Tesseract.md

Introduction

Tesseract is a fork of the Cube 2: Sauerbraten engine. The goal of Tesseract is to make mapping more fun by using modern dynamic rendering techniques, so that you can get instant feedback on lighting changes, not just geometry.

No more long calclight pauses... just plop down the light, move it, change its color, or do whatever else with it. It all happens in real-time now.

Tesseract removes the static lightmapping system of Sauerbraten and replaces it with completely dynamic lighting system based on deferred shading and shadowmapping.

It provides a bunch of new rendering features such as:

• deferred shading
• omnidirectional point lights using cubemap shadowmaps
• perspective projection spotlight shadowmaps
• orthographic projection sunlight using cascaded shadowmaps
• HDR rendering with tonemapping and bloom
• real-time diffuse global illumination for sunlight (radiance hints)
• volumetric lighting
• screen-space ambient occlusion
• screen-space reflections and refractions for water and glass (use as many water planes as you want now!)
• screen-space refractive alpha cubes
• deferred MSAA, subpixel morphological anti-aliasing (SMAA 1x, T2x, S2x, and 4x), FXAA, and temporal AA
• runs on both OpenGL Core (3.0+) and legacy (2.0+) contexts

Editing

To make shadowmapped point lights, just make light entities as normal. Optionally you can control the shadowing properties of the light using attribute 5:

• 0 = shadows
• 1 = no shadows
• 2 = static shadows - world and mapmodels only (no playermodels or pickups).

Shadowmaps are cached from frame to frame if no dynamic entities such as playermodels are rendered into them, so static lights (2) will generally be much faster than normal lights (0) during gameplay and should be used where possible. Unshadowed lights (1) are even faster as they further reduce shading costs, so they should also be used where possible.

To make cascaded shadowmapped sunlight, just use the normal sunlight commands:

• sunlight
• sunlightyaw
• sunlightpitch

You can also set sunlightyaw and sunlightpitch from your current direction with the following command:

• getsundir

You can control the diffuse global illumination of sunlight using the following parameters:

• giscale - scales the contribution of indirect light
• gidist - limits the distance which indirect light travels (smaller values are more intense, but higher values allow farther travel)
• giaoscale - controls the contribution of atmospheric light
• skylight - controls the color of atmospheric light

Screen-space ambient occlusion affects mostly ambient light and to a lesser degree sunlight, but it does not affect point lights. If you want to make use of SSAO in your map, just use the ambient command to set an appropriate ambient light color/intensity.

To make refractive alpha cubes

First mark the cubes with the alpha material. Use valpha or texalpha to set the transparency level as normal. Then use either of the following commands:

• vrefract K [R G B]

K is the strength of the refraction, on a scale of 0 to 1, 1 meaning distortion spanning the entire screen, 0.5 spanning half the screen, etc.

The direction of the distortion is taken from the normal-map of the texture.

R G B are optional and specify a color for the refraction, with each component being on a scale of 0 to 1 as well.

After editing operations your map may be full of small cubes and triangles, and you will notice that your map looks faceted. To fix this you still need to use the calclight command, however, it no longer generates lightmaps anymore. It just does a remip optimization pass as well as calculates smoothed normals to make things look better. Eventually this may be done differently using some sort of background optimization while editing.

To make decals

newent decal SLOT YAW PITCH ROLL SIZE

If you don't specify the yaw, pitch, and roll, or leave them all 0, then newent will fill them with current direction you are looking at. The slot refers to a decal slot in the map configuration, starting at offset 0. The size is specified in cube units.

To make decal slots

• decelreset - functions like texture reset, clears all decal texture slots
• setshader bumpspecmapdecal - shaders work like for world shaders, but with the -decal suffix instead of -world
• texture decal "diffuse.png" - all decal slots start with the "decal" sub-slot instead of "0", and this texture must have an alpha-channel
• texture n "normals.png"
• texture s "spec.png"

To make volumetric lights

Set attribute 5 of a light entity to 4.

The intensity of the volumetric lighting medium can be controlled by volscale and the color can by controlled by volcolour.