂

[dull oar]

jesus using portal prelude rtx files on cod2 i'm getting over 100fps on quality with dlss3. was getting 25 up to 50 before

[timid trout]

Frame Gen ?

[radiant belfry]

try it on/off with the preulde files

since there were performance improvements regardless of DLSS

[timid trout]

You still have that grass don't you 🙂

[dull oar]

Lol yea that's still there as well

[timid trout]

What progress are you guys doing over the weeks? Haven't been able to keep up with.

[dull oar]

so much better than 2.0. swear i was getting 40fps from this angle before

[radiant belfry]

i guess we can look forward to some much improved performance then 😛

[dull oar]

you know what brb, i'm switching to 2.0 for science

69 on 2.0. not 40 😦

[radiant belfry]

still a 10 FPS improvement, pretty great

[dull oar]

yea totally, worth shouting about tbh

[radiant belfry]

especially since the image quality improved too

looking forward to this being added

[dull oar]

100%

[timid trout]

Uhm..

[sweet cloak]

No progress with getting stable hashes and such

[dull oar]

my videos are starting to get some views so we might get some newbies with a coder mindset to come help you adam
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcPIZkXMLoU

[sweet cloak]

I hope It’s a difficult one for sure.

[dull oar]

did skippvs turn into anything?

[sweet cloak]

No it skips the whole pvs system, and thus the rendering system, and renders nothing.

It’s a good way to find the pvs system in the exe and dll though

[dull oar]

every discovery gets us that bit closer dont it

[sweet cloak]

Ever so slowly it’ll get solved.

Maybe I should look at RTCW and see if there’s any notes on it. That’s the common node between iw2 and quake 3.

[dull oar]

not a bad shout

[sweet cloak]

Oh that was easier than I thought. https://github.com/id-Software/RTCW-SP

[dull oar]

lol no way

[sweet cloak]

https://github.com/id-Software/RTCW-SP/blob/master/src/renderer/tr_bsp.c

Pretty similar to CoD2s system

I don’t have the mental capacity till like next week to really dig into it. Let me know if you find something that correlates to load everything or the likes.

[dull oar]

yea will do, no worries. I'll ping you if anythng pops up

[sweet cloak]

https://github.com/id-Software/RTCW-SP/blob/70951bc71b730efe6bcb07db7ae76ef0c4ae7c14/src/renderer/tr_bsp.c#L239

=================
R_LoadVisibility
=================
*/
static void R_LoadVisibility( lump_t *l ) {
    int len;
    byte    *buf;

    len = ( s_worldData.numClusters + 63 ) & ~63;
    s_worldData.novis = ri.Hunk_Alloc( len, h_low );
    memset( s_worldData.novis, 0xff, len );

    len = l->filelen;
    if ( !len ) {
        return;
    }
    buf = fileBase + l->fileofs;

    s_worldData.numClusters = LittleLong( ( (int *)buf )[0] );
    s_worldData.clusterBytes = LittleLong( ( (int *)buf )[1] );

    // CM_Load should have given us the vis data to share, so
    // we don't need to allocate another copy
    if ( tr.externalVisData ) {
        s_worldData.vis = tr.externalVisData;
    } else {
        byte    *dest;

        dest = ri.Hunk_Alloc( len - 8, h_low );
        memcpy( dest, buf + 8, len - 8 );
        s_worldData.vis = dest;
    }
}

Specifically this bit:
if ( !len ) { return; }

From my, very basic, understanding of this system. This is where the length of the expected visbility section (the portals) is determined for being loaded into the rendering pipeline

Now to see if this applies in cod2

[dull oar]

Poop ☹️

[sweet cloak]

I believe you said that if you don’t generate portals for a map, the entire map gets placed into one giant portal right?

Seems the map loading is entirely based on the PVS system, so telling it there’s no portal cells results in things breaking when trying to add things to the view.

https://github.com/id-Software/RTCW-SP/blob/70951bc71b730efe6bcb07db7ae76ef0c4ae7c14/src/renderer/tr_world.c#L654C10-L654C10

Seems like this walks through the nodes to check their visibility and lines up with the q3bsp presentation of the bitwise and.

So maybe skipping that will get us what we need

The answer might of been r_Markleaves the whole time

Clearly this is the work of Mark himself

[dull oar]

Oh wow well found Adam. Googling r_markleaves get a few good finds as well. It's more source stuff but you know.
https://twhl.info/thread/locate-post/344423

[sweet cloak]

The visible part of the world is cut off in the same fashion: we find the current leaf where the player is located (in QUAKE this is implemented by the Mod_PointInLeaf function) then we get a pointer to visdata for the current leaf (for our convenience, it is linked directly to the leaf in the form of "compressed_vis" pointer) and then stupidly go through all the leaves and branches of the map and check them for being visible from our leaf (this can be seen in the R_MarkLeaves function)

That stupidity is the key

[dull oar]

Lol you get all the lines

One sec let me check the maps all one cell without portals for ya

[dull oar]

yep it's all one cell

[hazy canyon]

Is this the Steam version of COD2? and did you apply any patches?

@sweet cloak lol there is a BSP decompiler built right into the game engine:
https://github.com/id-Software/RTCW-SP/blob/70951bc71b730efe6bcb07db7ae76ef0c4ae7c14/src/bspc/bspc.c#L860C5-L860C17

first it loads the BSP, then it writes it out to a map file

I was trying to see if it had support for loading maps directly, but seems not

this recompiler is really interesting though ....

" forcesidesvisible = force all sides to be visible\n"

I wonder what would happen if you added all the nodes in the tree to a single portal:
https://github.com/id-Software/RTCW-SP/blob/70951bc71b730efe6bcb07db7ae76ef0c4ae7c14/src/bspc/portals.c#L212
much to try 🤔

[dull oar]

Just the steam version yea.

[hazy canyon]

I think if you mark all portals as translucent, the PVS calculation for the node clusters will just see through right to the next poral:
https://github.com/id-Software/RTCW-SP/blob/70951bc71b730efe6bcb07db7ae76ef0c4ae7c14/src/bspc/portals.c#L142

[dull oar]

All you gotta do is set the render preference to dx7. Draw sun to 0

[hazy canyon]

okay, thanks 👍

[dull oar]

Wow watbulb well found mate! Loads to try here

[tight obsidian]

The screenshots are beautiful! I'm a big fan of the older COD games. Seeing it like this, is really cool. Thanks for all your effort and work put into this

I'm hoping one day someone will put the same amount of love as you did in COD WAW

[hazy canyon]

yeah im just guessing but there's lots we could try when recompiling the maps to BSP's. or potentially trick the viscluster calculations to pass through each node and portal to the next one

[dull oar]

Just something to keep in mind we don't have . map files just the compiled .d3dbsp files

I know you mention the built in decompiler just wanted to highlight that though

[hazy canyon]

yep. but you can decompile the BSP's to map files. then use bspc to compile them again, though im not sure how well that works

[dull oar]

Will you be getting giving this a go yourself and joining our little party of 2?

[hazy canyon]

probably yeah, i'll give it a shot for a bit this weekend. first step is just to look at the BSP files to figure out what they are and how they are compiled, then look at the source to see how it does the viscluster calculation to see if there is any way to trick it with the existing BSP's to passthrough the PVS calculation between all portals. if that doesn't work it might be best to figure out how to recompile the BSPs to make everything use a single portal, or a portal that is always marked as translucent, to trick the viscluster calculation to move onto the next cluster and portal pair so everything becomes visible.

[dull oar]

Awesome stuff. Here this should get you started

[dull oar]

That's my multiplayer config file. And this is my rtx config

[hazy canyon]

rgr thanks

[dull oar]

No problemo. Holla if you need a hand. Right it's bed time for me. Laters

[hazy canyon]

have a good one

[sweet cloak]

[sweet cloak]

Note that there’s differences to cod2 and rctw’s code base.

CoD 1 is closer to rctw

[hazy canyon]

Yeah unfortunately 😢

[sweet cloak]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Quake_-_family_tree.svg

[hazy canyon]

I want to just get hands on with the BSPs and see what kind of info is in the file itself to define portal properties

[sweet cloak]

The file structure is kinda defined on the modding wiki but it’s not really clear.

This is a good breakdown of the PVS system #1099591203768504421 message

I know @dull oar has a compiled map comparison that you can diff to see what a the portals appear as.

I believe CoD2 doesn't have the simple walking of each "leaf"/"node" of the BSP tree still in it.

[hazy canyon]

Hmm interesting

I’m really hoping that internally when it starts the viscluster calculation from the node parsing recursion, we can leverage a trick

Since in COD2 some portals can be marked as transparent, which causes the viscluster to flood through to the next leafset until a portal is reached

But im not sure if they expose portal properties in the BSP

Or if it’s simply used as a data organization primitive during compilation

[sweet cloak]

Here's all the 'portal' refences

Oh you're looking at the map compiler

[hazy canyon]

Yeah all my current info comes from the BSPC compiler

But that is also useful

Since it looks like the game code is aware of VisPortalsForCell

ShowPortals would be cool for debugging

Is that a command?

[sweet cloak]

Yes

[hazy canyon]

Sweet

[sweet cloak]

||I never got it to work but Tadpole has shown it works just fine for him ||

[hazy canyon]

Hah lol

[sweet cloak]

https://gist.github.com/adamplayer/da783479114da1418736ae62a8450e98

[hazy canyon]

Ah a fellow IDA user I see

A man of class

[sweet cloak]

I used to use ghidra but it just doesn't analyze as well it seems

[hazy canyon]

IDA is sort of the king at win32 reversing, it’s been around since before the people who wrote ghidra were probably even born

[sweet cloak]

I can share my idb. It's based on the mac build from back in the day.

Aspyr always leaves debug symbols in their macos builds for whatever reason

Not that I'm complaining

[hazy canyon]

Sure

What IDB version tho?

[sweet cloak]

7.5

[hazy canyon]

Okay that should be fine

I have 8.0 Pro with all the bells

But I use it for work

[sweet cloak]

Living large over there

[hazy canyon]

Haha yeah. I reverse engineer software at work for a living, so we gots all the modules from everything from blackfin DSP to obscure MIPS processors

[sweet cloak]

Oh boy bizzare architectures. IDA's favorite

[hazy canyon]

Yea it really is

Really it’s just one defence customer that reallllly wants it, so they pay hex rays to make it and then they integrate it into the product

Cough Northrop Grumman

Cough

Binary ninja is also nice

Far more affordable

We usually use that for writing custom arch plugins because writing them in hex rays is an exercise in insanity

And ghidra doesn’t support VLIW

[sweet cloak]

Ghidra was spending all that time for that dark theme

[hazy canyon]

Lolllll

Yeah

That really bugs me

For awhile you could enable accessibility mode and invert all the colours, it was half passable

But still looked so bad

[sweet cloak]

They just did that for you now, ez dark mode

Legability be damned

[hazy canyon]

Foreal

[sweet cloak]

By the way the magic for loop is this #1099591203768504421 message:

    for ( i = 0,leaf = tr.world->nodes ; i < tr.world->numnodes ; i++, leaf++ ) {
        cluster = leaf->cluster;
        if ( cluster < 0 || cluster >= tr.world->numClusters ) {
            continue;
        }

        // check general pvs
        if ( !( vis[cluster >> 3] & ( 1 << ( cluster & 7 ) ) ) ) {
            continue;
        }

        // check for door connection
        if ( ( tr.refdef.areamask[leaf->area >> 3] & ( 1 << ( leaf->area & 7 ) ) ) ) {
            continue;       // not visible
        }

        parent = leaf;
        do {
            if ( parent->visframe == tr.visCount ) {
                break;
            }
            parent->visframe = tr.visCount;
            parent = parent->parent;
        } while ( parent );
    }

Found in R_MarkLeaves, which I don't know if the CoD2 engine still has

I go rest now as well

[hazy canyon]

I wonder if vis is precaclulated or loaded from the BPS. I wonder what happens if you add all leaf clusters to vis 🤔

have a good one

hmmm R_VisitPortalsForCell. I want to try visiting all the portals for all the cell clusters 😅

could probably do some quick interception with frida and dump the args to R_MarkLeaves and R_VisitPortalsForCell and call them myself

[sweet cloak]

I think that’s possible, it's called only from r_vistportals, so it's straight forward to manipulate.

They’re in the gfx DLL if you want to manipulate them.

Everything render related is in the gfx DLL, the games exe keeps a struct(?) with pointers to all of them.

https://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/quake2Polymorphism.php

I didn’t take all the fun programming courses in college so I don’t really know how to describe it

[dull oar]

Morning, just to catch you up @hazy canyon I have installed the old cod2 mod tools including the old level editor. This came with two levels from the base game for you to learn from. The multiplayer map Matmata and a single player level set at night in France. Taking out all bsp brushes marked as "portal" and "portal_nodraw" saving and compiling got us this #1099591203768504421 message we know for certain the portals are causing mesh hash instability. Now it's just a case of breaking this system any way we can.

I've exported Matmata with and without portals and compiled the maps with the exact same settings. The difference between the two files are the portals.

But it's all hexadecimal

[hazy canyon]

@dull oar okay makes sense, thanks for the info. I also saw the mod tools and was also playing with them and am just getting to grips with how it all works. My only question, is if its the portals which are causing the instability (which makes sense because that is the locality for the current cluster set in the PVS), would it not be possible to just remove the portals from all the BSP's and recompile them?

sort of seems like its solved if you remove all the portals, which causes the clusters to all be exposed to the root portal, if there is any (which causes the PVS to passthrough)

[dull oar]

We're tried removing the portals from the compiled map files (.map goes into the compiler, .d3dbsp comes out) but it just won't have it. They stick around no matter what unfortunately

Hopefully we're just missing something though

Another little trick that we haven't tried yet but if you make structure brushes detail brushes and they shouldn't get culled

[hazy canyon]

oh okay, I see, so you are trying to remove the portals from the precompiled maps, whereas you had the raw source maps before and were compiling the maps out of them (and removing the portals in the process)

[dull oar]

Yep. We only have the two raw source maps infinity ward provided us

It's in the maps source folder of your mod tools

[hazy canyon]

rgr makes sense, thanks

in that case I'll probably look into decompiling those back into maps, and seeing if we can do the same thing with the official compiler

another thing I was thinking of, is if that doesn't work, we could try and modify the engine to not remove a cluster from visualization once it has been initially rendered, which would be easier than trying to reverse engineer how the whole PVS system works. we know the clusters get rendered, and eventually they get culled out due to the PVS, so if we can edit a branch in the engine that causes the leaf to get removed from the current vis set, then that could work too.

[dull oar]

I don't know if that might make it unstable until all leafs have been seen though

It's the increasing and decreasing of vert and UV count that's causing the instability.

[hazy canyon]

thats true, I dont know either, but at some point they all get rendered based on where you are and what you see, its just they eventually get removed from the PVS set at some point, im assuming you could tell it to not do that. but im not certain

oh okay

[dull oar]

We have this as well, might help you
https://github.com/riicchhaarrd/d3dbsp/tree/main

[sweet cloak]

RTCW does keep track of what was visible and keeps it in memory for a few frames.

[sweet cloak]

@worldly river do you have interest in finding the elusive if statement ?

[radiant belfry]

Call of Duty 2

[slate plank]

Hi, give the latest runtime a try. I have added some fixes and parametrization for decal offsetting. It should help with some of the issues. See parameters under rtx.decals.* and a texture category rtx.singleOffsetDecalTextures. You can find the parameters in GUI under Rendering \ Geometry \ Decals. Note that these settings apply when a new geometry is detected, so you may need to move camera and/or restart a level to take effect. The added texture category is to be set for textures that are already set as decalTextures or dynamicDecalTextures. See https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/dxvk-remix/blob/main/RtxOptions.md for more info.

[dull oar]

oh wow thank you peter! I'm on it now mate

[dull oar]

I'm sorry peter i'm not sure what this fixes. I've had a play around with the settings reloading the map and cant see anything decals clip, cut through the scene and all sorts as before. guess I'm a little confused. what problem specifically does this resolve mate? could you give a practicle example of how I should use these new options?

[slate plank]

I think you have various issues with decals than what I was looking at with this so it wasn't clear, sorry. The change should help with the decals Z-fighting as well as make their order more invariant due to camera positioning shown in #1099591203768504421 message and any runtime dynamicity of the decals in the game (i.e. when new decals are generated frame to frame such as due to machine gun fire).

What you can do is first see if this change helps with the z-fighting and ordering issues of decals on its own. In addition you can tag decals that don't inter-overlap (i.e. the stains on the walls shouldn't overlap within their own texture hash category - in other words the same stain shouldn't overlap with itself) as singleOffsetDecalTextures . Last you can adjust the parameters, though that should be the last resort since the default should generally work. However in case of lot of decals being spawned in a frame and it being OK to allow to offset decals further, bumping the rtx.decals.maxOffsetIndex further would be beneficial to prevent wrap arounds (i.e. when decals that should be further are offset closer since the decal offset index wraps around back to the rtx.baseOffsetIndex within a frame).

Is this more clear?

[dull oar]

ah so bulets from your gun no longer flicker around jumping from top to bottom of the stack and are nice and stable now. can confirm, very nice 🙂

it's not so much the stain overlapping with itself thats the problem its the stain overlapping with another unique decal. here look

and if i mark a decal as decal instead of dynamic decal i get this effect

[slate plank]

If the stain and the other unique decal have different texture hashes then they can be tagged as single offset decal textures. The purpose with that is to slow down decal offset index increase in a frame. RTX Remix offsets input decals from the game. Generally each decal is offset based on the order they are seen in a frame (there are some caveats), so if there is a lot of decals or the ordering of decals changes frame to frame this can cause ordering artifacts.

singleOffsetDecalTextures just helps avoiding hitting the rtx.maxOffsetIndex and unnecessarily offseting decals.

[slate plank]

Note, current system has a limitation of decal offsetting happening when a new geometry is detected. So if you tag textures as decals or change their categories, you may need to move the camera or reload the level to force the geometry to be recreated. We'd like to improve this in the future, but that's how it is right now.

[dull oar]

yep worked that out with the terrain decals the hard way. go off in a huff and come back the next day and everything working thinking it was magic 😛

so the wall trim and wall smudge should be singleOffsetDecalTextures i save, close, open and they should be ok?

sorry about all the questions and I REALLY appreciate all the hard work you've put into this so far mate ❤️

[slate plank]

Yes if they have separate texture hashes and they don't self overlap, then yes please tag them as singleOffsetDecalTextures.

[dull oar]

isnt that what i've done here though?

[slate plank]

Yes you did tag them. Does it reproduce after you reload the level preserving the texture tagging state?

[dull oar]

yea map_restart I'll close the game and reload

still fighting after a game reload

[slate plank]

Can you set following in rtx conf and restart and see if it makes any difference here?
rtx.decals.maxOffsetIndex = 10000 rtx.decals.offsetIndexIncreaseBetweenDrawCalls = 10

[dull oar]

here we are, still flickering i'm afraid.

[slate plank]

Which map is it?

[dull oar]

mp_carentan. its on multiplayer

you just need to be sure you have a microphone enabled and multiplayer should open for you

thats how you get to the map

and the wall

[slate plank]

There's a scenario that if these two decals are first seen on frames where they are not rendered at the same time, then current system won't resolve them well since the offseting happens when they are seen for the first time. But I'd like to confirm that's the problem since it would be unusual for this to happen.

[sweet cloak]

|| Peter can you make hashes stable pls ||

[slate plank]

I think Mark knows more about the state of hash stability and what we're doing to help there.

[dull oar]

bsp brush meshes are getting culled by baked in vis called PVS and remix thinks they're new meshes as parts of the batched brush meshes disappear and reappear with culling. its an issue you have with most games of the era that use brushes including portal. fixing this stabilizes everything as shown here.

had to recompile the maps with out portals, only maps that exist as source .map files are matmata and a singleplayer rhine map. it's proven portals and PVS are making our brushes unstable. now we either gotta remove them the hard way or bribe someone at nvidia

https://tenor.com/view/barisarduc-suggestive-wink-turkishdizi-barisarduç-gif-22733873

ever been to disney land peter? adam's willing to take you if you can take a look at this PVS issue

[sweet cloak]

I’ll pay for parking too

[dull oar]

bargin

[sweet cloak]

It’s super simple I promise. Walk in the park compared to the sims

[static tangle]

This sounds similar to the problems we had in Portal, where culling changes will change batched mesh draws, which results in different meshes being sent to Remix. It's not so much hash instability, as it is the actual draw calls changing.

[sweet cloak]

We got the graphics renderer to [attempt] rendering everything at once and it seemingly made the hashes even less stable.

[static tangle]

We do have some long term ideas for improved ways of handling that situation - basically hiding the original BSP geometry and making it easier to just model aa entire room in USD and attach it to the room overal.

for now, an easy work around is to put a unique static prop in each culling region, hide all the original walls, and just create replacement rooms anchored to those static props.

[sweet cloak]

Man, BSPs really are an enigma to figure out it seems.

[static tangle]

| rendering everything at once and it seemingly made the hashes even less stable.
Across two captures, are the actual contents of the mesh_HASH prims different? i.e. if you select a specific wall, what is different about the mesh that wall is a part of

[dull oar]

this video demonstrates the issue really well with meshes popping in and out and the hashes changing with each pop
https://youtu.be/2pY6Bh75PjM

[sweet cloak]

No idea. Didn’t check a capture. The debug mode is still tied to the capture hash right?

[static tangle]

that looks like exactly the type of culling I'm talking about - and since it happens based on turning, that means it's probably frustrum culling

so the game is hiding portions of the mesh that are beside or behind the camera

[sweet cloak]

I believe that’s gone from our build now.

From my testing at least

[static tangle]

try going into the dev settings tab, enable free camera, move way up above your camera and look down, then exit the remix gui and look around as normal. that will let you see the entire level geometry as you rotate the in-game camera around

should make it easier to figure out what is actually changing as you turn the camera

[dull oar]

yea it's along the lines of the portals, it's these things the seperate the world into chunks

[static tangle]

(I know nothing about the game engine, but there are a ton of things that could be causing draw call instability - maybe it batches the meshes in different order depending on camera angle or something

[sweet cloak]

It’s the quake 3 engine pretty much.

[dull oar]

one second, let me get you a visual

[static tangle]

each mesh_HASH prim in a capture represents the geometry sent in a single draw call.

if the geometry a wall is a part of is different in two different captures, then the game is batching that wall with different other walls, leading to the instability. There's nothing we can do on the remix side to stabilize that - you'll need to figure out why the engine is changing the batch

[sweet cloak]

Hm that gives me a thought. The q3 still does this bizarre chop and patching of meshes that span two leafs. Wonder if that’s what we’re seeing happen.

[sweet cloak]

Huh. It didn’t do that for me on mantma[sp.]

[static tangle]

that looks exactly like frustrum culling.

Also, you can move and rotate the free camera using keyboard/mouse

[dull oar]

so you can see above is frustrum culling, no doubt. but this mode is based on portal culling

[slate plank]

Note the free camera won't have the same effect as moving in-game camera for the purposes of camera based runtime state of the game. So if you suspect the game changes state based on camera (things being unstable, popping etc) you can check with free camera if it happens there as well. If it doesn't repro with free camera, then yes it's the game doing fancy things. Otherwise if it's unstable with Free Camera as well then it's something that should be investigated in Remix.

[dull oar]

these are artist placed planes that break the world into chunks

[static tangle]

well, it still looks like it's culling zones based on the camera

[dull oar]

surely you had this issue with quake 2 no?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfCRHSIg6zo

[static tangle]

quake RTX wasn't a remix project, that was bespoke

[sweet cloak]

Looks we’ll have to go back to the reverse engineering. I don’t think the modifications that kungfooman made were what we’re looking for

[dull oar]

no same, portalfinecull 0 is key here. its frustum culling as mark said when its portalfinecull 1

[static tangle]

Yep. Note that if your world is already split up into zones, if you can just prevent those zones from batching together when drawing, that would actually make the meshes pretty stable and easy to replace

[dull oar]

makes the one map i can do it too 100% stable

[static tangle]

although you may see bits of the world disappearing in the reflections with frustrum culling

[dull oar]

he can nuke that though with portalfinecull command

[sweet cloak]

Could you expand on this?

[dull oar]

in those two videos above with the culling the first one has portalfinecull set to 1 and its frustum by the looks of it. with portalfinecull set to 0 its all based on the portal zones

i've just noticed this when mark pointed it out btw 😛

[sweet cloak]

So is your theory that we need to nuke frustum culling now?

[dull oar]

I think so yea

yea can test it with the portaless matmata map i have

[sweet cloak]

Okay, that can be done.

Thanks for your help Nvidia Pals

[dull oar]

matmata with portalfinecull set to 1 . if its frustum based culling it'll be unstable

[static tangle]

note that both of those videos show frustrum culling. It's just that one of them culls entire zones at a time, and the other culls sub meshes within a zone

both of them are working to remove geometry that the camera is facing away from

just at different levels of granularity

[sweet cloak]

Dx9 has a hard limit of things it can draw right?

[dull oar]

with portals isnt it all about being able to prove you can see portal b through portal a at a certain angle and baking that into the bsp file rather than frustum culling though?

[static tangle]

I think you'd actually be better off leaving it doing zone based culling, and then investigating the draw call batching to make that only batch meshes within a single zone.

each draw call was pretty expensive in dx9. behavior will be very different in remix... but we also have a decently heavy cpu burden due to all the hashing we do

[static tangle]

it's very possible, but that just means it's a fancier way to cull stuff you can't see right now

[sweet cloak]

You keep only the portals that are possibly visible in memory. Then apply the frustum culling.

[dull oar]

that would work, r_single cell shows all the brushes in that one cell and thats stable

[static tangle]

the fundamental problem is that the contents of a batched drawcall changes when the game changes what is being culled. Splitting all that out so that drawcalls only get batched from a single cell may make rock solid hashes... but it also may wreck your CPU and drop you down to 1 fps

[dull oar]

r_singlecell ^

[static tangle]

that's something you'll have to experiment with. Keep in mind that for Portal we eventually just had to give up on replaceming anything that wasn't a prop

[static tangle]

yeah, matches with what I'd expect, aside from that one bit of instable terrain

[dull oar]

terrain are based on curves, different system.

[sweet cloak]

Could you expand upon the batching? Are you saying how the game sends the draw calls to the gpu?

[static tangle]

I have no solid info on how this specific game is doing it. But a common technique in this era was to gather up all the meshes that use a given texture, make one long list of all of their triangles, and send it down to the GPU as one mesh. There was a very large per-drawcall overhead in dx9, so having more triangles in fewer draw calls was a bit performance improvement

[dull oar]

lines up with what i see in onmiverse. all my brick walls are one mesh

[static tangle]

when a given wall is enabled or disabled by the culling system, it will get added to the batch of triangles using that same texture.

[sweet cloak]

It does it based on material from my understanding in this game.

[static tangle]

thus changing the geometry and invalidating the hash

[sweet cloak]

Ohhhh

So by breaking up that list into each of its element rather than the larger list would net us our stable hashes?

Apart from destroying our CPU

[static tangle]

possibly destroying. or maybe it would improve CPU performance. I really have no idea

[sweet cloak]

But the hashes, they’d theoretically be stable?

[static tangle]

I know it will be a significant change, so you should check the performance with and without that mode and see how it changes

[sweet cloak]

It’s stable hashes at any cost here Mark.

[static tangle]

and yeah, if you could split up those batches, the hashes would no longer be invalidated by culling coming in and out. There could still be other ways the draw calls change though

I do want to make a bit of a clarification though:

When a draw call changes, the hash should change. this isn't hash instability - it's draw call instability.

hash instability is when the draw call is still drawing the same geometry, but the hash is changing anyways.

[dull oar]

ah right i get it

if the hash was flashing every frame as a cpu skinned character thats a hash instability

[sweet cloak]

Noted. I’ll change my dictionary. That’ll help prevent confusion going forward

[static tangle]

draw call instability can only be changed on the game side, Remix can't do anything about it.
hash instability may come from either side, and if it comes from the Remix side we'll want to fix it.

(cpu skinning is still the draw call changing, but it's one of the cases where we want to give those different draw calls a stable hash somehow... but that's an area of research)

[sweet cloak]

I’ll write this up into a proposal here tonight so we can formulate a plan of attack.

[dull oar]

someones talking himself out of an all expense paid trip to disney land

[static tangle]

and I'm going to go get lunch 😛 Good luck with figuring this out, I look forward to hearing about it.

[dull oar]

most fun i've had all day, cheers mark, peter and adam ❤️

[sweet cloak]

I’ll put a shout out in the preface of the paper

[static tangle]

actually, another thought I just had that won't leave me alone -

If you make all the BSP meshes use a single texture, they would all be batched into a single draw call. Splitting that out so that meshes in different cells go into different draw calls would then give you one draw call for all the BSP meshes in each cell - essentially giving you each cell as a distinct mesh_HASH prim that can be replaced

[dull oar]

oh snap good idea. we dont care what they look like with mesh replacement i can change it to anything

[sweet cloak]

Hmm. That is an interesting thought

Not sure on the implementation yet

[dull oar]

arent materials stored in the d3dbsp map files as plain text?

[sweet cloak]

Maybe?

[static tangle]

so, if you could assign one standard texture to the BSP meshes in a specific cell, and use a different texture per cell, you'd get stable mesh hashes 😛

you'd have to commit to remastering all of those meshes to restore their correct material assignments tho

[sweet cloak]

There goes all the time for the Disney land trip

[static tangle]

and you'd need to have that culling mode that was per-portal instead of per submesh

still though, it's a definite road forward that shouldn't even need any code changes, just map changes

[dull oar]

that bit we can do. and i've waited 20 years to mod cod2. I got this 😛

[sweet cloak]

We don’t have the source map files

[static tangle]

oh... well if you can do code changes, you could probably change the texture assignements when loading the map

either way. I think I've given yall a path forward now, so I'm going to go back to making lunch

[sweet cloak]

If you have the source [map] files, you just compile maps without portals and you’re done by the way. I believe the same applies for source engine games 😉

[dull oar]

it's true, portal can be stable after 5 mins of deleting portals per map and a quick recompile

[static tangle]

I believe we tried that, and it had really significant perf impacts.

[dull oar]

cod2s fine with it, very playable

i've only tried like 4 maps 😛

[sweet cloak]

Just avoid adding 800k polygon grass

[dull oar]

i'm being creatively stifled! I cant work under these conditions!

[sweet cloak]

I’ll need to consult my cats on this one again they seem to know their stuff from doing the sky dome in u2

[dull oar]

textures in your d3dbsp in lump0
https://wiki.zeroy.com/index.php?title=Call_of_Duty_2:_d3dbsp#Lump.5B0.5D_-_Materials

they are very wise it is true

[sweet cloak]

Doing some more reading: https://wiki.zeroy.com/index.php?title=Call_of_Duty_2:_Portals

Seems like portal fine cull cuts up the geometry?

Regardless, seems like disabling frustum culling is a good path forward.

[sweet cloak]

Going to spend some time trying to disable the chopping today

[dull oar]

Hell yes! kick its arse

[sweet cloak]

Imma take a note from KungFooMan and just start hitting it with a hammer and NOPing it until it works.

[sweet cloak]

Is there anyway to run the multiplayer in windowed mode?

[dull oar]

I think its broken mate

[sweet cloak]

Damn

[dull oar]

seta r_fullscreen "0" in your player config file might work

[sweet cloak]

Found the frustum clip plane function

[dull oar]

get in

[sweet cloak]

Ugh the game crashes if you leave it alt-tabbed too long

[dull oar]

sometimes yea. I think its remix cause you can still shoot and run around but it wont render anything

[sweet cloak]

Hm

You can get it to run windowed via remix btw

in the bridge conf

Seemingly the only repeatable way

Okay NOPing out the frustumclipplane function just ends up drawing nothing

Do you also get 1000 remix errors about compatability when starting the game?

[dull oar]

no nothing like that

where you seeing it? must be missing it somewhere

[sweet cloak]

As soon as I launch the game

[sweet cloak]

Now this is just unfair

[dull oar]

lol right

i dont use any bridge.conf for cod2, just boots without it. could be you have a setting in there its disagreeing with?

[sweet cloak]

Alright 🧑‍🍳

[dull oar]

omg!

[sweet cloak]

That's with 0 clip planes

[dull oar]

is that r_singlecell?

[sweet cloak]

So our theory of it being the frustum clipping appears to be correct

No

[dull oar]

i think its only showing you one cell

[sweet cloak]

Something weirder

[dull oar]

wow ok then

is portalfinecull 1 or 0?

[sweet cloak]

0

Finecull of 1 renders nothing

[dull oar]

looks almost like showsinglecell with portalfinefull on 0. this it that for comparison

i think your on the path mate

[sweet cloak]

Lemme try setting it 0 clip planes everywhere

[dull oar]

i think portalfinecull 0 uses portals where as 1 using frustum culling

[sweet cloak]

I'm in that exact situation, it's the same as r_singlecell 1 and fineculling of 0

Time to put the hammer into pratice and start beating the frustumclipping into submission

[sweet cloak]

Everything visible but still unstable draw hashes

[dull oar]

try switching fine cull

does that without portals as well

[dull oar]

darn

maybe try lifting the camera way up and look down, has to be something going in and out as you move around

[sweet cloak]

[dull oar]

omg!

omg you've done it you mad genius!

[sweet cloak]

Just one simple jmp

IDA didn't want to decompile the function so I guess all of us just ignored it

It sets up the number of sides to cull

[dull oar]

your amazing, well done man

[sweet cloak]

I'll setup an IPS patch here in a second

[dull oar]

hell yes

the dog has no idea why i'm yelling lol

[sweet cloak]

https://bbbradsmith.github.io/ipstool/

Test it out and see if it works for you. You'll wanna apply the typical smc and finecull things

Lemme know if you need a video tutorial

[dull oar]

i'm sorry mate i do, never used an ips patch before

[timid trout]

How is yours? (x64db - I don't have any experience was just playing around)

[sweet cloak]

Think that's 1 day 5 hours?

[timid trout]

I have no words

[timid trout]

Time to go outside and touch some grass 🙂

[dull oar]

now we can have fun and play 😛

[timid trout]

Touch some 20k poly grass?

You mean

[dull oar]

its very smooth and soft

[timid trout]

Just like in real life

[dull oar]

is this right @sweet cloak ?
https://youtu.be/L90jaEXeldQ

lunar ips

[sweet cloak]

Hold on I'm getting the set together

[dull oar]

i'm trying to be patient XD

[sweet cloak]

Took a few takes

[timid trout]

What is going on with trees?

Lod?

[dull oar]

yep

[sweet cloak]

Yea

[dull oar]

those were always stable

[sweet cloak]

I didn't have all the typical things setup to prevent those from going wild

[dull oar]

r_forcelod 1 to be high lod all the time

[sweet cloak]

My install doesn't seem to like reading the cfg file

[dull oar]

oh you need to add it to an autoexe and trigger it in level with a button

[sweet cloak]

Ah

Well if you wanna set that up in a way that I can add it to mine lemme know

I'm gonna go let me brain cool down with some ice cream or something

[dull oar]

you bloomin earnt it mate!

well done again, never did i ever have a chance to do without you

[sweet cloak]

Lemme know if you get it working

[dull oar]

got it working, every map except mp_carentan looks stable so far

[sweet cloak]

Anything special about that one that you know of?

[dull oar]

yea but i cant remeber it off the top of my head.

I'll dig it up though. I think it uses a special type of portal or something

rhine is rock solid

this is a thing of beauty. hang it on a wall man

[sweet cloak]

I’ll see if I can make a patch for SP here in a bit

Are there any night multiplayer maps that I could look at adding lighting to?

Wanna see how stable all the hashes are and if the distant light can be messed with.

[dull oar]

single player has a fantastic one with tanks you have to blow up. loads of scripted tank battles. fire blazing at night would look sick

tracer bullets

nuff said

mp_trainstation looks ripe for awesomeness

[sweet cloak]

What's the original skybox look like?

[dull oar]

sunny day

[sweet cloak]

damn

[dull oar]

https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Newvillers

https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/El_Alamein

https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Call_of_Duty_2_Multiplayer_Maps

el alamein is a banger of a map as well

its got a single player mission at night

[sweet cloak]

I'll patch the SP dll and then play with that map

[dull oar]

assult on normandy for me mate. you got the spitfires at the end as well. so damn cool

so far looks like carentan, brecourt and railyard and still unstable. everything else so far is rock

slightly unstable, like its very specific positions and angles

[sweet cloak]

Hmm

[dull oar]

in Carentan for example the only thing that culls when you look away and lock pvs is this one house in the middle of the world. this staircase and some wood trim bits inside

do we really wanna do this now?

celebrate the win, worry about this another day i say

[sweet cloak]

SP doesn't seem to want the same method applied

[sweet cloak]

Oh I see the problem. Can't seem to disable the portalfinecull

[dull oar]

should be able to, developer "1"?

oh no its the cheats

one sec, super easy on single player

sv_cheats "1"

[sweet cloak]

Won't let me change it

[dull oar]

lol i got you

add these to your single player config file
seta thereisacow "1337"
seta sv_cheats "1"
seta sv_pure "0"

no idea why they need to be seperate like they are

[sweet cloak]

Just seems to not wanna stick

Sv_cheats won't go to 1

I'm running out of ideas

[sweet cloak]

Tabling SP for now.

[dull oar]

Damn Adam that's sick!

[sweet cloak]

Scale is all messed up. But it should be .4(?)

[dull oar]

Yea I think so, i did the same size for the wall lamps. Any smaller and it clips the model don't it

[sweet cloak]

The actual bulb is transparent so it should go inside it for now

[dull oar]

Now we're talking that's awesome

[sweet cloak]

Is it possible to add a distant light source?

[dull oar]

Only ever tried with the fallback light. Now we got stable hashes can't see why that won't work

Yesterday I got a sky dome AND direct light to work but I couldn't work out how or why

Fallback direct light that is

Btw with your patch performance seemed the same

[sweet cloak]

Don't know why but it doesn't work for me

[dull oar]

The fallback or a new distant light?

[sweet cloak]

New distant light

Mark is it possible to add a distant light?

[dull oar]

Can't think of any game that might have done it before.

Someone has surely

[sweet cloak]

Maybe, we could be on the bleeding edge

[dull oar]

Maybe. Quick server search not seen anything about it working. Might have to use the fallback for now mate til we bug mark enough he gives in 😅

Or gas light him "remember you said last week you'd make direct lights your focus? How's that going"

[sweet cloak]

Top of Jira queue don't you remember?

[dull oar]

Oh wow! It's lighting up the smoke!

[dull oar]

Nailed that soft night time glow

[sweet cloak]

I adjusted the distance light conversion factor(?)

I settled on 0.05 for this map

[dull oar]

Looks absolutely mint

When you save rtx make a copy. Rtx_AlAlamein so you can keep your settings map specific until mark adds post process volumes so we can have per map looks

That's second in the list after distant lights

[sweet cloak]

Ignore the textures freaking out, I think the light value from the sun are pretty okay

That's with 0.04 as well

[dull oar]

I've sorted that nap. You can use the nod files I sent you. Textures shouldn't freak out

[sweet cloak]

I used the rtx conf you sent but for some reason emissives didn't work :/

[dull oar]

It's a good soft diffused look, lovely cloudy grey day

And I'm from England I know all about them

[sweet cloak]

Oh thing I've discovered. I can't get the terrain lightmaps to disappear in the terrain baking that remix does.

So you'll wanna make the lightmaps set to 1

[dull oar]

Your marking them as terrain?

I just normally mark the layers as dynamic decal

[sweet cloak]

It prevents all most of the zfighting

[dull oar]

But you loose normal maps

Lol that edit

[sweet cloak]

Whatcha mean

[dull oar]

Terrain baker doesn't support normal maps I thought

[sweet cloak]

Ohhh I understand whatcha mean

I got nothing for ya there

[dull oar]

Have a look at carentan or Matmata and see what how I used the dynamic decals. Works fairly well but yea like you say. Z fighting everywhere

[sweet cloak]

I'm going to go touch grass for a bit and then come back for some more

https://github.com/adamplayer/CallOfDuty2RTX for all my rtx things

[dull oar]

Hell yes , nice one. Looking awesome

[marsh hinge]

I see this is exclusively a cod2 thread again. Was it deemed impossible to get other older cods to work?

[dull oar]

Cod4 hooks but the renderer is rasterized. It'll be due to shaders. Luckily cod4 has loads of mod tools including a shader editor. If we can simplify them somewhat maybe we can get something to render.

But yea, cod 2 first

[marsh hinge]

I'm cool with that. I wanna see my favorite cod2 mod in RTX lol. Can't remember which one it was but it was a really good zombies backport

I'll have to get the github and mess around with that

[dull oar]

Hell yeah. Volumetric fog with zombie glowing eyes would be very scary

[timid trout]

This looks awesome

[dull oar]

playing through some of the single player we have a few more unstable props and hashes. not a lot, it's the odd wall or wood texture

[hazy canyon]

Should I still try working on recompiling maps without portals? It looks like you guys have figured out more stuff and tbh I don’t have the time to catch up with where you are at in regards to that

Seems like Adam found the mystery jump anyways #1099591203768504421 message

[dull oar]

yep looks like adam's method might work, it's got some kinks I hope he can iron out but we're loads better than we were

Thank you for helping though mate ❤️

[dull oar]

after setting a couple floating terrain decals as dynamic decal the floors and walls no longer have holes

the terrain stuff tints your ground, you loose normal maps when you replace. I wouldnt use it yet

[dull oar]

mp_decoy is the night map. all sorted now. just had to set some decals and close and open the game as peter said

[sweet cloak]

Well that does work better than the terrain system

[dull oar]

wanna copy my dynamic decal line from my RTX and slap it in your own?

[sweet cloak]

Yes please 🙏

[dull oar]

i'll upload the whole thing so people can play along 🙂

[sweet cloak]

I think I’m going to try blending the modifications that KungFooMan made and see if that does anything to the sp levels.

[dull oar]

good idea. expanding the frustrum might be worth doing if you can. I'm noticing lamp shades coming off light sources as you turn around

[sweet cloak]

Yea I noticed that too. They really did not want any overdraw with these quake engines, so much hammering to get it out 🔨

[sweet cloak]

Keeping things in sync: Forward was super easy

Just a simple jump

[sweet cloak]

Latest IPS patch is up on the repo, disables all the bad culling afaik.

[dull oar]

yay!

[sweet cloak]

I'll mess with SP in a little bit. Going to try out that map you suggested

[dull oar]

flopping massive, got blown up tanks and everything

[dull oar]

works a treat, still have a hole in carentan but as that's just me must be something i've done 😛

[sweet cloak]

Do you know how to apply the translucent shader by chance? 👀

[dull oar]

I can do it to new meshes but havent done it to an existing mesh before

think kim knows

lights are fixed, even when you turn around 🙂

[sweet cloak]

@radiant belfry could you help me pls. I can't find a guide or anything on how to replace the shader

[sweet cloak]

||He finally is doing the music meta ||

[dull oar]

lol thought you'd like it

[sweet cloak]

Hopefully we can figure out the translucent shader so we can get all the windows working

[dull oar]

would look amazing. got me a replacement texture and everything

[sweet cloak]

Found a hidden mark tutorial

#1096847508002590760 message

I’m gonna grab some lunch and then I’ll attempt it if you haven’t already

[dull oar]

half way through a reinstall to fix my carentan

[radiant belfry]

yup, that's it

[timid trout]

What's wrong with translucent shader?

[dull oar]

having trouble with latest @sweet cloak

[sweet cloak]

That looks like remix more than the game itself.

How does it look with RTX turned off?

[dull oar]

i'm going to send the video in a DM as it fickers and i dont wanna ruin someones day

[sweet cloak]

Is it happening everywhere? Or is it localized?

[dull oar]

Every where yea. Have you spawned with a gun on your side?

[sweet cloak]

No

Oh yea that's a big problem

Solved

Updated IPS patch is on the repo

[dull oar]

thats sorted it! nice one

[sweet cloak]

Okay got the translucent shader working

Going to try and see if I can get a glass texture working

Works but it do be wonky

I don't know what I did but the smoke suddenly worked nicely

I didn't mark them as particles

[sweet cloak]

I feel like I'm not quite grasping what I should set the transparency amount at

Not liking it too much tbh

[radiant belfry]

i didn't realize what i was looking at

[radiant belfry]

did you set it as thin?

if not it looks really weird

[sweet cloak]

It's the fact that the frame is also transparent, I can't seem to get that bit to be opaque

[radiant belfry]

ah

hmmm

being able to apply a mask for that would be nice

[sweet cloak]

Can just do a mesh replacement and have it be all fancy

[radiant belfry]

could maybe kind of slightly hack the outer frame mesh and integrate the other frame part into it

[sweet cloak]

There are two meshes for every window for culling reasons

[radiant belfry]

transparency so far in Remix has been a real pain in the ass

i've been unable to get it looking right in basically anything

[sweet cloak]

Oh boy, the SP culling system appears to be completely different than the MP

[radiant belfry]

that explains why i made absolutely 0 progress with the SP maps

[sweet cloak]

What’d ya try?

[timid trout]

Yeah these are scattered around, would be more practical if each one of them gets its own thread.

[dull oar]

I'll make the window model tonight. Found a lovely stain glass window texture I'm going to shatter. Imagine that sun pouring through stained glass with rtx

[timid trout]

I can't imagine because I am out of VRAM.

Or in this case IRAM

[sweet cloak]

I didn’t see a massive jump in vram with the translucent glass tbh.

[timid trout]

I am sure tadpole will slap a 8k shatter-crack texture on that window.

Or he'll model that crack then replace the mesh itself.

bullet holes made of thousands of polys

[timid trout]

BF1942 was using more vram with translucent water.

I am not sure, it might be just the normal map taking up that much memory..

[dull oar]

I'll crack it in 3d so we get proper refraction effects. Extrude and bevel the 3d metal elements as well. Should only take a couple hours.

[sweet cloak]

By the way, the opacity for the translucent diffuse should be set to something like 99% or even 100% otherwise you can’t see the color.

Or set it with the transmission color, i think that’s the proper way to

[timid trout]

It is, I realized that after having weird distance cut-offs with diffuse texture.

[sweet cloak]

Which makes sense as to why I couldn’t get the frame of the window to not be opaque

[timid trout]

For some reason no matter the alpha value it never gets completely opaque, we probably need to use two mashes with corresponding material as you stated.

[radiant belfry]

question: has anyone observed worse performance in these games than Portal RTX or Prelude?

[sweet cloak]

Perfect for a mesh replacement as tadpole is doing then. We can also get that nice wavy stained glass normal on them as well

[sweet cloak]

Of course

[radiant belfry]

what causes that again?

[sweet cloak]

Probably need to have the materials optimized for PBR.

[radiant belfry]

even when there's no replacements at all?

[timid trout]

Foliage also slows down a lot

[sweet cloak]

Like clamping the colors and reflectances to not be so wacky. There’s also a lot of problems with things becoming transparent due to having alpha textures that seems to cause problems.

[radiant belfry]

like what i mean is if you turn off replacements in Portal RTX, performance there is significantly higher than i've seen in any other game

[sweet cloak]

Ohhh

Im sure there’s some optimization techniques we haven’t been told about or discovered yet.

[radiant belfry]

i hope so

[sweet cloak]

I know portal RTX lighting is way less noisy than what we get and the emissive materials look way better

[radiant belfry]

i get like 20 FPS in Barnyard without balanced DLSS, lol (no replacements)

it's ~30 in PRTX with replacements on

[timid trout]

#1096847508002590760 message
I think it is high amounts of alpha textures like foliage. Because no matter the game I get terrible performance on maps that has lots of grass and such.

the chain link fences in Portal RTX are actually modeled for exactly that reason

[radiant belfry]

hmm

makes sense i guess. barnyard has like the worst foliage possible (4 layers of alpha textures stacked on top of each other)

[dull oar]

got some 20k tri's of grass if you wanna test your theory

[timid trout]

It needs 20k poly grass, you can borrow some from @dull oar

[sweet cloak]

There’s a lot of objects that end up getting marked as non opaque, you can check with the debug view, that should be opaque.

[radiant belfry]

replacements are totally broken right now, so no 20k grass for me 😦

[dull oar]

oh no

[sweet cloak]

Did someone say remove frustum culling?

[radiant belfry]

but i can hide the foliage and see

[radiant belfry]

hmm?

there is culling that i'd love help with, lol

[sweet cloak]

[radiant belfry]

but it's definitely not BSP based

[sweet cloak]

The empire of anti culling expands.

[dull oar]

we're still unstable adam, finish your first snack before you move on to the next 😛

[timid trout]

Exactly, BF1942 has literally all textures marked as transparent, and captured textures are transparent.

[timid trout]

Born to debug

[dull oar]

https://www.textures.com/search?q=stained glass
what glass do we want btw?

[sweet cloak]

Damn SP has such a different culling system for whatever reason.

[radiant belfry]

they just got bored and devised a new system for the heck of it

[dull oar]

multiplayer carentan would be cool, it's got unstable hashes still 😦

[sweet cloak]

It’s modeled after this kind of style originally https://www.textures.com/download/WindowStainedGlass0003/13430

[dull oar]

sods law its the one i've been working on

[sweet cloak]

I still don’t know why tho

[dull oar]

orginal

[radiant belfry]

lmao 60 FPS at 800x600

i move on now

[sweet cloak]

The classic maxis approach.

[timid trout]

Get a CRT monitor and you'll be fine

[radiant belfry]

i beat you to that 😛

oh also any time the moon is visible, many things turn rasterized

[sweet cloak]

I’ve got some improved debug tooling last night, I’ll see if it helps figure it out.

[timid trout]

It might be some sort of post processing on the moon?

[radiant belfry]

which debug view?

[radiant belfry]

the moon doesn't exist at all in captures

[radiant belfry]

that's what i thought

looks beautiful, lol

[sweet cloak]

Yea that’ll mess up fps

[radiant belfry]

also here's the moon issue

annoying hud overlay, sorry

[sweet cloak]

If you can do mat replacement, remove the opacity flag on everything

[radiant belfry]

so what's the easiest way to remove it for everything?

sorry if the answer is obvious

i just woke up and am on a mission

[timid trout]

This maybe? Untested

You can override opacity slider

[sweet cloak]

The opacity flag via mat replacement.

[sweet cloak]

Does this do anything?

Never figure it out.

[radiant belfry]

yeah, i just kind of don't understand what you mean\

[timid trout]

No idea, gotta gave a look

[timid trout]

Seems like no

[radiant belfry]

that just toggles the actual transparent textures

[sweet cloak]

In OV when editing a material there’s a remix specific flag under “other” for the material properties that’s titled something like “Is Opaque” or similar.

[radiant belfry]

so it looks like this now, lol

[radiant belfry]

right, that's what i thought. can i do that in bulk though?

[timid trout]

How is the performance

[radiant belfry]

if not, i may make a script for it

[radiant belfry]

the same

[sweet cloak]

You can tack it on in your magic usda script, it just adds a line to each mat definition

[radiant belfry]

before/after moon btw

[radiant belfry]

yeah

alright then. thanks guys

i'll leave you to COD again, sorry to invade 😛

[timid trout]

What's the bottom left triangle

the image on the right

[radiant belfry]

that's a fake light source. it pops up again whenever the moon is in sight

just like the window there

[sweet cloak]

I think adding a bunch of different colored pieces of glass will really make it look nice. Like how this is https://www.textures.com/download/WindowStainedGlass0165/115914

[sweet cloak]

I’ll hop on over to the barnyard thread for a bit

[timid trout]

You would need to create individual sub meshes for different colors if you are going with transmittance.

[sweet cloak]

That’s true. I’m sure there’d be a fun way to do that with nodes in blender, but I don’t know if that’s worthwhile to do

[timid trout]

I am sure it is, these look awesome in Minecraft RTX

[sweet cloak]

Man. What a showcase that thing was

[radiant belfry]

btw it seems this isn't possible in OV

[timid trout]

Even with scripting?

[radiant belfry]

i think the line is uniform bool enable_opacity = 0

[dull oar]

thinking something like this

[timid trout]

@dull oar What do you think?

[dull oar]

cant control it with a texture?

[timid trout]

You can use a diffuse texture but it causes distance cut-offs in some of the games I've tested.

[dull oar]

we cant replace every coloured piece of glass i'd be here for ever 😛

[timid trout]

The transmittance is what meant to be used. If I apply a blue diffuse texture on water, it will look blue no matter the depth or angle. If I apply a blue transmittance color and adjust it's distance it will get the blue-er as the water gets deeper.

[timid trout]

Yeah diffuse texture will be just fine for glass, I hope it doesn't get that weird cut-off on CoD2

[dull oar]

lets try it with rgb windows at first and see what happens, then replace it with complex texutres later if it works

[timid trout]

Water with diffuse texture.

By setting trasmittance values instead of using a diffuse texture

[sweet cloak]

Are you doing it by hand

[dull oar]

lol yea i've done it all by hand.

gotta model the frames, bake, texture and export 🙂

[sweet cloak]

Do you use blender ? You can do it with geonodes pretty easy afaik.

[dull oar]

3ds max, no worries mate, i got it 🙂

[sweet cloak]

Or model the frame and do a simple subtraction modifier.

[dull oar]

gonna sculpt it a lil but as well

[sweet cloak]

That’s how you’d do that frame in real life as well, sculpt it and make a mold out of it.

[dull oar]

I'm going to replace the texture in the outter frame, its the last non pbr material in that church

[sweet cloak]

The masonry frame around it?

[dull oar]

these pale bricks

thats the only bit i havent worked on in the church

[sweet cloak]

Yea that’s the frame for the window. It’s got a fun exact architecture word that I’d have to check in my book for.

It does look like nicely dressed limestone tho

Which is period and location correct afaik.

[dull oar]

nice 🙂 i'll keep it lime stone then 🙂

thats a lot of smiley

should have a temp asset down today we can test floating in the level and place and break up proper ones tomorrow

https://tenor.com/view/toy-story-toy-story2-cleaner-art-you-cant-rush-art-gif-20473104

[dull oar]

hows that for a test, i'll sculpt it tomorrow and bake it and stuff

[sweet cloak]

Looking amazing

[dull oar]

and it works in game

[sweet cloak]

[dull oar]

stained glass 🙂

do you guys need a quick video tutorial to get it in your own games?

[timid trout]

Get what?

[dull oar]

the stained glass meshes i just attached

[sweet cloak]

Do they need to be setup as a mesh replacement still?

[dull oar]

yep just same process as with a light but you pick xform then click add then reference and find the usda

the frame and the glass are seperate so you gotta copy the transforms from one to the other.

just gonna nip out with the dog for 30 mins 🙂

[timid trout]

I was trying to add a plane to gmod (my first mesh replacement), it never worked until I simply attached the plane to something else.

[dull oar]

one sec, i'll record the process

@sweet cloak @timid trout
https://youtu.be/EiYH9DQ_4yc

[timid trout]

Great, have you tried adding both the frame and the glass as childs of a single USD? (With different materials referenced to them of course). It should be possible if I recall Mark's post correctly.

[dull oar]

yea in that video i add them both. its just the glass is invisible

I now have three in a line 😛 cause you can just go to edit>duplicate

[timid trout]

My question was quite unclear, what I meant is that you should be able to package both the frame and the glass panel into a single usd, then reference the package in the mod.usda, instead of referencing two individual pieces.

[dull oar]

ah right, havent tried that before but sounds like it should work

might make it hard to select a single mesh and fiddle with it's material settings mind you

its just listed as Xform1 with no children

[timid trout]

Waiting for volumetric god rays with individual colors to them..

[dull oar]

yea it's not casting any colours 😦

[sweet cloak]

[dull oar]

default is like sunglasses, you can just about see through it and its reflective

thats me, face against the glass looking in. you can see a building reflected in it

[dull oar]

as good as i can get it

[sweet cloak]

I can't seem to get the materials to load 😦

[dull oar]

You may need to recreate them. Just open the USDA models. Create material from MDL file and find the capture materials

The glass zfights with one side of the frame just an fyi

This muppet forgot to push the glass forward a little bit

I can record a video if you need one

[sweet cloak]

Lemme try it a again and then I'll need your guidance

Yea I keep messing it up somehow

Looks pretty tho

[dull oar]

oh yea, neat

tada 🙂

[sweet cloak]

We're getting somewhere

I don't know how, but it was in a superposition of what mat was being assigned

[dull oar]

yay!

just push the glass forward a bit so it doesnt clip with the back of the frame and you're golden 🙂

just holla when your ready for the proper assets and i'll wrap this window up proper for ya

i'm off to bed, have fun 🙂

[sweet cloak]

@static tangle do you have any ideas? Is colored transulent material not supported?

[dull oar]

The glass here is a single poly plane with a bc7 DDS with no alpha map and aperture translucent material

[static tangle]

I know it's come up before - I believe it's on the todo list, and we just haven't gotten around to it.

Although that glass also looks like it should be marked as thin

(thin glass is when the game has a single plane, and that plane represents both the entry and exit of the glass. non-thin glass is when the game has 2 planes, one of which is the entrance, the other is the exit. From the screenshot, it looks like the renderer thinks the entire world behind that window is in the glass - which happens when you have just a single plane of non-thin glass.)

[sweet cloak]

Ah gotcha, I’ll stop trying to figure out why it doesn’t work then

[pearl birch]

Geez the progress on Call of Duty 2 is amazing. My question is why is there no Call of Duty 1? Is it because Call of Duty 1 runs on OpenGL? I do have a problem with OpenGL.dll missing errors and crashes on Call of Duty 1 though.

[sweet cloak]

Yep

[sweet cloak]

Wonder how the glass would look if you we just made a normal map out of it and applied it.

That’d at least give it something to look more than a pane of glass

[brazen gorge]

Cod2 with normal map

That's is just... Amazing...

And i though a gold lambo was thing but fucking normals on old game is more cool...

[dull oar]

I'm getting a lot of ghosting with this glass. Might help though

More details to hide it

[timid trout]

Can you try with frame generation off?

[dull oar]

It's not on. Just the denoiser doing it I guess

[sweet cloak]

Mark did say the denoiser struggles with lots of details with that shader

I’ll have some time later this afternoon to mess with the SP gfx DLL and try to get stable draw calls.

[dull oar]

Would it be ok if you take another look at multiplayer? A couple maps still have unstable bits. We can work around them by attaching lights and meshes to the stable meshes sitting next to them, stuff like that. but would be nice to know you've had another look with fresh eyes.

No pressure though, only if you want to.

[timid trout]

Remix discord multiplayer deathmatch when?

[dull oar]

Oh yes please. I know where the decals glitch and can see through the map

[timid trout]

Legit wallhack 😄

[dull oar]

Honestly remix would be the perfect cheat tool

[timid trout]

The Way It's Meant To Be Played

• NVIDIA

[timid trout]

I am sure there is a way to validate remix settings at runtime

[dull oar]

Would be cool when it's out

[sweet cloak]

Could you write up an issue for it? You could put on my repo, post it to rentry or whatever. I just need to have the scope of the issue narrowed down

I think the issue is the jump type that I used for bypass frustum culling.

[dull oar]

It was from the first jump thingy you did when you got Matmata stable. The frustum culling update worked first after you posted the fix on Sunday

[dull oar]

After this one. It got like 95% of bsps stable but a couple stubborn buggers still cull

[dull oar]

Here's what still culls in carentan

[sweet cloak]

Oh so it was never stable

[dull oar]

Loads more stable but a handful of bsps still cull sometimes

[sweet cloak]

Is that player visible?

There are surfaces that are single sided

[dull oar]

So what I did there was look away from the map and lock pvs so that culling gets locked and I can see what's still getting culled. If it's gone, it's culling

Those stairs and some bits inside that house disappeared so they're still getting culled

It's that low now, were talking stair cases and bits of wall and flooring

[sweet cloak]

But is it there when the player goes near it?

[dull oar]

Yea

Sorry yea it's there when the players there

[sweet cloak]

Yea that’ll be some deeper thing with the map loading.

[dull oar]

That screenshot just highlights the bit that culls still. Map looks great, no bugs

[sweet cloak]

Just making sure, the hashes stable on those maps right?

[dull oar]

No it's not. It's better but the concrete those stairs uses is unstable. Same for some bits of wood

Railyard, carentan and brecourt are slightly unstable still

[sweet cloak]

Interesting, that helps a lot

[dull oar]

Have a look at railyard, it's the one with the tanks you lit first

That's the worst offender of the three trouble maps

That issue also affects single player

[sweet cloak]

I need to force the portalfinecull to 0 for single player so bad.

I always get caught up spending time debugging it and forget that it’s turned on.

[dull oar]

That'll be in the dll right?

I saw a dll for lod distance online

I bind all those commands to f2

[sweet cloak]

I’m not sure, I just know I can’t seem to get it to change to a 0 even when modifying the memory.

does that DLL turn off the portalfinecull?

[dull oar]

No but I figure if one command is in there would that mean more might be

Remember I'm a Muppet lol

just trying to be the best rubber duck I can be

[sweet cloak]

Just need to find a way to get the cheats enabled in normal SP and we’ll be in a way better place.

[dull oar]

Spdevmap has cheats enabled

Spdevmap assault_duhoc

Same as devmap for multiplayer supports cheats

I'm always no clipping and god mode in my videos on YouTube. I'm crap

That's what I mean with the command binding to f2. Spdevmap to your level. Bind your autoexec.cfg to f2 and in that put this in it

seta r_portalFineCull "0"
seta r_lodScale "1"
seta r_forcelod "0"
seta r_lodBias "-1000"

[sweet cloak]

https://www.unknowncheats.me/wiki/CVAR_Protection_Patching_Code_(Dynamic)_CoD2

[sweet cloak]

I can see if I can find that pattern and just permanently apply the patch

[dull oar]

Oh wow neat. That would be wicked

[sweet cloak]

End goal is to not have to do anything in the games console commands and just have it read the cfg.

[dull oar]

That would be amazing. We'd be able to play online as long as we only played on servers that aren't pure (Most aren't) and have all our lovely remix stuff in there

[sweet cloak]

I wanna be able to play the SP campaign with PT.

[sweet cloak]

That as well

[dull oar]

Oh yea the single player is wicked. The nighttime tank battle level in the French town is crying out for Adamplayer lights ™

[sweet cloak]

Rip the denoiser

[dull oar]

Pop another graphics card in the case, it'll be fine

[slate plank]

Can you share a video showing the ghosting? Enable HUD (Set dxvk.hud = 1 in dxvk.conf) so we can see what FPS it was recorded at. Does the ghosting repro for both DLSS ON and OFF? What Denoiser quality are you using? If you are using Low, does it repro on High quality?

[dull oar]

here we go peter 🙂 if you pause the video while moving you can see it

going to try low next

does it on ultra perf as well

but if i select non rather than dlss it's fine. grass in the background doesnt look so flickery either

[slate plank]

Just to confirm, are you saying the ghosting doesn't show with Denoising on High and DLSS being off?

[dull oar]

sorry it shows with DLSS with ultra perf or quality mode. turning off DLSS makes the ghosting go away

if me wiggling in front of a floating glass plain isnt clear enough I dont know what is lol

it's a 1940's dance move, all the kids did the wiggle back then

[slate plank]

I can see it in the video, I just wasn't clear on the wording for DLSS off case. Thanks for confirming. I'll add that info to our internal ticket.

[dull oar]

just mucking about 😉 cheers peter

also something to note this glass plane doesnt cast pretty colour shadows as we hoped. it casts no shadows

wanted to blow some of your minds with fractured stained glass effects

[slate plank]

How is the glass and bars within it put together? Is it a single material or a mix of different things - single pane glass + decals

[dull oar]

the frame is a solid mesh with the normal opacity material, the glass is a second mesh with translucent material on it

I uploaded the mesh here if you'd like to play with it
#1099591203768504421 message

does look pretty sick in that screenshot above dont it. if it can cast coloured light in a burning church it'll look straight up amazing. I've made brand new 4k pbr materials for every part of the church so it's all set for the best screenshot ever award

[slate plank]

Yes we don't support colored attenuation yet, but it should be affecting the light throughput. I'll double check on that.

[dull oar]

thanks mate, reach out if you need anything else from me

@sweet cloak Carentan with latest patched dll. sorry I couldnt get to my pc earlier to record it for you.

sorry it's not recording for some reason

[sweet cloak]

That’s alright, it’s on tonight’s docket to work on It’ll hopefully be an easy fix and then I can get back to SP.

[dull oar]

there you go buddy

you're an absolute treasure mate, thank you so much for your hard work on this mate. SUPER appreciated

[sweet cloak]

Ahhhh it’s the indoors parts

I suspected that they had issues when I was messing with the church on one of the maps.

[dull oar]

sometimes, see the terrain and that one type of wall?

it could be a red herring though couldnt it. like maybe the bricks on the inside and cause of the batching its also culling?

[sweet cloak]

Yea I’m not too worried about the terrain since it’s all goofy with its many layers.

[dull oar]

yea i aint touching that

its all floating decals or something, nah

[sweet cloak]

I think I have to revisit the portal system cause the indoors seems like it doesn’t get loaded when outdoors.

And then it culls the outdoors when indoors.

[dull oar]

well matmata is 100% stable and has no indoors does it

bet your right you know

[sweet cloak]

Guess we’ll find out soon enough

[sweet cloak]

Uh my game has unstable drawcall hashes now for some reason

[dull oar]

is this from something new?

[sweet cloak]

Nah I think steam might've done somehting

[dull oar]

oh nuked your dll and exe

validated them even

[slate plank]

Direct lighting should be getting attenuated if you tag the glass panel as thin glass as Mark explained earlier.

[dull oar]

I think I tagged it as thin glass before i took those screenshots earlier today, let me double check